President Joe Biden’s reversal over the weekend on a threat to block bipartisan infrastructure legislation unless it arrives on his desk alongside a massive spending package is the latest example of an administration that has proven susceptible to outside pressure.
Biden’s backtrack came in a rare Saturday statement, in which he claimed his remarks about infrastructure days earlier had been misunderstood. The president said Thursday that he would not support a bipartisan infrastructure bill, which emerged from negotiations that he endorsed, without a partisan spending bill arriving on his desk “in tandem.”
“If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” Biden said in a speech unveiling the White House-backed infrastructure deal on Thursday.
BIDEN’S TWO-STEP DANCE WITH LIBERALS AND CENTRISTS
Republicans quickly balked at the president’s demands, expressing frustration that Biden had pitched the bipartisan deal in a way that gave the impression GOP negotiators had agreed to a plan that greenlighted an ambitious liberal package. Prospects for the deal Biden had fought so hard to achieve dimmed significantly after his Thursday speech.
By Saturday, Biden had reversed course in an effort to save his bipartisan proposal, acknowledging that his comments had “created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent.”
Biden’s attempt to tie the two pieces of legislation together, however, was a concession to the left flank of his party in the first place. Some liberal lawmakers had threatened to withhold their support of a bipartisan deal — which omitted most of the climate, healthcare, and social programs Biden initially proposed — without a guarantee that the Senate would pass a partisan bill containing those things using a procedure, known as reconciliation, that would allow Democrats to do so with only 50 votes.
The reversal of strategy was not the first time the White House has caved to pressure from the Right, Left, or center.
In April, Biden retreated from a promise he’d made in February to raise the cap on refugees that the United States will admit each year amid scrutiny of the migration crisis unfolding at the southern border.
Hours after an onslaught of criticism from liberals, however, Biden changed course again, vowing to lift the refugee cap even though the White House had cited the lack of resources for refugee resettlement as the reason for originally keeping existing limits in place.
The Biden administration faced attacks from both sides of the aisle over the explosion in illegal immigration that began earlier this year, prompting Biden to place Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of mitigating the flow of migrants.
Earlier this month, after taking heat for laughing off questions about visiting the border, Harris announced a trip to the border that was widely perceived as a concession to the administration’s critics.
Biden brushed off criticism of his handling of the border crisis by insisting his focus remained on the pandemic.
During the campaign, he had promised a liberal health activist that he would openly share vaccine-related technology with other countries if the U.S. developed a vaccine before other nations.
For weeks of his early presidency, however, Biden resisted calls from the Left and from the international community to strip patent protections from vaccines that American drugmakers had developed, prompting liberal lawmakers, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, to write a letter demanding he issue the waivers.
Biden ultimately did so over the objections of the pharmaceutical industry and the reported concerns of some of his own aides.
The White House was also accused of caving to public pressure when it came to lifting recommendations regarding mask-wearing in the spring.
As more people were getting vaccinated and the administration was busy promoting the efficacy of the shots, the White House faced criticism for policies that seemingly suggested vaccinated people should continue to mask up. Commentators were increasingly questioning why, in photographs of events at the White House, fully vaccinated officials were seen masking and social distancing; they accused the White House of sending a mixed message about how well the vaccines worked.
Biden in May announced in a hastily arranged Rose Garden event that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had changed its mask guidance for vaccinated people, no longer advising them to cover their faces in most settings.
But state and local leaders said the White House caused widespread confusion by announcing the change with little warning or explanation, and the White House was criticized by some for moving too quickly in an effort to appease detractors.
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Biden was similarly accused of announcing a policy change on investigating the origins of COVID-19 in response to political criticism. White House officials had repeatedly deferred to the World Health Organization on questions about what was being done to look into a theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab amid growing public interest in the possibility.
On the same day, reports emerged that suggested the Biden administration had shut down a Trump-era investigation of the pandemic’s beginnings, however, the White House put out a statement from Biden in which he claimed he had asked the intelligence community to spend 90 days investigating the matter.
Critics questioned whether Biden had unveiled the investigation simply to respond to public pressure rather than to signal a shift in the White House’s interest in the issue.
