© Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Roger Severino
The media loved to complain that former President Donald Trump was always violating long-standing political norms. President Biden, we were told, would end such chaos and reinstate normality and respect at the heart of government power.
Perhaps not.
On Wednesday, Biden broke a presidential norm that Trump never dared violate. Biden did so by firing members of independent agencies appointed by the previous administration. In the days preceding the firing, Biden's deputy director of the Presidential Personnel Office, Gautam Raghavan, asked for the resignation of several Trump appointees.
These included Roger Severino, Jennifer Dickey, Andrew Kloster, and Dan Epstein. In an apparent violation of federal law, Raghavan threatened to fire them if they didn't resign. This, even though the appointees are serving fixed terms.
Firing appointees serving fixed terms that have not expired would be unprecedented. But when several refused to resign, they were indeed fired. Severino, who served on the Administrative Conference of the United States council, is now
suing the Biden administration over his termination.
"The Council does not wield any executive power — indeed, it does not wield any power at all as a purely advisory entity — so President Biden has no constitutional power to terminate Mr. Severino or any other member of the Council," Severino's lawsuit said.
"President Biden's attempt to remove me contrary to law exposes his lofty promises of healing and uniting all Americans as nothing more than cynical manipulation," Severino said in a statement.
Comment: It's a rather bold move from India considering how, in the past, Big Pharma had relative free reign to trial medications on India's people - perhaps because in those experiments it was primarily India's poor.
This news draws attention to another event that happened recently: Fire breaks out at world's biggest vaccine maker, India's Serum Institute
See also: The Inanity of RNA Vaccines For COVID-19