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Politics

3 moves Biden could make as a lame-duck president

Updated: 07-11-2024, 10.51 AM

Political life will get easier for President Biden once the election is over and he doesn’t have to worry about controversial moves that could damage Vice President Kamala Harris’s chances of winning the White House. And there’s a lot Biden might do after the election that he wouldn’t do before it.

The so-called lame-duck session — the period from Election Day until the new president takes office the following January — occasionally produces some interesting surprises. There’s also a congressional lame-duck session, which goes from Election Day until new members take their seats in early January.

If there’s a change in political power in the White House or Congress, the lame-duck session can be an opportunity for the outgoing party to wrap up unfinished business, especially involving moves that might be politically unpopular.

Seventeen days before leaving the White House, in 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower severed relations with Cuba, clinching its place in the Soviet orbit. President Jimmy Carter signed the Superfund environmental cleanup law during his lame-duck session in 1980. President George W. Bush approved the federal bailouts of General Motors (GM) and Chrysler (STLA) during the lame-duck period in 2008.

Biden hasn’t overtly signaled any major moves he plans to make during the next 10 weeks, but there are a number of unsettled issues on which he might feel he has a freer hand to act.

One is sanctions on Iran, which has fully asserted itself as the most nettlesome nation in the Middle East. Iran backs the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups at war with Israel, and the conflict has escalated to direct exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran: once in April and again in October. The bloody scorecard now shows Israel with the latest jab and Iran vowing yet another retaliation.

Biden has taken heat for tacitly easing enforcement of long-standing sanctions against Iran that are meant to hamper its ability to earn desperately needed revenue from oil exports. Biden suffered clear political damage when US gasoline prices hit $5 per gallon in 2022, and he’s been determined to get gas prices down ever since. That includes letting Iran export more oil into global markets than it might under tougher enforcement, with the marginal supply boost putting downward pressure on prices.

Biden won’t have to worry quite as much about gasoline prices during the next couple of months, which means he might be able to tighten up on Iran. Eurasia Group estimates that Biden could take a range of actions that would reduce Iranian oil exports by 150,000 barrels per day to 700,000 barrels per day. The effect on oil prices, and, eventually, gas prices, could be negligible at the lower end, with a pop of 10% or more at the higher end.

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