Political norms? We don't need no stinkin' political norms!

I am looking at the legal tempest arising from Biden's "end-run" around the Constitution regarding Covid-19 Mandates (essentially forcing the private sector to require that all employees be vaccinated ).  This was all along going to be a dubious overreach.  When the Office of the White House Counsel advised that it would probably not stand a legal challenge, the Chief of Staff Ron Klain and his circle of advisors came up with the fig leaf of OSHA.  They would try and force fit Covid-19 mandates through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.  

Klain then tweeted to the effect that they were circumventing the legislative and legal processes in order achieve their coercive goal.  The Courts immediately granted a stay until the challenges could be heard.  The White House then advised the Administration to ignore the Court stay, setting up a major Constitutional battle.  The three branches of government are co-equal and subject to one another.  The president cannot simply ignore the Judicial branch.

Now, a second course has held that the OSHA regulation is likely to be overturned but that regardless, the Administration must halt the program until the merits of the cases can be heard.  We'll see just how far the Administration is willing to go in creating a Constitutional crisis.  

But reading about this morning, I am thinking, was't there something like this just a couple of months ago?

I had to noodle around in my memory banks for a while but finally I came up with it.  This is what happened with the eviction moratorium issue.  The Administration had issued an executive order to the effect that landlords could not evict tenants during the pandemic.  This was widely considered an unconstitutional order but it took the better part of a year for the challenges to wend their way through the court system.  Eventually, the courts held that the executive order was indeed illegal.

Specifically, the court indicated that Congress needed to pass enabling legislation and put the Administration on notice that the law was unconstitutional but that the stay would be put on hold for a couple of months.  If Congress had not passed enabling legislation by that point, the eviction moratorium would be overturned and landlords would once again be free to evict non-paying tenants.

A week before the expiration, the White House and Congressional Democrats noticed that they needed to pass legislation to extend the moratorium.  It looked like there was not Congressional support for such legislation, nothing proceeded, the executive order was overturned and for a couple of weeks the White House and Congressional Democrats traded barbed comments as to who was responsible.  

Then the White House again issued a very similar executive order banning evictions, I guess hoping no one would notice.  The courts noticed and promptly overturned the executive order bring the matter to a close.

The parallel between the two incidents is that in both cases, there is a White House administration willing to ignore the Judicial branch and the Legislative branch, using sleights of hand and legal obfuscation which are known to be illegal in order to achieve some ideologically desired outcome.

It is just striking that the Administration which the Mandarin Class was so convinced would return us to political norms is operating so far outside those norms.