All the ways Joe Biden is making a difference

How good old middle-of-the-road Joe has transformed himself into President Go Big or Go Home

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If all Joe Biden ever did was to appoint Merrick Garland as Attorney General, that would have been enough.  Did you see his announcement on Wednesday? Garland stood there at a podium in Washington D.C. a day after the conviction of Derek Chauvin on three counts of murder and said the Civil Rights Division of his department alongside the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota will immediately begin an investigation seeking to determine if the Minneapolis police department engages in a pattern or practice of excessive force and whether it engages in discriminatory conduct against minorities.  Garland had already announced last Friday that the Department of Justice will reinstate the use of consent decrees and public reports to insure that police departments comply with the law, rescinding a Trump administration order halting the use of consent decrees against police departments.

Can you imagine either Jeff Sessions or William Barr taking such a step to correct the problems this country faces with policing?  Can you imagine Trump calling the family of George Floyd both before and after the trial and conviction of Derek Chauvin to comfort them in their suffering?  It’s as if a lightning bolt came out of the sky and hit the District of Columbia shocking the United States government into its senses. 

But it wasn’t lightning.  It was Joe Biden.  He appointed Merrick Garland, and even though the Senate slow-walked his confirmation, Garland stepped into the job and has aggressively pursued the investigation and prosecution of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.  So far, 440 indictments of insurgents have been handed down, including charges of conspiracy against members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, right-wing groups of white supremacists Trump was fond of.  One leader of the Oath Keepers has already pled guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.  More such agreements will doubtlessly follow. 

Biden has been under unimaginable pressure since inauguration day.  Trump’s lunacy about fighting the election results got in the way of a normal transition at a time when a smooth transfer of power was needed more than ever.  The COVID pandemic was about to enter its second year.  Nearly 400,000 Americans had lost their lives to the disease, with almost 200,000 becoming infected every day.  Vaccine distribution under the Trump administration had just begun with only 40 million doses distributed and less than 17 million vaccinations given.

Biden came into office with an announced goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in his first hundred days.  Yesterday, his 93rd day in office, he passed the 200 million mark of people who have received one of the COVID vaccines.  The numbers are beginning to slow, because they’ve hit the wall of the so-called “vaccine hesitant,” but they are still averaging 3 million doses a day.  Hospitalizations are down nearly everywhere.

Biden passed his $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan on his 49th day in office.  The size of the stimulus was previously unheard of:  Biden had said he wasn’t going to go half-way, he would hold out for the whole deal or nothing, and he did.  The plan passed with almost no Republican support in either house of congress.  Checks for $1400 per adult started going out almost immediately after he signed the bill into law.  As the money started to hit the economy, states began to open up.  Businesses came back from the dead.  Children started going back to “in person” school.  A sense of optimism returned nearly wholesale.  Unreal poll numbers began to show:  70 percent approval for the relief plan, with a majority of Republicans on board.  Biden’s personal approval numbers hit 60 percent in some polls, and even the approval averages have remained in the mid-50’s.  Donald Trump, on the other hand, never got above 50 percent approval and averaged in the low 40’s throughout his presidency.

Biden finished filling out his cabinet earlier this month.  Of 15 cabinet secretaries, only five are straight white men.  In Trump’s cabinet, on the other hand, 11 of the 15 were straight white men.  Biden’s cabinet has the first female Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen; the first Black Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin; the first openly gay cabinet secretary, Pete Buttigieg; the first Native American in a cabinet, Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary; and the first Hispanic secretaries of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, Alejandro Mayorkas and Xavier Becerra respectively.  He said his cabinet would look like America, and it does.

Most reports on Biden’s first hundred days end with “now comes the hard part,” and they’re not far from wrong.  He announced a massive $2 trillion infrastructure plan that will include 20,000 miles of rebuilt roads, rebuilding or repairing the 10 most important bridges in the country, and billions to remove lead water pipes.  The plan will also promote the change-over from fossil fuels to renewables and increase wages for minorities and provide money to bring updated broadband service to rural and underprivileged areas.  Biden wants to increase taxes on corporations to pay for the plan, a proposal that isn’t getting much love from the other side of the aisle, naturally.

But Biden is managing to make an old argument seem new:  All the trillions of dollars that seem so scary when you spend them now will pay off in huge economic growth over time.  He hasn’t used this example yet, but I hope he does:  the best comparison to Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” is to the interstate highway system that was started in the 1950’s and built in the decades that followed.  It cost hundreds of billions to build all the roads that have tied the country together east to west, north to south, and we take them for granted now, but Biden is old enough (as am I) to remember what it was like before the interstates were there.  Travel took forever.  Interstate commerce crawled.  The airlines didn’t have to compete with easy travel by interstate so airfares were high, with only the middle and upper classes being able to afford to fly.

All of that changed with the interstate highway system.  The economy boomed because people could move more easily.  Think of what living through the pandemic would have been like without Amazon and deliveries of everything from eggs and bacon to toilet paper and TV’s by trucks that drove on highways to get to our houses.  We take all this stuff for granted, but highways built with tax dollars made the way we live our lives today possible. 

Next week, Biden will address a joint session of congress and propose what he calls “The American Families Plan” which will address  education by making preschool and community college free for all.  With $1.5 trillion in new spending and tax credits, the plan will increase pay for home health care providers, supplement childcare costs, and provide a national paid leave plan similar to those in many developed countries in Europe and elsewhere.  He wants to pay for it by raising capital gains taxes and the top marginal tax rate on people earning more than $400,000 a year. 

I have an idea that one day our children will look back on the stuff Joe Biden wants to do the way we look at the interstate highways we drive down when we go visit our parents and grandparents for Christmas and other holidays.  They’ll take it all for granted. 

We have Ike to thank for the great system of roads in this country.  Our kids will have Joe to thank for wind farms we’ll be able to see from those roads and solar panels that will be powering our houses and day care and preschool that doesn’t cost half a month’s pay.  

Say what you will about good old bi-partisan Joe Biden, but he’s a lot tougher than the loon who played “Macho Man” at his rallies, and the man has vision.  And he’s not wasting a third of his presidency playing fucking golf.