One year into his presidency, Joe Biden is a failure.
His approval ratings are abysmal. His domestic agenda is as dead as disco. Inflation is slowly crushing the economy, and pandemic restrictions show no signs of abating in many parts of the country, in large part because he won’t let them.
Biden has only himself to blame.
He continues to pursue unrealistic policies that never had a chance of passing a closely divided Congress. Build Back Better, for example, was a mess, jam-packed with leftist polices, such as free community college and subsidized day care, that would have had a hard time passing the Senate even if Democrats had a larger majority.
The same goes for the Freedom to Vote Act, which became Biden’s next big sell after Build Back Better had failed. Did Biden seriously think he was going to pass a bill that would federalize the election process and make it as hard as possible for states to pass their own election integrity reforms, all with just one tiebreaking vote in the Senate? No, he didn’t. That’s why he lobbied Senate Democrats to abolish the filibuster, a legislative tool they used hundreds of times under Trump, which forces the majority party to earn 60 votes total on most legislation.
This, too, was a dead end. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema aren’t the only Democrats in the Senate wary of gutting the filibuster. There are plenty of others who see the writing on the wall and understand that Republicans are in a very good position to take back the chamber in 2022. When that happens, Democrats will start talking about the filibuster as “essential to our democracy!”
Faced with back-to-back losses, Biden did what he does best: He started insulting people. He compared lawmakers who didn’t want to abolish the filibuster to literal traitors during a speech this week. He claimed that everyone who opposed the Freedom to Vote Act — his bill to federalize elections — is racist.
By Thursday, Biden’s approval ratings were at 33%. Members of his own party were trying to walk back his rhetoric. To top it all off, the Supreme Court struck down his private sector vaccine mandate as unconstitutional.
Again, all of this is Biden’s fault. If he had kept the promise he made on the campaign trail and pursued a moderate agenda, there’s a good chance he’d have more to show for his first year in office. He might have been able to pass an even bigger bipartisan infrastructure bill if he hadn’t wasted all his time and energy trying to push Build Back Better. He could have passed an election reform bill in the form of the Electoral Count Act, which several Republicans said they’d support — at least, before he denounced them as racists.
Biden could have helped his approval ratings by encouraging the public to learn to live with COVID-19 instead of passing heavy-handed mandates that are just as unpopular as they are unconstitutional.
Biden now has until November to pass whatever is left of his agenda, given that Republicans will likely be back in charge of Congress. Lacking any significant legislative successes, Biden will go down in history not as the next FDR or LBJ, but as the president who somehow managed to be worse than the guy he defeated in 2020.
