After initial major appointments went to centrists and pillars of the Democratic establishment, liberals are starting to leave their mark on President-elect Joe Biden’s evolving Cabinet.
The wing of the Democratic Party best represented by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is still underrepresented among Biden’s announced picks for the Cabinet and senior White House staff. But the Department of Health and Human Services, where liberal California Attorney General Xavier Becerra will take charge, is not a consolation prize. And Sanders’s 2016 campaign press secretary Symone Sanders (no relation) will be Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s chief spokeswoman after spending 2020 on the Biden team, while liberals have vetoed foes from assuming key positions at the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Defense.
“The keyword for Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks is balance,” said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon. “Progressives didn’t get the pick they loved, Elizabeth Warren, as treasury secretary, but they did get someone they liked in Janet Yellen, who didn’t alienate moderates in the party.”
“Party progressives stopped Michele Flournoy from becoming secretary of defense, and the president-elect scored big with them on racial diversity with his choices of Xavier Becerra at Health and Human Services and Lloyd Austin at Defense,” Bannon added.
Liberals similarly played a role in keeping Bruce Reed, a centrist linked to the Democrats’ 1990s embrace of deficit reduction, from becoming White House budget director. That doesn’t mean the left wing of the party always got who it wanted even in these cases: Neera Tanden, who is slated for OMB, has rankled progressives in intraparty feuds, and some liberals have balked at Austin’s recent military service in a post central to civilian control of the armed forces.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, tweeted that “choosing another recently retired general to serve in a role designed for a civilian just feels off.” Slotkin, a former Defense Department official in the Obama administration while Biden was vice president, didn’t come out against a waiver allowing Austin to serve in the Cabinet. But she said she will “need to understand what he and the Biden Administration plan to do to address these concerns before I can vote for his waiver.”
“The fact is, Austin’s many strengths and his intimate knowledge of the Department of Defense and our government are uniquely matched to the challenges and crises we face,” Biden wrote in the Atlantic in anticipation of Democratic critics. “He is the person we need in this moment.”
If confirmed, Austin would be the first black secretary of defense. Flournoy would have been the first woman. Demographic diversity is a major consideration in assembling the Biden team, part of the tradition begun with Bill Clinton’s pledge to appoint a Cabinet that “looks like America.”
“This kind of infighting is crazy,” said a second Democratic strategist. “It is unnecessary. We are all on the same team. It is going to hurt us.”
At Health and Human Services, Becerra would oversee vast social welfare programs that are essential to Democrats. He would also play a large role in abortion policy, riling social conservatives who view him as a “pro-abortion extremist.”
“As attorney general of California, he continued what his predecessor Kamala Harris started by persecuting citizen journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s role in baby parts trafficking,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, in a statement. “Not only that, he went all the way to the Supreme Court to try to force California’s pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise and refer for abortion — a policy the Court rejected as unconstitutional. In Congress, he even voted in favor of partial-birth abortion.”
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, is said to be a front-runner for secretary of education. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus praised her as a “visionary leader who understands education from bottom to top.” If nominated and confirmed, it would be a teachers union leader in charge of the Department of Education.
Still, as rumors of Warren or Sanders making it into the Cabinet have faded in favor of speculation about former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has long brawled with liberals, the Left isn’t satisfied with its recent inroads. But it could be worse.
“They’re putting forward more weather vanes and operatives than ideologues,” Waleed Shahid of the left-wing Justice Democrats told NBC News. “The kinds of people Obama appointed who were most ideologically hostile to the left wing of the party are not being appointed this time.”
Depending on the outcome of two runoff elections in Georgia, the Senate could range from a 52-48 Republican majority to a 50-50 chamber controlled by Democrats through Harris’s tie-breaking vote.
“If we win the Senate, then I do think the administration should be open to more aggressive appointments, or rather, appointments who would support a more aggressive agenda to help working families,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN.
