Last week, Kimberly Robinson, writing for Bloomberg Law, reported that the Biden administration is on pace to flip more DOJ positions at the Supreme Court than Trump did. "In just under two months," she wrote, "Biden has flipped positions to defend the Affordable Care Act, side with union organizers in a takings case, reject a test put forth by the Trump administration in a voting rights dispute, support a California donor-disclosure law, and argue for a sentence reduction in a case on the new First Step Act. Changes in the federal government’s positions had been relatively rare prior to Trump, as they can undercut the credibility of the federal government’s top lawyer at the Supreme Court-- the U.S. solicitor general. The Trump administration took 'a number of ideologically driven, non-traditional positions that stretch the boundaries of traditional legal analysis by an SG,' longtime Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben told Bloomberg Law. 'I see the Biden administration as reverting to the mean by taking a more institutional and precedent oriented approach to its submissions to the court,' said Dreeben, who is now at O’Melveny." That's right, the status quo ante that Biden ran on-- the back to normalcy candidate.
It's worth mentioning that the Supreme Court conservative majority 6-3 conservative majority may be ready for some drastic flipping itself-- regardless of precedent or any semblance of credibility or normalcy. CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic reported today that they are eager to topple Choice. "The aims of individual justices, based on their recent writings," she reports, "range from reversing Roe v. Wade to forbidding clinics from challenging restrictions on behalf of women to relaxing the standard that states must meet to limit women's access to the procedure."
A decision to overturn Roe v Wade would tear the country apart and destroy the Supreme Court's credibility. The issue of Court-packing would instantly become a do-or-die issue for millions of Democrats. It isn't a metric Maureen Dowd used yesterday when she asserted in her latest NY Times column that Biden, a lifelong conservative-- she claims Obama's people saw him as "sort of a goofball and windbag... a member of an older, outmoded generation... uncool... a past-his-sell-by-date pol... In eight years, Biden said in a recent reveal that stunned Anderson Cooper-- and left Washington gasping-- he and Jill were never invited by the Obamas to their private digs in the White House."
Dowd, who loves Biden because he's even older-- by a decade-- than she is, claims that "Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty, while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas." Maybe she's on something mind-altering but in actual progressive circles, no one would ever refer to Biden as progressive, even if she's right about Obama having been a big disappointment to folks who weren't aware of his centrist record as a state Senator and then as a U.S. Senator. Meanwhile, Biden has killed the $15 minimum wage hike, killed meaningful filibuster reform (a talking filibuster is reactionary, not progressive), killed Supreme Court reform, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into not cutting the $1.9 trillion COVID-relief package, replaced the $2,000 relief checks with $1,400 relief checks, refused to forgive student debt, threatened to veto Medicare-for-All... He may be a progressive in Maureen Dowd's circles, but nowhere else.
The collective smirk was wiped off the face of Obamaworld this past week, as former aides expressed their irritation at the retrospective dissing, and while Biden’s inner circle enjoyed an unfamiliar sensation: schadenfreude. Now the friendly fire once aimed at Biden is coming toward Obama.
All month long, Democrats have been trashing Obama for the size of his itty-bitty 2009 stimulus bill-- Chuck Schumer called it “small” and “measly”-- and his refusal to sell it to the public.
Now, after President Biden passed the $1.9 trillion cornucopia of liberal delights, Democrats are thinking that if he keeps it up, they’ll soon be picking up their chisels to carve his face on Mount Rushmore, right in the spot Obama must have been picturing for himself.
Creaky, old-fashioned Joe moved fast and broke things. Unlike the sleek, modern Obama, who kept trying to work with obstructionist Republicans, Biden blew them off, calling it “an easy choice.”
Progressives, who had fretted that Biden would govern in a centrist hell, trapped in a sepia, split-the-difference Washington where Mitch McConnell would eat his lunch, were pleasantly surprised. {She's delusional.]
The lackluster Democratic response to the Great Recession, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Times’s Astead Herndon, “created so much damage economically, for people, but it also created a lot of political damage for the party.”
Obama’s failure to go big and to send the tumbrels rolling down Wall Street certainly greased the runway for Donald Trump. The paradox of Obama is that Americans embraced radical change by electing him but then he held himself in check, mistakenly believing that he was all the change they could handle.
Obama's failure to deliver on his brilliant open-ended, make-what-you-will-of-it marketing slog "Hope and Change," doesn't make Biden anything more than what he is-- a washed up conservative political hack who Obama decided would play a good ticket-balancing function as VP and then in 2020, handed him the presidency to keep Bernie out of it. Let's see what Dowd has to say when Biden allows the Supreme Court to get away with overturning Roe and the country melts down. I bet Dowd has never heard of Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant. Sawant is a twenty-first Century progressive, not an LBJ-"progressive" from Dowd's formative years in the last century.
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