Joe Biden’s first 100 days have certainly been notable – not just for his determination to make a hard left turn on policy, but for the assemblage of personalities he has brought to his administration to implement that hard left turn. Personnel, it is said, is policy. And on the personnel front, Biden’s team is as left as left can be.
Consider:
Any presidential administration’s personnel process begins with the choices the president makes for his White House staff. He spends more time with them than he does with anyone else; consequently, they have more influence over him and over his administration’s policy development and implementation than any others in his circle.
Biden chose as his White House chief of staff Ron Klain, a veteran liberal operative who previously served as chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, and to Biden himself from 2009 to 2011. He also served Biden previously as chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Biden was chairman of that committee. And Klain even served a stint as legislative director for Ed Markey – Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s partner and principal Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal legislation – when Markey was still in the House.
Klain has recruited into the Biden administration top staffers from liberal groups, something the groups say is a “big change from prior Democratic administrations.” Under the previous Democratic administration, for instance, “two of the most prominent think tanks on the left – the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Economic Policy Institute – felt almost entirely shut out of policymaking. Now, by contrast, CEPR and EPI have former employees – Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey – occupying two of the three positions on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Janelle Jones, a former EPI economic analyst, is now chief economist at the Labor Department.”
Biden was so determined to bring John Kerry back to government that Biden actually created a brand new position for him – “U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate,” with cabinet rank and a seat on the National Security Council. Kerry’s new position marks the first time that the National Security Council will feature an official whose sole focus is climate change.
Biden didn’t stop there. He created a new office in the White House – the “Office of Domestic Climate Policy” – and named another well-known leftist to head that office: Gina McCarthy, who had previously served as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama.
In Kerry and McCarthy, Biden has his perfect liberal climate tag team. They’ve already got sign-off from the left – they were both members of the Biden-Sanders “unity task force” on climate change.
And there’s more. Biden’s program is the most radical agenda ever to come out of the Oval Office – “If President Biden gets his way,” wrote The Washington Post, “the national minimum wage will be $15 an hour, immigrants without legal status will receive an eight-year path to citizenship, firearms will be harder to purchase, votes will be easier to cast and Americans will head back to work in 10 million new clean-energy jobs.” The newspaper sells Biden short – his radical agenda also includes, among other things, a massive wealth transfer, further expansion of Obamacare, spending taxpayer dollars on overseas abortions, and overturning by federal law 27 states’ laws that allow the freedom to work without union membership as a condition of employment.
To implement that agenda, he’s brought in a whole cabal of radicals: Alejandro Mayorkas (who, in an earlier job as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, helped implement President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program) at Homeland Security; Xavier Becerra (who, as California’s attorney general, was so extreme he sued the Little Sisters of the Poor after they had already won at the Supreme Court) at Health and Human Services; Vanita Gupta (who supports defunding the police and ending qualified immunity for police officers) at Justice; David Chapman (who advised the liberal gun control group Giffords) at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Deb Haaland, (who opposes fracking and oil pipelines) at Interior; and Marty Walsh (who, as mayor of Boston, hurt American workers by affirming Boston’s status as a sanctuary city) at Labor, to name but a few.
Radical agendas require radical people to implement them. A close look at the personnel he’s put in place makes one thing perfectly clear – when it comes to actually enacting a radical agenda, Biden isn’t trying to unite the country, as he promised in his campaign, he’s sending us off a socialist cliff.
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.