Lame-duck Biden admin. fails to take 2024 election to heart
On Monday, President Joe Biden banned all new oil and gas drilling in all federal waters — approximately 625 million acres. Due to the terms of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, President-elect Donald Trump may not be able to administratively reverse the decision, without congressional action. Alongside Biden’s last-minute drilling bans on federal lands in Alaska and Nevada, this move is designed to severely restrict Trump’s ability to kickstart the American economy with an invigorating shot of cheap, domestically produced energy.
The Biden administration’s offshore oil ban is part of a larger strategy to “Trump-proof” the federal government before Trump assumes office in two weeks. The strategy involves erecting as many administrative and personnel barriers as possible to Trump’s declared objectives, from economic tourniquets in the name of environmentalism to filling agency employment before Trump attempts to clean house.
But this strategy demonstrates that the Biden administration learned nothing from the 2024 election, in which the sitting vice president spent $2 billion and still lost every battleground state. Voters opted for Trump over a continuation of Biden’s policies because they disliked the impoverished, enfeebled, divided America that Biden’s agenda created. Voters chose the economy over the environment, wokeness, and moralistic lecturing.
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What was the Biden administration’s response? Double down on everything voters disliked and do everything in their power to prevent Trump doing what voters elected him to do. This is a strange course of action from those who supposedly love small-d “democracy” (that is, rule by the people).
In fact, Biden administration officials are already opining on the Trump administration’s policy — somewhat like a fired manager telling his replacement how to fix his department. On Sunday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insisted on ABC that Republicans should “not politicize” the “radicalization of individuals” in the military after a U.S. military veteran-turned-ISIS terrorist killed more than a dozen people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day.
This is the ultimate example of “Do as I say, not as I do.” The Biden administration began with a military extremism review that turned up empty. There were extremists in the military, but the Biden review didn’t find them because it was deliberately designed to only find right-wing forms of extremism. They had politicized the process.
Mayorkas’s own department has become notorious for prioritizing political objectives over its legal obligations. For the past four years, the DHS has flagrantly ignored U.S. immigration law, pursuing policies that appear designed to maximize the number of people allowed to enter this country illegally. While failing its core mission — securing the homeland — the DHS sought to innovate in the field of online censorship, with its short-lived “Ministry of Truth.” None of these actions were ever authorized by Congress. Mayorkas was pursuing a political agenda set by himself and his superior, President Biden.
The irony of the whole New Orleans fiasco is that it highlights the failings of the Biden administration. Their supposed purge of military extremism failed to detect this perpetrator. The FBI — a bureau with its own politicization problem — confidently declared that the attack was definitely not terrorism before publicly changing its story. This incompetence is part of the reason why American voters sent this team packing, and yet this team has the audacity to tell their replacements how to do their jobs.
This pattern of incompetence and cynical politicization is evident across the Biden administration. On Saturday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally admitted on a New York Times podcast that the Biden administration’s Middle East policy was effectively anti-Israel and fundamentally counterproductive to the goal of ending the conflict and bringing home the hostages. “When [Hamas] saw Israel under pressure publicly, they pulled back,” he said. Yet the Biden administration — both the president himself and top-level diplomats — routinely pressured Israel in public, undermining their objective of finalizing a deal with Hamas. Instead of achieving results for America and its allies, the Biden administration politicized diplomacy.
American voters gave Biden and his handpicked successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, low marks for this deliberate politicization of government, which failed to maintain America’s existing level of prosperity. Yet, in the waning hours of his presidency, Biden still seems more concerned with his political agenda than with what the American people have to say.
Biden administration officials are not the only ones who seem to have played hooky while the American voters were delivering their early November tutorial. On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) claimed that “We have a very functional FBI right now,” as a justification for delaying the confirmation of Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to head the agency, who has criticized its trend towards politicization. What Klobuchar meant was that she likes what the FBI is doing now — prosecuting pro-lifers and medical whistleblowers — and worries that a Trump administration will put an end to this rogue activity.
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggested on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Democrats lost the 2024 election because “we talked about the mechanics of the legislation and the details of the legislation, and we really didn’t show the kind of empathy and concern to average or show enough of it to average working families who didn’t realize how much we had done and how much we care for them.” Schumer’s memory must have reset with the calendar. Does anyone believe that Vice President Harris talked too much about the details of her legislative agenda?
In fact, Schumer claimed exactly the opposite of what most Americans experienced. Most of the signature legislation that passed during the last four years was bundled into massive spending bills where no one talked about the details. This included bills like the Inflation Reduction Act, which never had anything to do with reducing inflation and was merely a convenient cover for the Left’s climate priorities. Then came the Harris campaign, where voters were treated to a hundred recitations of Harris’s “middle-class family” but few and tardy explanations for what policies she would enact.
In 2024, Americans once again demonstrated their distaste for uncompromising progressive absolutism. But that is the product the Biden administration and its congressional allies are promoting, and it seems unwilling or unable to alter its course, even down to its final day.
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
Joshua Arnold is Media Coordinator for Family Research Council.
