Joe Biden’s agenda has thus far been a failure. Not only has the president created a myriad of border, economic, overseas, and Covid-19 vaccine mandate crises but he’s also been unsuccessful in jamming radical legislation through the Democrat-controlled Congress.
While Biden’s inability to get things done is unfortunate for Democrats, it’s a big win for Republicans who hope to see a red wave in the 2022 midterms.
As Byron York noted in his newsletter, the “centerpiece” of the Biden agenda, the Build Back Better plan, is dead without support from every Democrat in the Senate. And as the bill stands right now, it never has and it never will garner full endorsement.
“Well, the Build Back Better, as it has been presented over, what, the last seven, eight, nine months — that bill no longer will exist, OK? … My biggest concern, and my biggest opposition — it did not go through the process,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., long considered a swing vote when it comes to progressive legislation, told CNN’s Jake Tapper this week. “[Republicans] should have at least the opportunity to have input. It should have gone through the committee. These are major changes. It is going to change society as we know it. And those changes, there should be a hearing. There should be a markup. And then you’re going to have a better product, whether your friends on the other side vote for it or not. But they have to have input.”
Without its signature legislation, the Biden administration has no political clout with the American people who are mulling over which party should win their votes in the upcoming 2022 midterms. Gone are the days when Biden took credit for lining Americans’ pockets with government cash and here are the days he ignores the rampant inflation, rising gas prices, bare grocery store shelves, and increasing crime.
Biden kicked off his time in office with a plethora of executive orders undoing the Trump administration’s work on the border, removing bans on overseas taxpayer-funded abortions, immediately ending the Keystone XL pipeline, and mandating that any federally funded schools must allow biological males to claim to be female and vice versa.
Eventually, Biden’s focus migrated to passing radical legislation such as parts of the Green New Deal masquerading as a national infrastructure plan but it soon became clear that without the presidential pen, Biden was powerless to get anything else done.
Every time the White House initiated a new push to pass bills, progressives and less-leftist legislators bickered about what exactly should be included in the administration’s massive legislative packages. Thankfully, the majority of Democrats wouldn’t budge an inch, meaning soft Republicans haven’t been able to sacrifice key conservative principles to negotiate with progressives.
As a result, Americans, struggling to come to terms with a country still trying to recover from government lockdowns, record-breaking border apprehensions, skyrocketing inflation, radical indoctrination in schools, and vaccine mandates, turned their backs on the “unity” chief and named him one of the most unpopular presidents in 80 years.
Biden’s polling first began to falter following his botched Afghanistan withdrawal and only became worse as his first year in office went on. Just one year into Biden’s presidency, 56 percent of Americans disapproved of the job he was doing. The devastating number came out the same week Biden’s effort to force the Covid-19 jab on Americans working for private companies was dealt a fatal blow by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Americans quickly realized that under Biden, the country was not headed in the right direction, and they want change. A recent CBS poll found that at least 40 percent of Americans claimed they were “nervous” about the future of the country.
Democrats only have a razor-thin majority in both the House and the Senate. Their small margin for error and Republicans’ determination to regain control could create the conditions that frustrated Americans have been asking for. Combine that with historical records indicating that the party that controls the White House more often than not loses seats in the midterms, and the GOP could see a red wave sweep the November election, which The New York Times already vehemently detests.
Biden and Democrats have already signaled that they will throw fits if the 2022 election results do not favor Democrats. Biden even went so far as to say that the midterms could “easily be illegitimate.” Their attempts to do damage control after spending a year getting nothing done shouldn’t sit well with Americans.