Leaked audio of Biden has enraged progressives who are dismayed the new administration isn’t moving fast enough to ram through radical changes. The audio reveals Biden’s hesitancy to abuse executive orders in as authoritarian a fashion as the extremist left wants, causing some political commentators to despair of a 2022 bloodbath in the midterm elections.
In the first leaked audio clip, Biden shouted down civil rights leaders after the 2020 election and before the Georgia midterm election pushing for him to abuse his executive order authority.
https://youtu.be/h_8TE6FLhNg
“A lot of people in our community are getting a little anxious because they are not seeing enough of the progress they thought they would have seen at this point,” one civil rights activist said. “Let’s not disappoint them, and let’s not get to a place where voters in Georgia begin to second guess.”
“Okay, let me respond,” Biden responded. “I, I, I’ve gotta go. Let me respond. There is a lot to respond to here. Let’s get something straight. You shouldn’t be disappointed. What I have done this far is more than anyone else has done this far. Number two, I mean what I say, when I say it. I mean what I say when I say it. I am the only person to run on three platforms I was told could not possibly win the election. And I never ceased from it. One was on restoring the soul of this country, because of what I saw happen in Charlottesville. That was it. No one else was talking about it. The words of presidents matter. Nobody else. No progressive was talking about it. I did.”
Biden’s heated rhetoric, delivered to a number of Black civil rights activists, has caused upset on the radical left. It should be noted that Biden’s “fine people” claim implying that Donald Trump failed to condemn white supremacists at Charlottesville has been completely exposed as a myth, most notably at the second Senate impeachment trial.
In the second leaked audio clip, Biden frustrates progressives who want to see him violate the Constitution as president to ram through extreme changes to the nation.
https://youtu.be/8aWViseHUjY
“So there are some things that I’m going to be able to do by executive order,” he said. “I’m not going to hesitate to do it, but what I’m not going to do is I’m not going to do what used to — Vanita [Gupta], you probably used to get angry with me during the debates, when you’d have some of the people you were supporting saying, ‘On Day 1, I’m gonna have an executive order to do this!’ Not within the constitutional authority. I am not going to violate the Constitution.”
“Executive authority that my progressive friends talk about is way beyond the bounds,” he railed. “And as one of you said, maybe it was you, Reverend Al [Sharpton], whether it’s far left or far right, there is a Constitution. It’s our only hope. Our only hope and the way to deal with it is, where I have executive authority, I will use it to undo every single damn thing this guy has done by executive authority, but I’m not going to exercise executive authority where it’s a question, where I can come along and say, ‘I can do away with assault weapons.’ There’s no executive authority to do away that.”
“And no one has fought harder to get rid of assault weapons than me, me, but you can’t do it by executive order,” Biden added. “We do that, next guy comes along and says, Well, guess what? By executive order, I guess everybody can have machine guns again. So we gotta be careful.”
The audio was originally obtained by The Intercept’s Ryan Grim in early December, however, it has received more recent attention by political commentators, such as left-wing pundit Krystal Ball.
“I can’t possibly overstate how important Biden’s attitude towards executive action really is,” Ball railed. “It means substantively that we are going to have complete gridlock, and next to zero progress. And a lack of progress while the bottom is falling out doesn’t mean the same place. It means collapse. It means destruction.”
“And that lack of progress politically means the Democrats are going to be absolutely destroyed in the mid-term elections,” she added. “As a nation rightfully enraged by how they’ve been left out to dry seeks revene on those at the top. And it means that the populist rage that brought us Trump and Bernie is only going to grow in strength and import.”
The Biden administration has been aggressive with its use of executive actions and orders in terms of sheer volume. The White House lists 75 presidential actions up to date in just over two months of Biden being in office.