The Warning Lights Are Flashing at Biden’s Domestic-Change Factory

S ince the final machines were installed on January 20th of this year, Joe Biden’s domestic-change factory has been surprisingly productive. Within days of its opening, the president had commissioned an assembly line for the manufacture of executive orders. Within six weeks, he had delivered an enormous batch of progressive spending priorities — albeit in a box that advertised a different product. Now, as he looks to ramp up fabrication, Biden is considering pushing for the construction of a second, high-efficiency factory on the site currently occupied by the Senate.

Thus far, at least, Biden’s investors seem pleasantly surprised by the yield. Were his presidency to be evaluated on Progressive MarketWatch, it would undoubtedly generate a “Buy!” And yet, despite this unbridled optimism, some warning lights are flashing down at quality control — frantic, scarlet, unceasing warning lights, of the sort that augur disaster when ignored. Can Biden see them? Does he want to see them? Does anyone around him want to tell him about them? The answers to these questions will determine the fate of the next two years, and, thus, his presidency.

The first warning light pertains to the Democrats’ next legislative priority: H.R. 1 — or, if you are susceptible to question-begging nomenclative bullying, the For the People Act. In the Democrats’ eyes, H.R. 1 represents nothing less than the means by which American democracy will be preserved: a law that will safely land Flight 93, permanently banish the ghosts of Jim Crow, and finally usher the country out of the undemocratic hellscape in which it struggled until 2019. Indeed, H.R. 1 is held to be so imperative that it is being considered as the pretext for a daring run at the elimination of the filibuster.

The trouble with this plan is that H.R. 1 is deeply, deeply defective — and that, despite the best efforts of the factory’s marketing department, people outside of the rival Republican Party have noticed. In the Daily Beast, Jessica Huseman contrasts the “virtually unfettered praise in the media for H.R. 1” with the facts on the ground. The bill, she writes, “was written with apparently no consultation with election administrators,” shows “remarkably little understanding of the problems the authors apply alarmingly prescriptive solutions to,” “makes recommendations that appear to solve non-existent problems,” and would “would make elections less secure.” Despite having been told repeatedly that the bill was a mess, Huseman confirms, the “Senate did nothing to address the concerns of election officials,” many of whom were so alarmed that they “used the F-word a lot during [Huseman’s] chats with them.” It is, one told her, a “fu**ing bad bill” that would lead to a “clusterf***” next time people vote.

If, that is, the proposal ever gets that far, which seems unlikely given that so many of its provisions are either flatly unconstitutional or dramatically unpopular. Huseman concludes that H.R. 1 is most likely a “messaging bill,” but, if that is the case, it’s hardly a useful one. At Hot Air this weekend, Jazz Shaw noted that nearly half of Americans have never heard of the proposal and that those who have heard of it overwhelmingly dislike some of its key provisions. H.R. 1 bans the use of voter-ID mandates, which between 75 percent and 85 percent of registered voters support (including majorities of the minority groups for whom Democrats say the bill has been written). It requires states to mail out ballots to every voter, even when no ballot was requested, which 63 percent of registered voters oppose. And it requires states to count ballots that arrive ten days after an election is held, which 73 percent of registered voters oppose. One can only wonder how much worse these numbers will look if, as seems increasingly likely, the Democratic House of Representatives has to alternate between insisting that H.R. 1 is imperative for the maintenance of democracy and stealing seats that were unequivocally won by the Republican Party.

The second flashing light is connected to the border. Inexplicably, President Biden is well on the way to repeating a mistake that was made by his predecessor: creating a mess within the immigration system that does nothing of consequence for him except diminish his already-limited supply of political and civic goodwill. In no other area do Democrats suffer more acutely for listening to their loudest activists than on immigration, and, boy, are they suffering here. During most debates over contested public policy, skillful Democrats are able to deploy the usual set of indignant distractions, mawkish euphemisms, and press-enticing buzzwords, and thereby to smother criticism in its crib. On immigration, though, this invariably fails — not least because members of the party who live near the border have no incentive to play along with the ruse.

Only rarely can one blame a new president for events that take place within weeks of his having taken office, but President Biden deserves the blame for our present border crisis. Spurred on by a crowd that explicitly covets open borders — and held hostage by progressive rhetoric about immigrants that has spilled out beyond the United States —Biden has managed in just a handful of weeks to destroy the relative stability that the previous administration had achieved.

Preventing this political damage from bleeding into the operations of his change factory will require the president to reverse course — not with subtle shifts and winks, but with a megaphone. Pretending that the border crisis is not happening will not work. Barring photographers from documenting it will not work. Playing with language by synonymizing it will not work. Those beeping sounds coming from the control panel are real alarms, not background noise, and there is no “override” function to be found. As its new master, President Biden has two choices: He can acknowledge the issues that already confront him, or, if he doesn’t like the way they look, he can turn in the other direction, inhale the happy talk his apologists reflexively proffer, and watch as the whole enterprise burns slowly, but surely, to the ground.