No, Joe Biden will not move left.
I’ve seen many so-called “progressives” talk about moving Joe Biden to the left. Heck, even the legendary Bernard Sanders has talked about it. But let’s face the facts: it’s not gonna happen.
On the 2020 presidential campaign trail, Biden promised to rescind the Trump tax cuts, forgive $10,000 of federal student loan debt, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, rehabilitating released prisoners, decriminalizing marijuana, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, and abolishing the death penalty. Additionally, he vowed to create a public option, lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60, rescind the Trump administration’s policies of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, universal pre-school, and expanded free public colleges.
While many of these promises fall short of those proposed by Biden’s primary opponent and rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the question remains in the air, will Biden accomplish these goals, and, further yet, does he even want to? Will he fight for these policies? Let’s take a deeper dive and find out.
While Biden may have promised to rescind the Trump tax cuts (of which 83% of tax breaks went to the top 1%, and all tax cuts for incomes below $75k were temporary), a top adviser of the president-elect, Cynthia Hogan, who lobbied for the Trump tax cuts. In terms of forgiving $10,000 in federal student loan debt, an promise made early in the campaign of the former vice president, Biden stated, regarding forgiving $50,000 in debt,
“I’m going to get in trouble for saying this . . . it’s arguable that the president may have the executive power to forgive up to $50,000 in student debt… Well, I think that’s pretty questionable. I’m unsure of that. I’d be unlikely to do that.”
While he has reaffirmed his support of canceling a smaller amount such as $10k, however, it would be via legislative action through Congress he has stated. With a very narrow Democratic majority in the House and a Senate majority up in the air, it’s very unlikely that Congress will be able to pass anything on this issue, therefore one couldn’t be faulted to speculate that the Biden administration will not be canceling any student loan debt, at least not anytime soon.
Biden has repeatedly affirmed his commitment to increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and in fact, the U.S. House passed a bill to do this exactly in July of 2019, and we have no reason to believe that Biden will back off of this promise once in office. However, once again, with the partisan makeup of Congress, even with a willing President Biden and a Democratic Congress, such efforts could prove to be futile.
For criminal justice reform, Biden’s record is not viewed favorably by those on the left, and for good reason. As New Jersey Senator Cory Booker pointed out to the former vice president in the Democratic presidential primary debate on September 12, 2019,
“There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses,” Booker said, “because you stood up and used that tough-on-crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine.”
Biden authored and was a key figure in the passage and signing of the 1994 Crime Bill, which extended the death penalty to 60 new crimes, stiffened sentences, offered states strong financial incentives for building new prisons, and banned a range of assault weapons — helped lead to the wave of mass incarceration that’s resulted in the United States accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prison population.
While it is true that Biden has promised to decriminalize marijuana, this simply doesn’t go far enough, when he should be pushing for the legalization of marijuana. And while it’s likely we’d see bipartisan support for legalizing marijuana, including from Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, Biden will need to focus on getting this accomplished in the first 6–8 months of his presidency before focus shifts to the midterms.
Healthcare is where we can expect Biden to really let down his progressive voters. During the campaign, Biden has continually expressed his support for expanding Obamacare and implementing a public option which would cover up to 97% of the U.S. population, however that still leaves out approximately 10 million people. Considering however, that Biden received in campaign contributions, $205 million from the insurance industry, $62 million from the health industry, and $56 million from lobbyists, Biden is likely to stack his administration with friends of the pharmaceutical industry and health insurance executives. And getting healthcare reform through the 117th Congress, at least in a leftward direction, will be near impossible.
The topic of immigration is where Biden will really let down progressives. Biden has said that he’ll reverse Trump’s immigration policies, however the Biden transition team has already began giving excuses as to why executive orders and other executive actions on the issue will be delayed. Not to mention, that it was the Obama administration that built the cages of which many liberals have criticized the Trump administration for. Additionally, Obama was known as the “Deporter-in-chief”, with the Department of Homeland Security stating that more than 3 million undocumented immigrants were deported between 2009 and 2016, fastly outpacing Trump. While as recently as February of this year Biden has called his old boss’ deportation policies a “big mistake”, it seems to be up in the air as to which direction he himself will take.
Now let’s take a look at Biden’s cabinet picks so far; Former four-star US Army General Lloyd Austin was picked as the Secretary of Defense, which is already problematic. Austin, after having retired from the Army in 2016, joined the Board of Raytheon, a major corporation in the military industrial complex. It’s almost certain that such a pick will push Biden towards hawkish stances and actions, which would correlate with Biden voting in favor of the Iraq War, in 2002. Biden floated Rhode Island’s Democratic Governor, Gina Raimondo, as the new Secretary for Health and Human Services, who as State Treasurer or Rhode Island, in 2011 she spearheaded legislation slashing pension benefits, an effort vehemently opposed by unions. More recently, she drew criticism over a decision to grant nursing homes immunity from liability for resident injuries and deaths during the pandemic. Ultimately, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a staunch supporter of Medicare for All, was chosen for the job.
Biden, after having become president-elect, has already shown his disdain for progressives and is much more eager to work with congressional Republicans than the more left-wing members of his own party. Judging from many of the decisions of not just himself, but of his transition team and his record as Vice President and as a United States Senator, I believe that Joe Biden will not substantially move left, overall.
