In President Joe Biden’s scorched-earth speech last night, he was correct in some of his criticisms of former President Donald Trump and a percentage of Trump’s most fervent followers. That does not, however, excuse Biden’s gross hypocrisy, as the mote in his own eye is large.
Even though he holds the office of the presidency, Biden is by far the wrong man to (pretend to) speak for the “soul of America.” He has spent too much time trying to grind traditionalists under the sole of his shoe.
It is insulting for Biden to lecture anyone about fidelity to the Constitution whose actual words he has spent a career trying to evade and undermine. Just late last month, Biden unliterally claimed authority to cancel student debt even though he, his lawyer, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) all had acknowledged a year earlier that he has no constitutional power to do so. They all know they were right then, but that didn’t stop him. And it’s just the latest transgression in Biden’s long record of them.
Earlier this year, Biden urged Congress to declare unilaterally the misnamed and radical Equal Rights Amendment to be part of the Constitution even though authority for states to ratify it expired 40 years ago and even though five states that voted to ratify it later voted to rescind the ratification before the 1982 deadline. He decreed that landlords could not evict tenants for failure to pay rent after admitting he had no such power. He decreed that private employers must punish workers for being unvaccinated, again despite not having that power.
And even though he has said that “to use the office of the presidency … to intimidate and undermine an independent judiciary would be a blatantly unconstitutional abuse of power,” he has repeatedly refused to condemn threats to Supreme Court justices who disagreed with him.
More hypocrisy: Biden blasted “MAGA Republicans” Thursday because they “do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election.” Repeatedly he harped on this, almost to obsessive levels. Yet he appointed to the Federal Election Commission Dara Lindenbaum, the legal architect of the outrageously spurious effort by Democrat Stacey Abrams to overturn results from the 2018 Georgia governor’s race that was not nearly as close as the Georgia presidential battle in 2020. If he insists that he “will not stand by and watch elections in this country stolen by people who simply refuse to accept that they lost,” then why choose someone to oversee national election law who simply refused to accept an obvious and undeniable loss?
Biden lied in his speech by claiming, entirely falsely, that “MAGA forces” want “no right to contraception.” He decried “divisive culture wars,” but he is the one deliberately provoking those wars by siccing government on nuns who don’t want to participate in abortions, on religious schools and doctors who object to a transgender ideology that until about five years ago was no part of the culture at all, and on parents who dare exercise their constitutional rights to petition school boards to oppose critical race theory and other race-obsessed practices.
The most flagrant hypocrisy, though, was his spoken paragraphs after paragraphs saying we all must “reject violence as a political tool.” Yet he chose as his own vice president who in the immediate wake of the 2020 Minneapolis riots began raising money for a “bail fund” to get violent rioters out of jail — and who, even after the protests turned terribly violent, urged that the protests “not stop” even beyond that fall’s election. She didn’t make a distinction then between violent and supposedly “peaceful” protests, either.
Biden keeps claiming to be a uniter, but he has spent a career using harsh rhetoric about his opponents, from calling them “semi-fascists” last month to telling black Americans that mild-mannered Republican nominees would “put y’all back in chains.”
Biden never has been anything but a shiv-in-the-gut politician, demonizing and calumniating those who disagree with him. The soul he needs to examine is his own.
