The Patriot Post® · Left-of-Century: Biden's 100 First Days
Joe Biden hasn’t even been president for 100 days, and it already feels like an eternity. In just three months, the man absurdly dubbed a “moderate” has emerged from his campaign basement and dispelled that notion — to the delight of the party’s radicals. He has embraced the far-Left’s all-out war on every pillar of democracy. Shell-shocked, Americans have watched this White House spend us into insolvency, inflame our divides, and lead a charge to radically makeover the Supreme Court, our states’ election laws, the U.S. Senate, immigration policy, religious freedom, and human biology. He’s exceeded expectations to be sure — just not in the way most voters had hoped.
It’s no wonder, in this flurry of leftist wish-granting, that most people in this country aren’t giving Biden high marks. In a new ABC/Washington Post poll, the 46th president’s approval rating at 52 percent is the lowest of any modern president except Donald Trump and Gerald Ford. “For the 14 presidents from Truman to Biden, the 100-day average is 66 percent.” Biden’s highest marks, ironically, come from COVID successes he can’t even claim credit for, having been set in motion months earlier under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. And yet still, the mainstream media — the informal arm of Biden’s PR team — is even trying to spin the public’s response, claiming that 52-percent approval “is the new 60.”
“Any time you’re over 50 in this polarized environment, that’s really solid,” NBC’s Chuck Todd argued. “It’s sort of the new 60 percent of the way when you and I grew up in the 80s and 90s.” But unfortunately for him, there’s no way to gloss over other numbers — like Biden’s glaring underperformance on foreign affairs, the border, and race relations. In results that are sure to be ignored by the press, Pew found that 54 percent of Americans say they disagree with the president on “most or all issues.” Only 44 percent agree. A plurality think he’s spending too much (48 percent), Quinnipiac points out, and on immigration, his numbers are at crisis levels — even as he insists the actual problem is not.
Of course, some of Biden’s most devastating decisions in these early days have been rolling back — or completely annihilating — Donald Trump’s progress on key issues. FRC just released a new document called, “Tracking the Biden Administration” that catalogues all of the president’s devastating actions so far. Stacked side-by-side with the Trump Accomplishments, it’s a sobering night-and-day contrast. Of the 62 executive actions Biden has taken so far, a record-setting number — 32 — were a direct attack on life, family, and religious freedom. Add that to his cabinet, stocked full of pro-abortion, anti-faith extremists, and this administration is on track to make Barack Obama’s administration look centrist!
Obviously, Biden’s promise to unify was just another convenient throwaway line. “After campaigning on [it],” Gary Abernathy wrote in the Washington Post, “Biden so far recognizes Republicans only as one would acknowledge shoulder lint.” The same goes for more than half of the country, who this president has trampled in his payoffs to groups like Planned Parenthood. He’s overturned the hugely popular ban on overseas abortion funding, opened the doors to fetal tissue research, relaxed the restrictions on dangerous chemical abortion pills, agreed to let abortion groups take Title X “family planning” dollars again, and picked a team of anti-Hyde amendment, pro-abortion radicals to run his government.
On gender and sexuality, the president has almost done more in 100 days than Barack Obama tried in two terms. His orders are on track to abolish girls’ sports, fight any limits on transgender treatments, march transgenderism into the military, and eliminate single-sex services in homeless shelters, prisons, and other housing arrangements. As if that weren’t enough, he’s created a “White House Gender Policy Council,” promised to strip away conscience rights from medical personnel on transgender hormones and surgery, and moved forward with plans to end gender-specific bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers in the public schools. Meanwhile, his diplomatic corps have already warned the world that they’ll be forcefully pushing the LGBT agenda in every way.
FRC’s Mary Szoch points out a new op-ed for Newsweek that back in 1974, Joe Biden told the Washingtonian that on social issues, “I’m about as liberal as your grandmother.” That might have been true 47 years ago, but it’s certainly not true now. The more powerful Biden has gotten, the more untethered from morality he’s become. If anything, his views would shock most of our grandmothers!
Originally published here.
Republicans Pop off at Coca-Cola
“If politics isn’t your business,” Steve Tobak used to say, “keep your business out of politics!” That’s a message Republicans are embracing a month into the Georgia election law fallout. Companies that raced into the fray, like Coca-Cola’s CEO James Quincey, are finding out the hard way that getting involved in local issues isn’t exactly a way to sell more soda. According to new polling, a majority of conservatives are thinking twice about quenching their thirst with a business that tried to quench America’s ballot integrity.
Fifty-two percent of GOP voters, like myself, say they’re less likely to buy Coke products now, Rasmussen Reports announced last week, spelling uneasy times ahead for one of the country’s most well-known brands. “I want to be crystal clear,” James Quincey, Coca-Cola’s chief executive had said. “The Coca-Cola Company does not support this legislation, as it makes it harder for people to vote, not easier.” Of course, as scores of people — including Governor Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) — pointed out, Quincey clearly hadn’t read the law. If he had, he’d know that the state had actually done more to expand voting rights than to limit them. Either way, consumers didn’t take kindly with the company popping off about a matter that was none of their business.
But despite the object lesson of Coke, some executives are just too woke to get the message. In an astonishing show of ignorance, 43 CEOs have decided to line up against local bills that protect girls sports and young kids from the transgender agenda. Companies like Airbnb, Amazon, American Airlines, Apple, AT&T, Bayer, Ben & Jerry’s, Capital One, Dell, Dow, Dropbox, Facebook, Gap, GoDaddy, Google, Hilton, H&M, IKEA, Levi Strauss, Marriott, Microsoft, Nike, Oracle, Patreon, PayPal, PepsiCo, Peloton, Pfizer, REI, T-Mobile, Twitter, Uber, Verizon, Wells Fargo, and Zillow have already signed onto the Human Rights Campaign statement on “Anti-LGBTQ Legislation,” and a good number of them are threatening to respond if Texas leaders don’t kill their bills to level the playing field for women’s sports and put an age limit on transgender drugs and surgeries.
Calling the legislation “divisive,” the brands say they’re “concerned to see a resurgence of efforts to exclude transgender young from full participation in their communities” (which, of course, is not the point of either of these proposals). SB 29 would require public schools students to compete in sports based on their biological sex and SB 1646 would make it illegal to assist in the “administering or supplying” of dangerous cross-sex hormones or treatments.
Earlier in the month, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (R) was irate when many of these same companies tried to interfere in Texas’s election reform debate, blasting businesses for infiltrating the state and then working to undermine what it stands for. “You’ve meddled in a lot of issues lately…” he said in a fiery 30-minute press conference. “Stay out of things you don’t know anything about, and if you want to get involved, then you’re taking that risk,” he warned. Pointing out that corporations have moved to Texas for its low taxes and favorable economic climate, he said, “Don’t, on one hand, say ‘Thank you, Texas,’ while, on the other hand, slap us in the face. We’re not going to put up with it anymore.”
Fortunately, Big Business’s intimidation tactics don’t seem to be having much effect. Ever since Georgia Governor Kemp stood his ground, more elected officials seem to be ignoring the garbage the other side throws its way. Just this past Friday, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (R) joined the growing chorus of GOP leaders to sign a sports fairness bill into law. After the state House (74-19) and Senate (25-5) passed it virtually unopposed, Ivey made it clear that Alabama won’t be threatened by outside activists like the NCAA and big-name corporations who want our daughters to compete against biological boys. “I want to thank Governor Ivey for her leadership,” said the legislation’s sponsor, state Rep. Scott Stadthagen (R), “and for protecting the rights of Alabama’s female athletes. Standing up for what’s right is not always easy, but it’s always the right thing to do.”
As for what everyday Americans can do, boycotts are just the beginning. On “Washington Watch” Friday, the Political Forum’s Stephen Soukup explained how companies are being infiltrated and changed by political activists. “Anyone who holds a certain amount of stock for a period of time can file a resolution,” he said. And if it’s considered germane, then “everybody gets a chance to vote, and the management of the corporation gets a chance to say whether or not they’re for or against this proposal.” That’s how leftists have gamed the system. They’ve bought shares of stock — and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a lot — "simply for the purpose of affecting a corporation’s behavior… over the long term.“
Now, after years of quietly gaining a foothold in these big brands, they have enough leverage to change the way corporations behave. "And if they can’t change the corporation’s behavior, they can change the leaders or the directors.” But the good news, Stephen insists, is that conservatives have just as much power as the other side — if they use it. “And that’s one of the things that people need to understand when these things get political, is that if you engage, you can push back. You could reverse engineer what the Left is doing.” All it takes is highly motivated people who want to make a difference.
Originally published here.
Court-Packing Lacks Dem Backing
In the last handful of days, a surprising number of Democratic senators have decided to go on the record opposing court-packing. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) said, “the more responsible thing to do is to keep it at nine justices.” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) followed suit. “I don’t think the American public is interested in having the Supreme Court expanded. ” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) piled on, insisting “adding seats” would “politicize the court.” What led to this sudden encounter with sanity? The one thing they all have in common: competitive reelection races in 2022.
For someone willing to say anything that pleases the crowd in front of him, President Joe Biden has remained surprisingly silent about whether he supports court-packing. He absolutely refused to say during the campaign whether he would add four more justices to the court, insisting “you’ll know my opinion on court-packing the minute the election is over.” Apparently restoring abortion funding and imposing transgender insanity across the military and the rest of federal agencies were higher priorities. Earlier this month, Biden finally created a commission to study the issue of court-packing and get back to him with a recommendation after 180 days.
But Biden’s progressive allies haven’t been so reserved. Calls to add justices to the court electrified activists on the campaign trail and even after. Democrats in the House and Senate introduced a bill to expand the bench from nine judges to 13. They even tried to redefine the term “court-packing” to mean filling vacancies, as presidents have routinely done, so that they could claim they wanted to “unpack the Supreme Court.”
Unfortunately for the Left, Americans were unconvinced. “Court-packing” still has negative connotations for most of the country, as the latest surveys show. Despite some Democrats’ change of heart on the matter, it turns out Americans still oppose adding seats to the court by a two-to-one margin, as a recent poll reported — including 72 percent of independents and even 33 percent of Democrats.
For now, Democrats seem content to wait for Biden’s commission to finish its report. Even then, pushing through court-packing would face an uphill climb; since 2017, at least ten more Democratic senators expressed opposition. “This is in the category of things that couldn’t muster 50 votes and probably couldn’t muster 40 votes,” said Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). But it’s not time to let down our guard. The Left controls America’s most influential cultural institutions. As they did with same-sex marriage, the Left may try to corrupt public opinion before forcing through unpopular policies. And there’s no guarantee that politicians won’t change their public position on the issue. Then-Senator Biden in 1983 called court-packing “a bonehead idea” and “a terrible, terrible mistake.”
This all adds up to one more reason to protect the filibuster. Even if the Democrats eke out a bare majority of votes to pack the court, they could never reach the threshold of 60 votes they would need to unravel the third branch of government. America’s governing system of checks and balances has redundancy built throughout. Those redundant checks and balances prevent a narrow majority with radical views from reconstructing the system to give themselves permanent control. We need the Supreme Court, and the filibuster, now more than ever.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.