A group of liberal House Democrats who sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Friday demanding he fulfill a campaign promise to lift refugee caps — which he later in the day announced he would not do, only to reverse course hours later — could be just the first in waves of pressure on him from the Left.
Biden campaigned on a platform of bipartisanship, and he has so far resisted demands from liberal activists on a range of policy issues.
BIDEN ACCELERATES REFUGEE PROCESS WHILE STALLING ON PROMISED ADMISSION CAP HIKE
His White House has instead focused on COVID-19 relief and an infrastructure proposal, dodging questions and concerns about priorities for liberals that some Democrats hoped he would elevate once in office.
Here are the areas in which a liberal showdown could be on the horizon.
REFUGEE CAPS
Biden vowed during a speech at the State Department in February to lift limits on the number of refugees the United States would accept that former President Donald Trump put in place.
But pressure built over the ensuing two months of inaction on that front; the White House, during that time, faced a growing migrant crisis on the border that opened Biden to criticism from the Left and Right.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, lead a letter signed by dozens of liberal House lawmakers on Friday urging Biden to live up to his promise to raise the refugee cap to admit 125,000 refugees a year. Trump had cut that to 15,000 refugees per year.
After days of avoiding definitive answers about the president’s plans, the White House said Friday that Biden had signed an executive order accelerating the admissions process for refugees — but would not be raising the cap.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, called the move “completely and utterly unacceptable.”
Critics also noted White House press secretary Jen Psaki had, as recently as Wednesday, maintained that Biden planned to uphold his promise to liberals.
“The president remains committed to raising the refugee cap, and I can assure anyone who has concerns that that remains the case,” she said at the Wednesday White House briefing.
The White House put out another statement hours after the initial announcement Friday amid progressive fury, claiming the administration would still increase the cap to an unspecified amount sometime in May.
COURT-PACKING
Some Democrats outraged over the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett before the 2020 election pushed aggressively for adding more seats to the Supreme Court during the campaign.
Biden has resisted endorsing that view and is potentially boxed in by his past opposition to the concept of court-packing. His refusal to take a specific position on it during the presidential race became itself a storyline, with progressives pushing for him to break their way and conservatives warning that his reticence was masking secret support for the idea.
Rather than announce any concrete effort to add more justices to the bench, Biden last week established a commission to study the membership of the high court as well as its case selection and history. The move bought him six months to avoid liberal outrage over leaving the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority intact.
But some liberal Democrats may not be content to wait on Biden.
House and Senate progressives introduced a bill on Thursday that would add four justices to the bench. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, said she would wait to review the results of the commission’s findings before bringing the bill to the floor.
GUN CONTROL
Biden announced an executive action earlier this month that would ban so-called “ghost guns,” or firearms that can be made at home and therefore have no serial number or background check requirement.
But the move did not satisfy gun control activists, who have since pushed the White House to back more aggressive legislative solutions like restrictions on assault weapons.
Psaki was questioned after Biden’s March 25 press conference as to why the president didn’t list gun control as a priority as urgent as his economic recovery plans or infrastructure.
“I think he needs to engage directly, and I think he needs to be counting the votes. I’m not sure what he’s waiting for,” Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, told the Associated Press after Biden announced executive action, but no legislative plans, on April 9.
POLICE REFORM
A string of high-profile instances of police brutality and use-of-force problems in recent days has renewed interest in police reform policies on the Left.
However, the White House this week abandoned a Biden campaign promise to create a commission that would study the issue of police reform. Instead, the administration plans to support police reform legislation, the White House said.
Liberals were unhappy with the decision because the bill the White House said Biden would support in lieu of using executive action, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, may not pass the sharply divided Senate. The Democratic House passed it in early March.
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MIGRANT DETENTIONS
Facing historic levels of unaccompanied minor crossings at the border, the Biden White House has struggled to house children humanely while it processes the arrivals.
The conditions have angered some liberals, who note that Trump received criticism for holding families in similar conditions.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, led dozens of Democratic lawmakers in sending a letter this week to the Biden administration urging the Department of Homeland Security to reform border detentions.
“Now is the moment for the Administration to take up long-overdue systemic reform of the border reception and shelter system for unaccompanied children,” the lawmakers wrote.
After Democrats ran against the fact that Trump put “kids in cages,” some on the Left have watched with discomfort as images of detained children have punctuated Biden’s first 100 days in office.
But the Biden White House has said little in recent days about how it plans to fix the situation, and neither the president nor vice president has previewed any plans to travel to the border themselves.
