The Left’s Mythical Mandate

By Aaron Kliegman Joe Biden was elected president because he wasn’t Donald Trump or a radical leftist. That’s it. No one was genuinely inspired by the 78-year-old Biden. No one watched him stumble over his words on the campaign trail and thought, “That’s my guy!” No one looked back on his nearly half-century in politics and stared in awe at his non-existent list of accomplishments. Certainly no one could be impressed by his agenda because, well, he barely mentioned it. And when he did, he often had to backpedal — such as when he was challenged to say whether he would eliminate fossil fuels. “I’m a nice guy and not Donald Trump,” was Biden’s case for the presidency. “I’ll end the chaos and return us to normalcy.” This was his electoral mandate: to govern as a boring, comfortable moderate. To be an old and tired president with low energy who was simply not his predecessor, nothing more. We know this because it’s what Biden and his team told the American people he’d be. So, the left didn’t earn any mandate. Yes, Biden won the presidency, but precisely because he wasn’t proposing the same lunatic polices as Bernie Sanders. (Not to mention tens of millions of Americans still believe Biden didn’t win legitimately.) And yes, Democrats regained a majority in the Senate, but only by the narrowest of margins. Meanwhile, Republicans gained several seats in the House and won the battle for control of state legislatures. In short, the American people rejected far-left progressivism in the 2020 election. They didn’t give Biden and the Democrats their blessing to remold America. And yet, remolding America is precisely what Democrats are now trying to do, with Biden serving as their fearless leader. Indeed, the left is simply pretending it earned a mandate from the American people. Where to begin? Last week, Biden announced his Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, which is really just an initiative to explore the prospect of packing the nation’s highest court with left-wing ideologues. According to the White House, the commission will examine topics including “the genesis of the reform debate; the court’s role in the constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the court; the membership and size of the court; and the court’s case selection, rules, and practices .” Just a few days later, liberal Democrats introduced legislation in both chambers of Congress to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices. As Joe Biden himself said in 1983, packing the court is a “bonehead idea” that would undermine the independence of the high court. He was right: Packing the court would turn the Supreme Court into another legislative body, a political tool to achieve political ends. But that’s the point: To the left, power and ideology trump the Constitution. The judiciary isn’t the only branch of government in the Democrats’ crosshairs. They’re also targeting the Senate. Biden said recently he’s willing to kill the filibuster, which necessitates 60 votes rather than a simple majority to pass bills. Without the filibuster, Democrats would be able to ram through a left-wing wish list of legislation. Democrats are also pushing a bill in the House to make liberal Washington DC the 51st state — a move that would give Democrats two more seats. Taken together, both moves would erode the Senate as an institution, threatening the nature of our federalist system. Temporary majorities would be given free reign to do as they please. If Biden has his way, the republic created by our Founders will become something else entirely. Of course, the leftist agenda doesn’t end there. Democrats, under Biden’s leadership, are currently trying to overhaul our nation’s election laws by usurping the role of the states. They also seek to overhaul the nation’s health care system, pushing it further to the left. All this comes as a growing number of elites in politics, media, and academia compare Biden to FDR, saying the former is the man of the 21st century to transform America by expanding the role of government permanently. And in fact, Biden is trying to pass historically expensive legislative packages targeting a range of issues, from infrastructure to education. Remember, Biden didn’t campaign as a transformative figure — certainly not as a new-age FDR. He portrayed himself instead as a unifier, promising to bring the American people together. What we got instead was a left-wing power grab, in service of a mythical mandate that Biden and his fellow Democrats never earned. So much for bipartisanship.

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