President-elect Joe Biden sounded like President Trump last week when he used broad, sweeping terms to recite his pledge to bring together a diverse Cabinet.
“I promise you: It’ll be the single most diverse Cabinet based on race, color, based on gender, that’s ever existed in the United States of America,” he told reporters after an economic speech in Wilmington, Delaware.
Now no longer a candidate, Biden is being urged by liberal activists and congressional leaders to keep his word. And that move is potentially preventing the two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator from selecting his first choices for his inner circle.
Biden, a 78-year-old white man trying to counter pressure from the Democratic Party’s left wing for more minority representation in government, vowed during his primary campaign to assemble a diverse team, including a woman vice president.
“If I’m elected president, my Cabinet, my administration will look like the country,” he said during the March debate.
Biden has already named his nominee-designates for two of his Cabinet’s top four positions. But both Antony Blinken, his secretary of state pick, and Janet Yellen, his choice to head the Treasury, are white. Yellen, though, could be the first woman to hold her post if she’s approved by the Senate.
Despite Yellen breaking a gender barrier, black and Latino Democrats are clamoring for time with Biden’s aides before he announces his defense secretary or attorney general this week.
Biden’s incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain met virtually with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus last week to ease tensions over Politico reporting that New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham had turned down Biden’s offer to lead the Department of the Interior.
Members of Biden’s transition team also spoke with Asian American and Pacific Islander lawmakers Monday, who told them the “community feels hurt” that they are not yet represented atop a major department, the Washington Examiner confirmed.
Biden himself will meet with the NAACP Tuesday after Derrick Johnson, the organization’s president, publicly complained that his group hadn’t sat down with staffers more than a month after Biden’s Nov. 3 election. Johnson has argued black voters helped Biden defeat Trump and will be crucial in Georgia’s Jan. 5 Senate runoffs.
On the weekend, California Rep. Karen Bass, another vice presidential possibility and floated replacement for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the Senate, delineated black candidates to head the Department of Defense.
“For defense secretary, there’s two individuals that the Congressional Black Caucus would like to put forward, Lloyd Austin and Jeh Johnson,” she told CNN.
Austin’s and Johnson’s stocks have risen at the expense of Michele Flournoy’s. Flournoy, once thought to have a lock on the role, wasn’t unveiled alongside Biden’s other national security and foreign policy advisers before Thanksgiving. The omission forged an opening for people to lobby Biden on behalf of their favorites. Liberals have underscored how Flournoy’s consultancy clients have included military contractors and foreign governments.
George Mason University professor Jeremy Mayer couldn’t say whether Biden would have considered Johnson for the DOD, for instance, without his pledge. But the academic and author, who’s written extensively on race in politics, said Johnson was “more than qualified.”
Johnson, Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security secretary and the Pentagon’s general counsel, is in the running to become attorney general as well.
“Every Democratic president faces diversity questions, and as the various ethnic, racial, and sexual voting blocs have grown in power in the Democratic coalition, the pressure has grown,” Mayer told the Washington Examiner.
Republicans don’t have to grapple with the same issues because their coalition isn’t as diverse, according to Mayer.
“At least Joe Biden did not promise to name a person from a particular group to one of the four top Cabinet posts, as Clinton did with women in 1992, which meant that he absolutely had to name a woman as attorney general after he had filled the other three,” he said. “That really created a bind on Clinton, when the first two women had to withdraw their nominations.”
When pressed last week on whether he would appoint a minority nominee-designate for defense secretary or attorney general, Biden declined to make a commitment.
His transition spokespeople were similarly grilled on nominations during a telebriefing.
“The president-elect certainly understands, and hears, and welcomes voices that are pushing him on diversity. That is how we make progress in this country,” Biden’s White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said. “We’ve only made eight of 23 Cabinet nominations at this point, so we are still very early in the process.”
Jen Psaki, his White House press secretary, added that many of Biden’s Cabinet picks were historic, including prospective DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Office of Management and Budget Director Neera Tanden, and Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Cecilia Rouse.
Biden later revealed California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Mexican American former congressman, as his Health and Human Services secretary.
“It’s not just because they’re diverse, it’s because they’re the most qualified people for the job,” Psaki said at the time.
