In table-setting his State of the Union Thursday evening, President Biden invoked the memory of Franklin Roosevelt but, according to nearly every poll, he may be headed in the direction of Jimmy Carter. While he certainly beat expectations for his performance, Biden fumbled a major opportunity to reverse course on the leading issue of immigration despite his 80% public disapproval on the issue. Instead, he opted for finger pointing at the GOP and a likely half-step executive order next week. That strategy will fail.
Indeed, many of the president’s problems can likely be traced to his pandering to the hard left. His original sin – the bungled 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal opposed by most of his senior military advisors – was a bow to the hard left’s isolationist impulses. His March 2021 $1.9 trillion stimulus – in a post-recovery but supply-constrained economy — was a foolish hat-tip to their deficit-spending, welfare-statist ideology which jet-fueled the near 17% Bidenflation in three years and caused most Americans to lose income under his presidency and lose faith in his presidency.
Biden has never been a great orator or political salesman the way presidents Clinton and Obama were. He’s fundamentally a patronage politician (think student-loan giveaways) with lose-knit coalitions of groups he hopes make up electoral majorities. A little more than a decade ago, when Democratic centrism was fashionable (remember when he was a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage?) Biden was also hawk on immigration, advocating English-language requirements and strict entry limits.
That was before the intersectional-left activists, campaign organizers and the donor class commandeered the policymaking aparatus of the Democratic party utilizing the flying monkeys of social media to shame and quash dissent. Accordingly, the Biden White House, thirsting to be the cool kids on the social media block, moved from hawk to dove on immigration and ceded to the demography-is-destiny delusion that unassimilated migration will fatten the Democratic electorate.
Like the other leftist fallacies, the open borders shift has been a disaster: the President trails Donald Trump 30 points and Democratic voters also disapprove by large margins. As writers Ruy Teixeira and John Judis have pointed out for years, the open borders is especially unpopular with working class voters, including the Black and Hispanic working class who know that uncontrolled illegal immigration is pushing down their wages, fattening profits of corporate elites, and driving wealth inequality.
Let’s be clear: President Biden bears the responsibility for the approximately eight million illegal migrant crossings on his watch. Republicans are entirely correct that, without any legislation, he has the singular power to fix most of the problem with the stoke of a pen, as Presidents Trump and Obama did effectively. The U.S. Supreme Court has clearly affirmed that authority.
Upon taking office, Biden issued rafts of executive orders effectively inviting millions of migrants to enter through the front door without as much as ringing the bell. Previously effective entry controls such as Title 42, Remain in Mexico, parole limitations and stricter asylum criteria were all purged from the administration’s enforcement toolkit, all to seemingly satisfy the unmoored demands of the hard left.
Fentanyl, terrorism, trafficking cartels, public safety, migrant skill sets, the diversion of billions of welfare dollars were all cans to be kicked down the road. Democratic stronghold cities across the country experienced meltdowns when asked to manage only tiny fraction of the new migrant flows of border states, underscoring longstanding conservative complaints of liberal hypocrisy.
President Clinton perfected what is known as the Sister Souljah moment where Democrats dispense with hard left orthodoxies and publicly shift to the common-sense center where most voters reside. Now liberal outlets like the Washington Post are nudging Biden to follow suit on immigration.
In the same way the administration double-speaks on Israel (Israel needs to “scale back” military operations/Israel needs to “defeat Hamas”), the Biden “reset” tries to have it both ways on immigration: blame Trump and the GOP for blocking Senator James Lankford’s “bipartisan” legislation while cherry-picking a few of its components into an executive order that only partially closes the border.
But that dog won’t hunt. One Republican Senator doesn’t make a bill “bipartisan” and the Lankford proposal would still allow well over 2 million illegal crossings each year — nearly 5 times that of the Obama and Trump annual levels. The public wants more serious action and President Biden, with legal guidance from the Justice Department, has ample power to shutter the border.
When President Clinton tacked to the center, his very smart White House staff knew the progressive left was a paper tiger — a small sliver of the electorate (about 6% of voters according to Pew), with a short memory, and unlikely to sit out any election. He knew elections were won more on persuasion of the center than turnout of the ideologues on the party’s left flank.
The President faces an uphill battle for reelection. Fewer than one in five voters believe his policies have benefitted them – a shocking number after all of the government spending and handouts which have run up over $2 trillion in annual deficits. Most voters doubt his capacity for a second term. He does not have many options to change this equation. A bold and unmistakable shift to the center on immigration is an obvious way he can start to claw back — if only he can show the moxie to do it.
Julian Epstein is the former Democratic Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
