The Patriot Post® · The Ludicrous Claim That Biden Is Taming the Left

The premise of a recent Washington Post article is so ludicrous, so farcical, so utterly detached from reality that it should have been submitted to the satirical Babylon Bee for publication or had its own famously “unbiased” fact-checkers award it an unprecedented five Pinocchios.

The article, entitled “How Joe Biden tamed the left — at least for now,” attempts to portray the president as a political Solomon who has managed to “tame” the far-left wing of his base through the first few months of his administration.

And just how has this modern-day Machiavelli so cleverly satiated his radical leftist throngs? Why, by giving them nearly everything they have demanded! Or, as the WaPo sages put it, “Listen a lot, and back many of the policies that activists have long wanted.”

Biden has certainly done that.

On a strictly party-line basis, Democrats passed, and Biden signed, a $2 trillion “coronavirus relief” package, which was approximately 10% dedicated to COVID relief and 90% a progressive goody bag that rewarded labor unions and corporate donors, plus $1,400 vote-buying “stimulus” checks for some, but not all, Americans.

Not to worry, says Biden. This reckless spending spree will be paid for by a massive tax increase on “wealthy individuals” and corporations.

Unfortunately, as even The New York Times admitted, the wealthy and corporations have the means to hire an army of lawyers and accountants to reduce, delay, or avoid these taxes altogether. Some just move to a more tax-friendly country, which is why Biden is pushing for a “global minimum tax,” forcing every country to adopt high tax rates so that there is nowhere to flee to for lower taxes. In the end, of course, corporations don’t pay taxes, consumers do, and thus workers will be forced to pay for their own “relief” bill.

Biden has also abandoned any pretense of moderation by pushing nearly $5 trillion in spending on top of the $2 trillion “relief” bill already passed. He’s calling for massive subsidies for “renewable” energy sources — a sort of Green New Deal-lite — as well as another $400 billion for care of the elderly and disabled, which would be essentially a slush fund for unionized caregivers, their exorbitant rates and benefits paid for by taxpayers.

At this point, about the only things the far-left base has not gotten is a minimum wage increase to $15/hour, unilateral cancellation of $50,000 in student loan debt (which is actually a transfer of the debt to workers who didn’t take out the loans), and a draconian new gun control bill.

Part of the reason for this heavy-handed lurch to the left is an effort to appease those on Biden’s radical flank. Progressive special interest and advocacy groups like MoveOn.org, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Sunrise (a global warming group), the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute are positively giddy at the prospects for pushing their agenda, considering Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, stays in regular contact with them. In fact, former employees of CEPR and EPI make up two-thirds of Biden’s White House Council of Economic Advisors.

Biden officials have also hired numerous staffers from leftist groups to work in the administration, including more than a dozen with ties to socialist Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, guaranteeing that far-left policies permeate throughout all levels of government.

As former Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir put it, “It’s certainly the case that the framework of things that he’s putting forward is quite progressive. … It’s a very different world than the last few years where the base of a bill that was offered was fundamentally conservative.”

Another reason for Biden’s hard-left lurch is his realization that, at age 78, and with rapidly declining mental faculties, he will be a one-term president (even if he laughably insists otherwise). He wants history to remember him as a transformational Democrat president in the mold of an FDR or an LBJ, which is why he’s willing to abandon his previous insistence on preserving the Senate filibuster.

On March 2, Biden met with progressive presidential historians at the White House to discuss just how much radical change a president could ram through in a short period of time, bombarding the group with questions about widening the scope of presidential power in order to enact his agenda.

As Axios reported, Biden “loves the growing narrative that he’s bolder and bigger-thinking than President Obama.” The historians only applauded and encouraged his radical expansion of power, and if that means eliminating the Senate filibuster and doing everything on a party-line vote, he’ll do it.

There is significant danger in this path, though. Democrats lost nearly 20 seats in the House in 2020, when they were expected to gain nearly that many, and the Senate is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with VP Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote.

That is hardly a mandate for a far-left agenda, and pursuit of such is likely to result in heavy losses for Democrats in the midterms.

Biden believes this Big Government approach will stoke the economy to Trump-era levels, but history shows massive government spending and burdensome regulations result in slow economic growth and high unemployment, as we saw during the Obama years.

Unfortunately, Biden and his team are impervious to facts and history, and they will continue their aggressive push toward socialism. Americans will pay the price until Republicans have a chance to retake the House and Senate. But much damage can be done in that time.