Like many prior promises and positions, President Joe Biden’s pledge to pursue unity and bipartisanship once he was in charge gave way to political realities soon after he sat down in the Oval Office.
Such has been a pattern in the first 100 days of Biden’s presidency: The things he’s said over the long arc of his career (either to build his image as a commonsense senator from Delaware or, more recently, to win liberal favor in his bid for the White House) have not matched the actions he’s taken as chief executive.
The first major legislative achievement of his presidency came in the form of a massive COVID-19 relief package that, contrary to Biden’s appeals for bipartisanship, passed the House and Senate without a single Republican vote. That stood in stark contrast to the relief package passed roughly a year before, under former President Donald Trump, that attracted broad support from both parties.
Almost immediately, Biden joined other Democrats in railing against the filibuster, even though Senate Republicans hadn’t used it yet to block a single piece of legislation in the new Congress.
In 2005, Biden staunchly defended the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, arguing that any attempt to remove it was “an example of the arrogance of power” and a “fundamental power grab by the majority party” that was “designed to change the reading of the Constitution.”
But in March, Biden lamented that the filibuster was “being abused in a gigantic way” and pointed to the hundreds of times it had been used in the last Congress. The citation was misleading, however, because the 328 motions were made by Democrats trying to block Republican legislation.
Nonetheless, Democrats this year have characterized the procedural tool they used many times under Trump as a Jim Crow-era tool of oppression, and Biden has signaled that his White House is open to the prospect of killing it in order to pass a progressive agenda through an evenly divided Senate.
One item potentially on that agenda is expanding the Supreme Court, which many Democrats argue is justified because Republicans filled three vacancies with conservative justices during Trump’s term.
Biden in 1983 called court-packing a “boneheaded idea” and argued former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to add justices to the bench was “a terrible, terrible mistake to make.”
On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden began his slow retreat from that opposition by obfuscating where he stood on court-packing in the context of a renewed debate, which had been sparked by the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September. He said voters “will know my opinion on court-packing when the election is over” — a response that satisfied neither Republican critics nor liberal skeptics.
Once in office, Biden quickly created what he described as a bipartisan commission to study the issue of adding justices to the bench, among other reforms. Critics noted the commission is stacked with experts from the Left and have expressed fear that the commission is intended to add legitimacy to a preexisting Democratic desire to pack the high court.
Indeed, a handful of liberal members of Congress introduced legislation last month that would pad the bench with four additional justices, overtaking the 6-3 majority of Republican-nominated justices currently presiding. Their bill came just days after Biden empaneled the commission — long before it had reached any conclusions.
And the members who crafted the legislation argued it was necessary because, thanks to Republicans, “the Supreme Court’s standing is sorely damaged.”
In his 1983 remarks on court-packing, Biden had argued that it was in fact the partisan effort to add justices that “put in question, if for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body … in this country.”
But perhaps nowhere has the Biden administration and its allies struggled more to project consistency than on immigration. A massive surge in people attempting to cross the border illegally during Biden’s first few months in office created a political mess for Democrats, who advocated fiercely against Trump’s immigration policies but have offered little in the way of solutions for the worsening crisis.
Biden struck a relatively progressive tone on immigration during the 2020 race, when he vowed to end Trump’s “inhumane” policies of detention and deportation and instead “welcome immigrants in our communities,” according to his campaign plan.
Facing a 20-year high in illegal border crossings, however, Biden by March was urging migrants not to come at all.
“I can say quite clearly: Don’t come over,” he said during an ABC interview.
Vice President Kamala Harris has also seemingly shifted her stance on immigration — particularly on a rule from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention known as Title 42 that the Trump administration invoked to allow more deportations during the pandemic for public health reasons.
In April of last year, then-Sen. Harris signed on to a letter to the Department of Homeland Security slamming the agency’s reliance on Title 42, arguing along with several other Senate Democrats that DHS had “granted itself sweeping powers to summarily expel large, unknown numbers of individuals arriving at our border.”
Harris and her colleagues wrote that DHS made “a startling expansion of executive power under the guise of a global pandemic response.”
But the Biden administration has continued to rely on Title 42 for some deportations.
Asked about the rule during his first press conference in March, Biden touted the number of removals his administration has executed.
“If you take a look at the number of people who are coming, the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of people coming to the border and crossing are being sent back,” Biden said. “Thousands, tens of thousands of people who are over 18 years of age and single — people, one at a time coming, have been sent back, sent home. We’re sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming.”
As a presidential candidate, Biden railed against the Trump administration’s asylum, detention, and removal policies and pledged to reverse virtually all of them upon entering office. Some of those, including the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced asylum-seekers to wait on the southern side of the border while their claims were being adjudicated under an agreement with Mexico, got the ax on Biden’s first day in office.
But Biden in March argued that a deal with Mexico to take back migrant families was among several solutions to the crisis that his administration is pursuing — despite having canceled an agreement that did just that.
“We’re trying to work out now, with Mexico, their willingness to take more of those families back,” Biden said during his first press conference.
“Why are not — some [families] not going back? Because Mexico is refusing to take them back. They’re saying they won’t take them back — not all of them,” Biden said. “We’re in negotiations with the president of Mexico. I think we’re going to see that change. They should all be going back, all be going back.”
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Meanwhile, despite all the rhetoric attacking Trump’s “kids in cages” policy regarding the detention of unaccompanied minors, the Biden administration has presided over an explosion in children crossing the border and entering into U.S. custody.
More than 17,000 unaccompanied children came across the border in April alone — the second-highest amount in the Border Patrol’s 96-year history.
