Posted on Wednesday, April 23, 2025

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by Sarah Katherine Sisk

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After spending four years cheering on Joe Biden as he repeatedly trampled constitutional boundaries, Democrats have suddenly discovered a passionate reverence for executive restraint – conveniently aimed at President Donald Trump’s lawful exercise of his authority.

Along with castigating Trump as an “authoritarian,” an increasingly common refrain among the liberal commentariat is that Trump should resist what they call “overreaches” of his authority because it supposedly sets the precedent for the next Democrat president to do the same thing.

A recent X post from New York Times columnist David French is representative of this dubious reasoning. “This man is governing as if his faction will never, ever lose power,” French writes of Trump. “Yet every power he unlocks for himself he unlocks for his opponents. He’s not ‘winning.’ He’s opening America to an unsustainable pattern of mutual destruction and vengeance.”

Likewise, another liberal commentator on CNN asked viewers, “well, what happens the next four years from now when a Democrat is in office? What happens when President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides to use these same powers that the president has now expanded?”

For conservatives, liberal hand-wringing over “executive overreach” and “authoritarianism” is tone deaf to the point of absurdity. Throughout the entirety of Biden’s presidency, he used his office to shield his family from accountability, hide his own potential criminal activities, and weaponize the government against his political opponent. Yet now the same people who excused all of this behavior want to lecture Americans about the proper scope of executive power.

Where, one wonders, were these same self-appointed guardians of constitutional integrity when the Biden Department of Justice helped engineer a “sweetheart deal” that would have let Hunter Biden walk away from serious criminal charges with a slap on the wrist? That plea agreement was so lenient that it collapsed after the presiding judge questioned its legitimacy and unusual terms – yet the same voices now blasting Trump for “abusing his power” were attacking conservatives for demanding Hunter Biden face accountability regardless of who his father is.

It was the same story when whistleblower testimony from career IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler revealed systemic interference with the Biden DOJ’s Hunter Biden investigation, including that the DOJ rejected more serious potential charges, blocked critical evidence from Biden’s laptop, and strategically limited the investigation’s scope.

Things only got more egregious at the end of Biden’s term with “Pardongate” – a flood of pardons and grants of clemency for everyone from a convicted double murderer to Democrat members of the January 6 Committee and members of the president’s family. Hunter Biden’s pardon, which covered all crimes he “may have committed” going all the way back to 2014, was a particularly audacious slap in the face to the American people.

Then there’s the Biden FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. For the first time in American history, a sitting president authorized federal agents to conduct what effectively amounted to an act of political intimidation against his political opponent.

Even federal judge Bruce Reinhart admitted the FBI’s action was “unprecedented” – but again the media and elected Democrats cheered Biden on.

That raid was conducted under the pretense that Trump had “mishandled” classified documents, charges based on the filmiest of evidence. Later, when far stronger evidence emerged that Joe Biden had actually mishandled classified information as vice president – leaving boxes of it stacked in the garage of his Delaware home – Democrats and the media excused the president once more, shielding him from any accountability.

Biden also waged open warfare on the First Amendment, with the Twitter Files showing that his administration pressured social media companies to silence dissenting views on the COVID-19 pandemic. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg later admitted that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to “censor” COVID-19 content.

Time and again, the Supreme Court had to step in to check Biden’s abuses of power. First, it was with his student loan forgiveness scheme, which was always blatantly unconstitutional. Later, Biden attempted to unilaterally impose an eviction moratorium that he himself admitted likely wouldn’t survive judicial review. In another instance, the Court ruled that Biden’s EPA had far exceeded its authority.

But perhaps nowhere was Biden’s open abuse of power more obvious than on the border crisis his policies created. For four years, Biden chose to not enforce immigration law, resulting in more than 10 million illegal border crossings, violating his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

Throughout all of this, liberals remained fierce defenders of the president. They insisted that his actions were not only legal but necessary to save the country from the “existential threat” of climate change or the imposition of an “authoritarian” regime under Donald Trump. Compared to how Biden attempted to systematically dismantle all guardrails on executive authority, Trump’s tenure thus far has been notably restrained.

Ultimately, the current Democrat narrative about executive power reveals nothing more than political desperation, not genuine concern for the Constitution. Until Democrats can confront their active participation and encouragement of Biden’s abuses of power, their sanctimonious warnings about Trump’s phantom abuses deserve the same serious consideration as their other political theater – none at all.

Sarah Katherine Sisk is a senior at Hillsdale College pursuing a degree in Economics and Journalism. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.