As we saw in the CDC eviction-moratorium fight, Biden either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what is within his legal authority as president.
In mid-October 2020, in an ABC News town hall in Pennsylvania in the heat of the presidential campaign, Joe Biden was asked by George Stephanopoulos about imposing a vaccine mandate. He said there wasn’t authority to enforce that, and that the president would simply have to convince governors and mayors to do so:
STEPHANOPOULOS: And once we get it, if it is safe, if it is effective, will you mandate its use?
BIDEN: The answer is, depending on how clear there’s — vaccines, they say, have a very positive impact, and they are going to affect positively 85 percent of the American public. There’s others that say, this vaccine is really the key. This is — this is the golden key. It depends on the state of the nature of the vaccine when it comes out and how it’s being distributed. That would depend on. But I would think that we should be talking about — depending on the continuation of the spread of the virus, we should be thinking about making it mandatory.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How could you enforce that?
BIDEN: Well, you couldn’t. That’s the problem, just like can’t enforce — you can’t enforce measles. You can’t come to school until you have a measles shot. You can’t. But you can’t say, everyone has to do this. But you would — just like you can’t mandate a mask. But you can say — you can go to every governor and get them all in a room, all 50 of them, as president, and say, ask people to wear the mask. Everybody knows.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And if they don’t, fine?
BIDEN: If they don’t, no, not fine. Then I go to every governor — I go to every mayor, I go to every councilman, I go to every local official, say, mandate the mask, man — say, this is what you have to do when you’re out. Make sure you encourage it being done. Look, George, you and I know — and I think you do, too, as well — the words of a president matter.
Biden being Biden, he hemmed and hawed about whether he would trust the vaccine, then got confused halfway through his answer as to whether he was talking about mandating masks or mandating vaccines. But the best you can say is that Biden, a lawyer who had been in senior positions in the federal government for half a century, had not thought through the legal authority for such mandates five months into the pandemic. Two months later, at a press conference in Delaware after the election, he reiterated that view:
No, I don’t think it should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory. But I would do everything in my power — just like I don’t think masks have to be made mandatory nationwide — I will do everything in my power as president of the United States to encourage people to do the right thing.
As we saw in the CDC eviction-moratorium fight, Biden either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what is within his legal authority as president. Donald Trump, at least, could use the excuse that he wasn’t a lawyer, had never served in government, and was encountering questions of federal executive authority for the first time. No president has ever come to the office with more preparation to answer these questions than Joe Biden. The fact that he is so cavalier about changing his positions on them raises serious issues of his character and, frankly, his mental state.