President-elect Joe Biden won the race by running a determined campaign that focused exclusively on an indisputable fact. Joe Biden is not Donald Trump. To which the voters responded by giving Trump the heave-ho while cutting into the Democratic majority in the House and (probably) leaving the Senate in Republican hands.
The institutional Democratic response to all this thus far has been to continue to push their leftist agenda that was fairly decisively rejected at the polls. In return they ask for a return bipartisanship and comity.
The plea for comity is coming from people who spent the last 4 years or so calling the Republicans racists, white supremacists, misogynists and Nazi sympathizers. It comes from people who routinely voted as a bloc against Trump’s judicial nominees and legislative initiatives. It comes from people who argued that the entire Trump presidency was illegitimate; that but for collusion with Russia, Trump would not have been elected and that Trump was a Russian “asset”.
Democrats and their friends in the media ludicrously argued that Supreme Court nominee Bret Kavanaugh was the leader of a high school gang-rape team; that in high school he unsuccessfully tried to assault Christine Blasey Ford. Mind you Blasey Ford never produced a shred of evidence supporting her claim; the witnesses she cited either refused to testify or flat out contradicted her, including her friend Leyland Keyser. And speaking of media friends, none of this prevented the Washington Post from describing Blasey Ford as a “prosecutor’s dream witness”.
Beyond the direct testimony of Blasey Ford, the party promoted wild and unsubstantiated claims of sexual assault brought forward by attorney Michael Avenatti. The legal career of Mr Avenatti has by now taken a turn for the worse. He is now a convicted felon, having been found guilty of committing fraud and extortion against Nike.
And then there were the physical attacks on officials of the Trump Administration, encouraged by Maxine Waters (D-CA), among others. According to NBC News, on June 25, 2018, she said:
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters, who has called for President Donald Trump to be impeached, told supporters over the weekend.
In the event, activists took up the call with zest, chasing scores of Trump officials and Republican office holders out of restaurants and physically threatening them, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife Elaine Chou. And that isn’t all. Representative Steve Scalise was shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter during a Congressional baseball game. (I hasten to add that the man was obviously mentally ill, and Senator Sanders quickly condemned the shooting).
Nevertheless, the point remains. Democrats and progressives launched a scorched earth campaign of opposition, and not for the first time. Now that they have the White House, a bare majority in the House, and lack control of the Senate they have decided that they are in favor of bipartisanship and comity after all. Who is kidding whom?
The obvious question is: If Democrats are so interested in compromise, what grounds are they willing to concede in the search for consensus? The answer is: none.
In that respect let us consider where the head of the party and its titular leader stands. To begin with, he has nominated California AG Xavier Becerra to lead HHS. Becerra, who has no experience in the field is quite simply a culture warrior. In particular, he is an abortion rights fanatic. Operating as California’s Attorney General, he launched lawsuits seeking to overturn other states abortion restrictions. Those states include Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio. His justification for doing so? “No government” he said “state or federal, has the right” to interfere with abortion. Which, in another context, is essentially the argument Texas AG Ken Paxton recently made with respect to the election, an argument that rightfully got the back of the Supreme Court’s hand.
Becerra defended California’s mandate (since overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in NIFLA v. Becerra) that required pro-life pregnancy centers to provide patients with information on how to obtain state funded abortions. In yet another attack on the first amendment, he sued the Little Sisters of the Poor seeking to require them to finance the purchase of contraception and abortifacients.
Then there is the nomination of Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In one sense she is a candidate that everyone can agree on: she has antagonized just about everyone in Washington, left, right and center. And not because she is a strong independent leader. She is simply a Hillary Clinton sycophant. In emails revealed by Wikileaks she wrote “I would do whatever Hillary needs always. I owe her a lot. And I’m a loyal soldier” and, “I don’t really think the issues matter”. The only explanations for her selection are these: either Biden picked a sacrificial lamb to appease the nomination Gods, or he is making selections essentially at random. No one thinks she is actually qualified to run OMB.
I could go on, but there is only so much time in a day. It is becoming increasingly clear that the idea of a return to “normalcy” is nothing more than a liberal fantasy. Personnel is policy and Biden is in the process selecting personnel who are creatures of the left, most of whom served in the Obama Administration. Not only have they presided over numerous policy disasters in the past, they are unchastened, and fully intend to repeat their failures. Moreover, at the Administrative level it is clear that the supposedly moderate Biden means to govern by “pen and phone”, Obama style.
Strap in because the best days of the Biden administration are already behind us, and he hasn’t even taken the oath of office yet.
JFB
