President Biden and the Democrats wouldn’t know democracy if it bit them in the ass

The President bizarrely declared that “freedom” is on the ballot after his own party robbed hundreds of millions of Americans of their freedom less than four years ago, among other unprecedented assaults on our democracy.

Last week, President Joe Biden opened the general election campaign by donning the mantle of George Washington, positioning himself and his party as the rightful defenders of democracy against the malign forces of former President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.  The President chose Valley Forge, the site of the Continental Army’s darkest winter before securing victory in the Revolutionary War, so there could be no mistake about his meaning, noting in his opening, “In the winter of 1777, it was harsh and cold as the Continental Army marched to Valley Forge.  General George Washington knew he faced the most daunting of tasks: to fight and win a war against the most powerful empire that existed in the world at the time.  His mission was clear.  Liberty, not conquest.  Freedom, not domination.  National independence, not individual glory. America made a vow.  Never again would we bow down to a king.”  The President fast-forwarded 246 years, on the eve of the “anniversary” of January 6, to bizarrely claim that a 3-hour delay in certifying the vote after an unfortunate, inexcusable riot delayed the counting, caused us to almost lose “all” that George Washington and the rest of the Founders bequeathed to the country, echoing the progressive notion that we face the same challenges that prompted Abraham Lincoln to deliver the Gettysburg Address and we might well be on the verge of another Civil War.  “Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions.  Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?  I mean it.  (Applause.)  This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical.  Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about.”  The President went on to claim that his likely opponent, former President Trump is “willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power” in contrast with him, of course who is running a campaign “about America.  It’s about you.  It’s about every age and background that occupy this country.  It’s about the future we’re going to continue to build together.  And our campaign is about preserving and strengthening our American democracy.”

At the risk of taking the proverbial bait, it is worth taking President Biden at his word, considering what precisely he means when he refers to “our democracy,” and whether or not he is the right champion for the cause as the head of the Democrat Party.  Putting this another way, what does recent history tell us about these self-proclaimed defenders of the faith and does their vision line up with what most of us think when hallowed figures like George Washington are called in service of a political campaign?  Somewhat arbitrarily, I admit, we might date this recent history to the start of the coronavirus pandemic, where progressive Democrats lead the greatest assault on American freedom since the Civil War, if not earlier, shutting down businesses, schools, and more, deciding what workers were essential or not, and issuing orders for millions upon millions of Americans to remain locked in their homes.  The situation was so absurd in progressive enclaves like California that a man was forcibly arrested by multiple police officers for paddle boarding by himself.  Also during the pandemic, Democrats and progressives organized and launched what Time Magazine described as a “cabal” and a “conspiracy” to fundamentally alter US election law, as in the underpinning of our democracy with the express goal of “fortifying” the election against the incumbent President.  In other words, Democrats transpired to hijack the fundamentals of American democracy in the middle of the most important democratic contest in the country and they did that to ensure Donald Trump didn’t win.  Making matters even worse, if that were possible, they attributed the need to fundamentally transform voting to the unique circumstances of the pandemic, but the Time Magazine report revealed that they were planning much of this before pandemic started, meaning they lied about their intentions all along.

President Biden was not in office at the time, but he offered full throated support for both the lockdowns and the changes to election law, oftentimes implemented outside of the normal legislative process.  Essentially, he went to war against American democracy before he was even elected, believing that vague emergency powers, not voted on by either the citizens or any legislative body, can suspend fundamental rights, everything from freedom of speech to assembly to voting, whatever they say fit, whenever they saw fit, the will of the voters be damned.  Upon taking office, President Biden continued to assert these powers at the Federal level, up to and including authorizing the FBI to collude with social media companies to suppress freedom of speech even for speech that was true yet undesirable in his view.  He did so partially in secret, partially in public as part of this undemocratic war on misinformation, full knowing the First Amendment, what can be seen as a pillar of democracy, prevents the government from interfering with speech, even via a third party.  Throughout, he savaged anyone who disagreed including states led by governors he didn’t like for exercising their reserved powers under the Constitution, referring to Texas, for example, as being a bunch of “Neanderthals.” Simultaneously, he refused to enforce existing immigration laws at the border, ushering in millions of new illegal immigrants, and unleashed a war on American energy, reneging on contracts and commitments made before he took office.  He also pushed “equity” programs that would favor one group of Americans over another based on their skin color, some of which have also been struck down by the courts as violating the Constitution.

The President wasn’t done waging war on democracy yet.  Later in 2021, he continued to violate the fundamental tenets of our Constitutional order by unilaterally mandating a vaccine for the first time ever at the Federal level without any vote in Congress.  In his view, American democracy offered individuals no choice in their healthcare decisions, except to be forced to do whatever he wanted even though the vaccine itself was proving much less effective than advertised at the time.  If you did not comply, you could be fired from your job, and as a direct result, thousands of Americans – how many we do not know for sure – lost their employment including those in the US military.  Almost simultaneously, he asserted ongoing emergency powers to force landlords to continue to support tenants who were no longer paying their rent even though he was told by lawyers on his own team that this was an unconstitutional position.  He was struck down by the courts on both counts, but still didn’t stop there.  Shortly afterward, the President decided, once again on his own, that he could magically forgive a portion of student loan debt, authorizing hundreds of billions of dollars for the purpose without any vote in Congress.  He did so even knowing that all spending is supposed to originate in the House of Representatives and no President in United States history had ever sought such a massive rewrite of laws and changes to the budget without the support of our representatives in Congress.  He was struck down by the courts yet again, only to issue another version of it, as ever without passing any bill to do so.

There have been other troubling, far from democratic developments as well.  The Administration has quietly begun conducting a war on natural gas via regulation and executive fiat.  This includes various “efficiency” standards for the most popular stoves in the country that would essentially make them illegal – along with heaters and everything else that relies on natural gas.  He has also publicly stated his goal to end the use of fossil fuels generally, clean burning or otherwise, again the most popular energy source in the country.  There will not be a vote in Congress on any of this, nor does the President feel there is any need for the people’s representatives to weigh in.  Incredibly, there are times when it appears the President and Democrats do not want the voters to weigh in either.  At the state level, Democrats are actively pursuing legal strategies to bar the leading Republican candidate from the ballot.  Colorado and Maine have already done so, in cases headed for the Supreme Court.  Other states are following suit even while most rational observers believe the Court is going to rule that one cannot protect democracy by barring voters from participating in democracy.  President Biden is not personally involved in these efforts, but the self-proclaimed champion of democracy has voiced his own belief that voters should be denied the ability to vote for the candidate of their choice and he has done absolutely nothing to declare the obvious democratic principle that the voters and the voters alone decide who should lead them, even though that is what democracy itself demands.

Ultimately, it is enough to make one wonder what the President thinks democracy actually is.  Previously, I have opined that progressives, complete with their court packing, filibuster defying schemes, believe democracy is whatever they decide at any given moment, but it’s worse than that.  These – and other instances – demonstrate the current Democrat Party actively undermines democracy at almost every possible turn, believing executive power, which is necessarily authoritarian, enables them to do whatever they wish, from locking you in your homes to forcing you to take a vaccine, up to including denying you the right to vote for the candidate of your choice.  Even worse, the President and his party are more than willing to lie about it for the sake of political expediency, hiding their true intentions in many cases while claiming otherwise.  On Friday, President Biden noted without irony that “For the first time on our history [on January 6, 2021], insurrectionists had come to stop the peaceful tranfer — transfer of power in America.”  The truth is his own party attempted to do the same, albeit with less visible results, in 2000, 2004, and 2016 when multiple Democrats objected to the election of both George W. Bush and Donald Trump, every Republican win this century.  In President Trump’s case, they also illegally tried to influence electors, almost as the same as they claim Trump himself did in 2020.  The irony gets even richer, however:  The President also insisted that his likely opponent is “obsessed with the past, not the future,” before promptly launching into a replay of the events before and after the 2020 election, everything from bragging about his victory to lying about how he’s always taken a tough stand against political violence – except when progressives were busy burning American cities to the ground in the Summer of 2020 and his own Vice President, Kamala Harris, was raising money to bail them out.  He went on to claim that he will “embrace the Constitution and the Declaration, not abandon it” despite shredding whatever part he doesn’t like at any given moment.  As if speaking from a bizarro world, he declared that “freedom” is on the ballot after his own party robbed hundreds of millions of Americans of their freedom less than four years ago.  You could not make it up if you tried, as they say, but on the bright side:  He’s embracing these fantasies only because his record is terrible and he cannot run on it.  Everyone knows he sucks, even his own party who are variously floating other potential candidates.  The American people are not stupid either, despite what Biden might think, we well remember who locked us in our homes and would do so again in a moment.  That’s not freedom, not even close.