The last fortnight of an outgoing term

With two weeks left in the White House, Washington entered the strange season that every presidency ends with, the season of farewells, pardons, final executive orders and the long goodbye that the capital conducts regardless of the departing president’s standing. The outgoing administration had done most of its governing; what remained was the formal endgame, the ceremonies that are prescribed by law and custom, the speeches that summarise a term, and the quiet work of clearing the desks for the people who will arrive with new plans and new priorities. The town that runs on power was learning, for a fortnight, to run on memory.

The pardons were the part of the endgame that drew the attention, and the attention was deserved, because the pardon power is the instrument that presidents reach for when the ordinary politics have failed them. The outgoing president’s use of the power had been the subject of legal and political argument for a year, and the final grants settled the argument in the only way that a president can settle it, which is by acting. The legal debates about the scope of the pardon power will outlive the term, because the courts will have to interpret the grants and the precedents will be argued for decades; the politics of the pardons, by contrast, were settled on the day they were issued, and the settling left both parties with material for the year ahead.

The final executive orders of the term were the quieter part of the endgame, and the quieter part often matters more. The regulatory rules that an administration finalises in its last weeks are the ones that the next administration must spend its first months unwinding, and the volume of last-minute rulemaking was, by the measure of the Federal Register, substantial. The agencies had been instructed to finish what they had started, and the finishing was visible in the pages of technical regulations that the public does not read and the lobbyists do. The inventory of what was finalised, and what was left unfinished, will be the scorecard that the new administration reads on its first day.

The farewell speeches carried the standard shape, and the standard shape concealed a genuine difficulty. The departing president must thank the people who worked for the administration, defend the record that the electorate rejected, and avoid the temptation to settle scores, and the difficulty of balancing the three is why the farewell address is the hardest speech that presidents give. The speech this fortnight was shorter than the farewells of the recent past, and the brevity was read, in the coverage, as a recognition that the audience had already decided its verdict, and that the farewell was for the record rather than for the conversion.

The last fortnight of an outgoing term is the republic’s annual exercise in the transfer of power, and the exercise is worth watching because it is the part of the system that other countries copy and that the system itself rarely examines. The transition teams were already in the building, the schedules for the inauguration were already printed, and the outgoing staff were already cleaning their offices with the particular attention of people who are about to leave a place they may never see again. Washington was, for two weeks, a city between its identities, and the betweenness, the farewells and the arrivals, the memories and the plans, was the most honest picture of the democratic routine that the country has.