For three and a half years, the Biden White House has seemed remarkably escape-proof. Even amid a popular backlash to the administration’s policies: the spending splurge in 2021 that was followed by sharp inflation in 2022 and 2023, the changes in immigration enforcement that have produced a number of illegal immigrants unparalleled entrants even in the border boom periods of the 1980s and 2020s. point.
It has not been clear who: the main assistants? Appointed in the cabinet? Members of the family? – He has urged the president to take these unpopular courses, which are not in line with his responses for many years in the Senate and appear to be at odds with his 2020 campaign presentation as a return to normality after the volatility of the Trump administration.
Or is it simply President Joe Biden himself, feeling free in his later years to indulge the liberal impulses he stifled for prudential reasons during a half-century of holding and seeking public office?
But there have been signs that, in the face of this latest election and trailing in the polls, at least some in the administration have been reconsidering. Take immigration as an example.
“President Biden has come to recognize that the rise in undocumented immigration during his presidency is a threat to his re-election,” reads the lead sentence of an article by David Leonhardt of the New York Times. “The administration is now considering policies that would undo some of its initial easing of immigration rules.”
Attached to the article is one of the Times’ excellent charts showing that annual apprehensions at the southern border averaged 1.97 million in Biden’s first three fiscal years. That’s a huge increase from the 300,000 to 750,000 annually since the 2007-08 financial crisis.
Leonhardt briefly dismissed the administration’s argument that those results are somehow the fault of Republicans because of their refusal last year to support the so-called compromise immigration bill. That’s not compelling, as Leonhardt suggested, because the president has “significant flexibility” to change immigration procedures, which he relaxed upon taking office and which he could tighten at any time.
Examples include restricting the right to seek asylum for illegal border crossers and regranting parole and release from custody on a “case-by-case basis only.” What can be done by executive order can be undone by executive order.
But what is the evidence that the administration is “now considering” different policies? Leonhardt’s article appeared on February 26, more than three months ago. “Biden and his top advisers are united in the need to push for greater border security,” Politico reported last week. But as restrictive immigration blogger Mickey Kaus responded, referencing Leonhardt’s article: “Yet they have done nothing, despite a long-rumored crackdown, for 7/8 of their term. What kind of WH is this? United on the need to act. Doesn’t act!
Maybe not united. Politico noted that White House senior adviser Steve Ricchetti, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama White Houses, has been “advocating for tougher border enforcement,” but his advice has not been followed. Presumably, those with different views have prevailed, unless this is just an example of the lethargy sometimes seen at the end of an administration.
One possibility is that Biden, at least at this stage in his life, believes strongly in what amounts to an open borders policy. What may have begun as a knee-jerk rejection of all of the Trump administration’s policies, and what has become a political liability, may, in the process, have become the conscious preference of this chief executive. That would fit with the information that Biden and some of his entourage do not believe the polls that show him lagging behind.
Strengthening that hypothesis is the response to the dismissal of Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, by Republicans in the House of Representatives. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) got his Democratic majority to abruptly shut down debate, presumably in coordination with the Biden White House.
Is there any reason to expect a different policy in a second Biden term? A president committed enough to an unpopular policy to have rejected advice to change it when he is trailing in the polls before an election is not likely to abandon it after having won a second term and unable to seek a third.
In time, we may learn more about what has been going on in a surprisingly leak-proof White House, in whose inner workings much of the overwhelmingly Trumpophobic press doesn’t seem very interested. Perhaps they fear exposing, in the words of former special prosecutor Robert Hur, a “sympathetic, well-intentioned old man with a bad memory.” But maybe he’s the one who’s really in charge.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and long-time co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, “Mind Maps of the Founders: How the Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” is now available.
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