Two years into the disappointing Joe Biden presidency, an unusual pattern of decision-making has emerged. Taken individually, these costly decisions and policies are well-recognized and strongly supported by the far-left of his Democrat Party.
However, taken together, only now are the cumulative impacts of three major policy areas beginning to emerge – Energy. Immigration. Spending. And the mounting impacts are all damaging to the country he has sworn to protect.
This isn’t coincidental. Anyone can disagree with any president’s decisions and policies. That’s the political fabric of this country. No chief executive of the United States has been approved universally by acclamation since George Washington.
The 80-year-old Democrat claims to be on the verge of announcing a 2024 reelection campaign. Or more accurately, the people who tell Biden what to do say he’s about to announce.
His party’s elders seem resigned to that, even as virtually every measure of Biden’s job approval wallows well underwater since his botched Afghan withdrawal in 2021. Their only hope is that Republicans nominate someone with even lower approvals.
But an analysis of Biden’s triad of tribulations shows they aren’t just controversial policies. Each is clearly intended to damage the country.
Why would anyone with the best interests of America sincerely in mind begin the systematic destruction of its hard-earned energy independence within 24 hours of becoming president? Why would he intentionally spend up to the $31.5 trillion national debt limit and then refuse to negotiate on increasing it?
Favoring an ultimate transition to electric vehicles doesn’t require destruction of existing fuel systems today.
Under the policies of Donald Trump, who remains reviled by Democrats for so shockingly denying Hillary Clinton her rightful political inheritance, the United States was producing so much oil, gas, and coal that it need not import any energy. So much oil and LNG gas that it was exporting vast quantities to an energy-hungry world for handsome profits.
On his first day in the Oval Office, Biden began undoing Trump’s policies. He signed executive orders for the determined demolition of that independence. He set vast tracts off-limits to both on- and offshore drilling, canceled existing leases, and added numerous new requirements to make leases too expensive.
He also killed the already-approved Keystone XL Pipeline to safely feed Texas refineries initially with 830,000 barrels of secure Canadian oil every day, eventually increasing to 1.3 million.
As one result, some of that oil is now transported more expensively and dangerously by rail car. See what can happen when trains with toxic cargoes derail in a Republican state and the Biden administration denies help initially.
On Election Day 2020, the average retail price of gas was $2.09. A month after Biden signed those orders, the price American families and commuters had to pay was $2.63 on the way to $4.87 last June.
Last year, Biden, who had called Saudi Arabia a pariah nation, made a humbling pilgrimage to Riyadh to beg its Crown Prince to increase oil production after cutting his own. Biden was publicly rejected.
And then, without the required genuine energy emergency, Biden began draining one million barrels a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, leaving it now at its lowest level since 1980.
The Biden administration has canceled its first purchase of oil to begin the promised SPR refill.
We can debate global warming and the merits and demerits of electric cars until 2035, when Joe Biden would be 93 and in his fourth term, God forbid.
But not even a professed environmental zealot like Corvette-owner Biden can so quickly prepare an entire nation, its decrepit electrical grids, the 150,000 workers in the oil and gas industry, the measly 160,000 existing charging stations to serve many millions of new EVs, and mandate that owners of 250 million gas-powered vehicles afford more expensive ones in such a short time.
Let alone survive politically with such Draconian edicts.
The porous southern border with Mexico has been a problem for decades, leaking in millions of illegals to burden local governments, schools, and social services across the country.
Federal politicians have routinely proven incapable of addressing it. Trump didn’t solve it either, but his restrictive policies eased the crisis by keeping a large majority of wannabe immigrants in Mexico while their cases were addressed.
Biden’s campaign rhetoric, professed sympathies, and border inactions, in effect, invited thousands to try again. Official encounters have increased to upwards of a quarter-million per month with more than 2.1 million in a year.
They are apprehended briefly and then released with appointment dates that many ignore with no follow-up enforcement. At times, the administration even buses some to distant cities where they are released to melt into the population undeterred.
Thousands of others make the dangerous border crossing on their own or via smugglers and creep their way across the country. Biden professes a desire to control the illegal flood, but his actions belie that. And sympathetic media fail to call him on it.
A deadly side effect is that tons of illegal drugs, mainly the deadly, artificial opioid fentanyl, also enter the country exacerbating drug addictions and a record number of fatal overdoses with little success or effort to staunch the flow.
As my colleague Susie Moore wrote recently,
The President has made his priorities clear, and securing the southern border, addressing the perils of illegal immigration and the out-of-control drug and human trafficking don’t rate.
To demonstrate how really, truly serious he was about addressing the open border, Joe Biden appointed Kamala Harris to work on it. She has done nothingto improve the situation.
That’s a common Democrat tactic to look like they’re doing something. Barack Obama named Biden as point man to drive new gun control legislation through Congress after the Sandy Hook school shootings. Nothing happened, except photo ops, but the political skit got them through the early emotional aftermath.
Obama also named Biden to oversee an administration-wide policy of open government and information. The then-vice president called senior officials to a meeting on transparency policy – and closed it to media and the public.
It’s difficult to imagine this president’s open-border policies being good for any taxpayers except future Democrat candidates benefiting from his salting hundreds of thousands of presumably grateful future voters across the land.
Biden has often expressed disappointment in the lack of public appreciation for his spending more than $5 trillion on COVID relief and infrastructure repairs.
Never mind the inflation caused by so much fresh money circulating. That monthly inflation rate soared to 8.5 percent year-over-year in 2022, highest in four decades.
As millionaire Biden did when gasoline prices temporarily moderated, he tries to portray the recent monthly inflation of 6.5 percent as a really encouraging thing.
But then he has servants who buy his groceries. So, he wouldn’t know that milk prices went up 39 percent last year while eggs have doubled in price. The government blames the costs of feed and a shortage of chickens due to avian flu.
That’s only one of numerous shortages that have jacked prices under Joe Biden. The others include infant formula, numerous pharmaceuticals including insulin, and even diesel fuel that drives the trucks involved with some 70 percent of goods shipments nationally.
Another lingering challenge for Joe Biden is his serial lying. He’s long been known as a gaffe-meister spouting unfiltered thoughts. In recent days he claimed: “White families gathered to celebrate” lynchings, adding, “Some people still want to do that.”
All politicians tell what Mark Twain called ”stretchers.” But Biden’s proclivity to lie or walk away from probing questions is now deeply embedded in his public presidential persona. Some of his lies are so unnecessary, trivial, or clearly untrue that I wonder over the mental state of someone who feels the need to so blithely and frequently speak falsely. Or, worse, is mentally unaware he’s doing so.
It’s not just a question of honor. It’s disturbing and dangerous. What happens someday if this commander in chief tells the nation we need to send our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers into harm’s way? Would their parents – or anyone – believe this man?
We have 100 weeks to find out. Or 309 if Joe Biden gets another term.