Our Hyperbolic, Divider in Chief

             It will probably not shock my reading audience to hear that I did not vote for Joe Biden, but it may surprise some as to why.  You would think that I made my decision based on policies, but that would not be true.  I knew very little about Joe Biden’s proposed policies because he spent most of the Presidential campaign in his basement masked even when isolated.  The few positions I did know about (rejoining the Paris Accord and re-engaging with Iran) I didn’t like.  But to be honest, I didn’t vote for Joe because of his advanced age.  

            Joe is 78 and will be 82 by the end of his first term.  The few times I did see Joe, I was convinced that he had lost his fastball and was just not capable of handling the challenges of the toughest job in the world.  When he eventually won, the one ray of hope that I had was that Joe promised to work across the aisle and unite America in the process.  It didn’t take him long, however, to break those promises and dash the little hope I had that he could unify the country.

The 2020 election left us with the most evenly split Congress in our nation’s history.  We now have a 50-50 split in the Senate and a 51% to 49% division in the House where Republicans actually picked up 13 seats in 2020 despite the fact that Joe Biden won the Presidency.  That almost never happens.  If the 2020 election was a mandate for anything it was a mandate for cooperation, consensus, and working across the ideological aisle. Yet, in his first month in office President Biden set a record for executive orders which didn’t even require working with his own party, let alone Republicans.  This is the action of a king, not a President who promised to work with representatives of both parties.  Then he and his party in the House and Senate excluded Republicans from the planning processes for his big pieces of legislation.  This early partisanship further shattered my hopes that Joe would deliver on his promise of unity.

Since then Joe has managed to divide the country in more ways than I thought was even possible.  He has blamed the unvaccinated for Covid-19 results and has, for all intents and purposes, let the Chinese Communist Party off the hook.  This has turned the vaxed against the unvaxed even though many of his own voters in the Black community are the most hesitant.  He has pitted Blacks against Whites and vice versa by ignoring the violence and destruction of BLM and Antifa during the “summer of love” and then obsessing over white supremacy which is virtually nonexistent in this great country.

He has turned the rich against the poor or should I say the poor against the rich?  I guess it’s best for Joe if we all hate each other.   He certainly leaned towards the rich, however, since he took tons of money from them to win the Presidency.  But, they need not worry.  Even if Joe increases tax rates on the wealthy, Congress will build in plenty of loopholes for them to wiggle through.  And certainly, Joe has turned Democrats and Republicans against each other.

His recent hyperbolic speech attempting to sell his Freedom to Vote Act was a character assassination of the vast majority Americans.  There are legitimate and thoughtful reasons to oppose this bill.  First of all, it violates the 10^thamendment to the constitution which limits the power of the Federal Government to those inumerated in the Constitution, and establishing voting rules for every state is not enumerated.  The 10^th amendment puts the power to establish those rules in the hands of the states.  Despite that fact, Joe compared people who oppose this bill to George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis (all Democrats BTW).  I don’t know the hearts of any of these men, but most people would connect their names with segregation and slavery.  So, Joe is suggesting that anyone who wants voter ID is a racist.  Now, I’m sure he intended this insult to land on Republicans, but voter ID is supported by 81% of all Americans, 77% of Black America, 78% of Hispanics and even 65% of Democrats.  81% of America is racist?  Really?  

But Joe still wasn’t finished with his campaign to divide America.  He headed back to Washington to kill the last vestiges of civility and collaboration left in the Senate and maybe all of Congress.  Yesterday, he attempted to convince Democrats in the Senate to eliminate the filibuster.  First, let me explain what the Filibuster is.  It is a rule in the Senate that requires 60 votes in the Senate (a supermajority) to end debate on a bill so that it can come to a vote.  This concept has been in the Senate since its establishment so as to make the Senate a cooling off chamber and a more deliberative body than the fiery and passionate House of Representatives.  It has also been in the actual rules of the Senate for almost 200 years and the super-majority cloture vote has been in the rules for over 100 years. The Founders favored this process to avoid what they called “the tyranny of the majority”.  The filibuster was intended to protect the minority party from total impotence and force our two parties to work together to create solutions that would work for the country as a whole.  Eliminating the filibuster would leave half of the country today voiceless.

My advice to President Biden would be to make good on the promises he made during the campaign.  Be the President of all Americans.  Realize that many patriotic Americans may legitimately have different opinions than you, Joe, but you represent them all.  Understand the good in all of them.  For all Americans, I suggest that we reject the cancel culture which demands “thought compliance” and delivers hatred and character assassination without it.  Most Americans are good, generous and patriotic people.  As soon as Joe Biden and the rest of us realize this, we will come together as a nation.