Xavier Becerra was selected for one reason above all others: abortion.
Xavier Becerra was selected for one reason above all others: abortion.
P resident-elect Joe Biden has selected Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, to be his first secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
What are Becerra’s qualifications to run the most important federal agency at the peak of the worst pandemic in a century?
Becerra, a former congressman, has no experience working at HHS and no medical background. He has never been chief executive of a state, or even of a large, complex organization.
“Some medical experts, who have been pushing the Biden team to name people with medical or public health expertise to serve in health leadership positions, were caught off guard — and unhappily so — by the news of Mr. Becerra’s selection,” the New York Times reports. “One person familiar with that effort said people involved were ‘astounded’ by the selection of Mr. Becerra, and suggested that Mr. Biden elevate Dr. Murthy to a cabinet-level position.”
So why did Biden select the attorney general of California to serve in this critical role in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic?
The Times notes that Becerra’s selection was a “surprise” because “Becerra has carved out a profile on the issues of criminal justice and immigration, and he was long thought to be a candidate for attorney general.”
“But as attorney general in California, he has been at the forefront of legal efforts on health care, leading 20 states and the District of Columbia in a campaign to protect the Affordable Care Act from being dismantled by his Republican counterparts,” the Times adds. “He has also been vocal in the Democratic Party about fighting for women’s health.”
So Becerra’s chief credentials are protecting the Affordable Care Act from (benign) legal threats and being “vocal” about “fighting for women’s health.”
To translate the Times, the primary reason why Becerra was selected is the issue of abortion.
The Department of Health and Human Services — with its broad rule-making authority — has always been important to advocates on both sides of the abortion issue. And Becerra’s selection makes it clear that the Biden administration will push the limits of that rule-making authority.
But Becerra has been so zealous on the issue of abortion that even some progressives have criticized him.
In 2017, Attorney General Becerra filed felony charges against pro-life activists who went undercover to expose Planned Parenthood’s practice of selling the body parts of aborted babies to biotech companies.
Hillary Clinton called the undercover videos “disturbing,” but progressives ultimately rallied to the defense of Planned Parenthood. The editorial page of the Los Angeles Times supports abortion-on-demand and thinks the videos uncovered no wrongdoing, but the Times editorial board still wrote that Becerra’s decision to file felony charges against pro-life activists was a “disturbing overreach.”
California law requires both parties to consent to audio recordings, but animal-rights activists had not been prosecuted for making their own undercover videos. “It’s disturbingly aggressive for Becerra to apply this criminal statute to people who were trying to influence a contested issue of public policy, regardless of how sound or popular that policy may be,” the L.A. Times editorialized in 2017. “In similar cases, we have denounced moves to criminalize such behavior, especially in the case of animal welfare investigators who have gone undercover at slaughterhouses and other agricultural businesses to secretly record horrific and illegal abuses of animals. That work, too, is aimed at revealing wrongdoing and changing public policy.”
Kevin Drum of Mother Jones wrote in 2017: “This was a legitimate investigation, and no level of government should be in the business of chilling it.”
Mona Charen, a conservative columnist who supported Biden’s election, wrote of Becerra’s behavior: “We are witnesses to an abuse of power by government that represents a test of our democracy. Anyone who fails to rally to the cause of the Americans victimized in this case should be discredited.”
Biden ran on a platform of bringing the country together. Becerra is uniquely ill-suited to accomplish that task at HHS. If a Republican president — in the middle of a pandemic — selected a culture warrior with no experience of working at HHS or of governing a state, the blowback from Congress and the press would be intense.