Joe Biden just won the most congested presidential primary in history with an appeal to return to normalcy.
President Trump, he argued, was an aberration rather than the natural result of an irredeemable Republican Party and that the nation requires a moderate liberal with the ability to back-slap his way to restoring relative comity and bipartisanship.
But now that he’s locked up the primary, Biden is signaling something very not normal. In fact, Team Biden is now threatening to violate standing norms of governance in ways Trump never has.
Appointed to Biden’s transition team is Julie Siegel, the former senior counsel for economic policy to Elizabeth Warren, whose socialist-cum-protectionist policies were resoundingly rejected by voters this winter. Earning a spot on his climate change task force is Green New Deal author Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and on his economic task force is Stephanie Kelton, the crackpot economist favored by spend-happy socialists for arguing that deficits aren’t real.
But now, Sen. Chris Coons, a close friend of Biden’s who occupies his former Senate seat, is talking about nuking the legislative filibuster — the requirement that 60 senators agree to end debate and move to a vote on legislation.
“I will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administration’s initiatives blocked at every turn,” Coons told Politico. “I am gonna try really hard to find a path forward that doesn’t require removing what’s left of the structural guardrails, but if there’s a Biden administration, it will be inheriting a mess, at home and abroad. It requires urgent and effective action.”
With Republican control of the Senate in jeopardy, conservatives would be correct to panic. Biden himself may be less radical than the opponents he vanquished, but his early staffing choices suggest a much more radical approach. Most alarmingly, Democrats might well get him to rubber-stamp whatever big-ticket items they can slip through Congress with a narrow majority of 50 senators — taxpayer funding for abortions, expansion of entitlements, repeal of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, abolition of the right to secret ballots in union elections — you name it.
Maybe Biden wants to return the nation to normalcy. But it doesn’t look like his staff does, and they’re the ones who will make all the decisions.
