Democrats are in a tizzy over Joe Biden. Poll after poll shows large majorities of Democrat voters think he’s too old or don’t want him to run for a second term in the White House, and Democrat elites are openly urging him to stand down.
But the real problem with Joe Biden isn’t his age. The real problem is that, as president, he’s the functional equivalent of avowed socialist Bernie Sanders – and, worse, in today’s Democrat Party, any of his likely replacements (Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, or Josh Shapiro, just to name a few of the more obvious aspirants to the throne) would give us more of the same hard-left agenda.
Think about what he has attempted, and what he has accomplished, and compare it to, say, the 2020 Sanders for President campaign platform:
Sanders wanted “to cancel all student debt over the next decade.” Even then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi said President Biden didn’t have the authority to cancel student loan debt on his own, but Biden went ahead and announced his decision to unilaterally move the responsibility for paying for hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt from the debtors to the federal government anyway – only to be blocked by a Supreme Court determined to maintain the Constitutional separation of powers.
Sanders pushed a climate change proposal that he said “will fundamentally transform our energy system away from fossil fuel and toward energy efficiency and renewable energy.” Biden’s White House struggled for a year and a half to structure a draft proposal that could win 50 votes in a deadlocked Senate and then get across the finish line with a tie-breaking vote from the vice president. He finally succeeded – but only after deceptively naming the bill “The Inflation Reduction Act.” The bill should have been named the “Let’s Kill Fossil Fuels and Subsidize Unreliable and Costly ‘Green Energy’ Instead” Act. Biden called it “the most significant legislation in history to tackle the climate crisis.”
Sanders promoted what he called “a welcoming and safe America for all,” which is another way of saying “let’s open the borders and see what happens!” Sanders promised to end construction on the border wall; “instruct DOJ to drop any litigation or funding restrictions relating to sanctuary cities”; “end President Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico,’ metering … and allow asylum seekers to make their claims in the United States”; and he will “expand and fully implement” President Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) programs. That’s a good description of the Biden agenda for immigration and border security, as implemented by the feckless Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Further, Biden supported the effort by radical leftists in the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, so Democrats could impose their top-down, federalized elections administration, campaign finance, and free speech-robbing bill – again, exactly what Sanders wanted.
Yes, that’s right. Joe Biden was so determined to take away states’ authority to administer elections under the Constitution that he, a “Senate man,” was willing to abolish a fundamental rule of the Senate that protects minority rights and serves as the biggest and most obvious brake on runaway majorities, a parliamentary device that defines the difference between the House and Senate. All in the service of the hard-left agenda.
This is not the way Joe Biden campaigned in 2020. Despite embarrassing losses in the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden was able to rally support in the crucial South Carolina primary and then beyond precisely because he was NOT Bernie Sanders. Biden had long been known as a “moderate” in the Democrat Party firmament. Democrat Party elites in the spring of 2020 were scared to death of Sanders, fearing that if he became the nominee, he would likely be crushed by incumbent President Donald Trump. They feared Sanders’ proudly socialist platform and history would doom him to defeat, so they rallied to Biden’s cause to block Sanders. To them, Biden was the “safe” and “moderate” pick.
So the irony is that Biden was selected by the Democrats because he was not Bernie Sanders – but in office, he has faithfully executed the Sanders game plan and implemented the Sanders agenda. And he has refashioned the modern Democrat Party into a Sanders-esque party, where fidelity to a hard-left agenda is the path to the top – look at the young Democrats, the rising generation, the Buttigiegs, Newsoms, Shapiros, Whitmers, AOCs. They’re all experts in the agenda of government control and socialist economic policies. And they are the future of the Democrat Party, thanks to Joe Biden.
(One of the aspirants to the throne, California’s Gavin Newsom, is so close to Biden on COVID lockdown policies and the determination to rob parents of their right to care for their children in the service of the trans agenda that it’s as if the two were separated at birth, despite the fact that they’re from different generations. It’s downright eerie.)
Whether Biden is at the top of the ticket or not, the policies he’s adopted and implemented during his presidency will continue to dominate the policy agenda in the Democrat Party. And unless the American electorate recognizes that – that the problem with Joe Biden isn’t his age, but his policies – we’ll be in for a long struggle ahead.
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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