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| Lamont, Biden and Hayes |
In mid-August 2020, Connecticut Commentary, relying largely on then presidential nominee Joe Biden’s Democrat Party Platform, noted that the Biden Administration, in both foreign and domestic policy, would be a repeat of the preceding Barack Obama administration in which Biden served as Vice President.
This prediction was a bit off-point. The policy prescriptions
adopted by the Biden administration indicate he has
bypassed Obama and now postulates Obama prescriptions raised to the third
power. Socialist Bernie Sanders, it may be
recalled, was more than satisfied with the Democrat Party platform he helped
construct.
Biden was sworn in as President on Jan 20. During an unusually long honeymoon period, Speaker
of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and
Biden have utilized a narrowed split in the House and a fifty-fifty split in
the Senate to consolidate their triumph over former President Donald Trump and
Republicans both moderate and conservative.
Just as Roman emperors used to debase their predecessors by
a form of cultural evacuation, so the Biden administration has sought to
deprive Trump of any lingering accomplishment by reversing his policies,
however efficacious and popular. Some inexpungible policies were retained by
the Biden administration; there are no signs at present that
Biden-Pelosi-Schumer intend to scotch Trump’s successful effort to bring a
Coronavirus vaccine on line as quickly as possible by throwing overboard time
consuming federal regulations. But successful policies of much resented
predecessors may be allowed to die on the media vine through benign neglect. You lightly touch your predecessors virtues, if at all, and pound like a madman on the vices.
To mention one notable instance, Biden has reversed Trump’s
border policies. And the reversal has reignited a huge onrush of border jumpers
seeking to avoid a cumbersome legal immigration process. Once again, the U.S.
border with Mexico has become little more than a demarcation line on a map. The
bums-rush of the U.S. southern border by Hondurans and Guatemalans following
Biden’s Trump purgation means, minimally, two things: one, Trump border
policies were successful in stemming illegal immigration; and two, unintended
consequences often attend the spiteful reversals of prior policies the new
regime considers useful for election purposes.
There is, Americans will have noticed during the past few
decades, a profound difference between electing battalions of Democrats to the
U.S. Congress and proper governing.
Then too, no one, friend or foe of Democrats, can have
failed to notice that the media honeymoon period enjoyed by Biden has been far
more prolonged than that of his predecessor Trump, whose honeymoon with a
hostile media was as short as the flickering of a firefly’s light at midnight.
Pelosi’s daughter sized up her mother to a tee when she
said, “She’ll cut your throat, and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” a
sentiment that might have applied equally to Lucretia Borgia. Years spent in
the House seeking to upend Republican majorities have focused Pelosi’s mind wonderfully.
Eliminating the filibuster at a time when the House is split evenly between
Democrats and Republicans and a faltering attempt to halt federal aid to states
that persist in cutting taxes is the political equivalent of the Borgia bad
habit of spiking the drinks of political opponents with arsenic, strychnine, cantharidin, and aconite, poisons used
effectively by the millionaire, politically well-placed Borgias.
If you can silence the opposition – regularly done in
Connecticut by marginalizing the Republican minority – you need not argue the
fine points of constitutional law or the untoward consequences of ruinous
policies. What used to be known in a healthy, vigorous and necessary media as
contrarian opposition simply disappears, both in the General Assembly and in
the pages of an increasingly partisan media. Opposition that has no tongue
cannot seed the political ground with inconvenient truths. Such truths are
strangled in their cribs, or aborted early enough so that an unborn opposition
may cause no problems to the ruling class, a potpourri of progressive Democrats
allied with a permanent administrative apparatus untouched by moderation and
serving always as a permanent fortification against a disappearing “loyal
opposition.”
Connecticut, for the last three decades, has been a petri
dish in which progressive policies have flourished. Progressives, programmatically
different from liberals, have been most successful in the state’s
larger cities, controlled by Democrats, former Republican gubernatorial
challenger Bob Stefanowski never tires of pointing out. Stefanowski has
incurred the wrath of Democrat-mayors-for-life in the state’s larger cities
because the majority party knows that retaining votes in cities is important to
all Connecticut Democrat officeholders. With three of the most populist cities
in their clutches, Democrats know they have an insuperable advantage over
Republicans in a state in which Democrat voters outnumber Republicans by a two to
one margin.
The Biden-Pelosi-Schumer triumvirate seeks to repeat on a
national stage the “victory” of sorts won by Democrats in Connecticut’s petri
dish.
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