Biden Isn’t Going Quietly Into that Good Night
Joe Biden will go down in history as the most legislatively consequential president in modern history.
In the 27 days until the inauguration of the most corrupt individual ever to ascend to the nation’s highest office (again), it’s easy to get caught up in the painful headlines about the federal budget, the debt ceiling, woefully inappropriate cabinet and ambassadorship appointments, and general dis-ease over the myriad unknowns confronting us over the next four years.
Good news often gets brushed aside, encouraging the opinion the outgoing Biden administration is just sitting on its hands running out the clock.
Well, here are some recent headlines demonstrating Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are still working for the American people.
First, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate voted to pass the Social Security Fairness Act on Saturday.
This is a big deal, especially since dismantling Social Security and handing it off to Wall Street has been a consistent republican obsession since the Social Security Administration (SSA) was created in 1935.
With the next administration and Congress licking its chops over the prospect of finally getting its wish, this piece of legislation is particularly timely. First, it will eliminate the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO). Added to the Social Security Act in 1983, these components reduce or eliminate retirement benefits for more than 2.4 million public service retirees, like police officers, firefighters, teachers, federal, state, and local government employees.
Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) and Garret Graves (R-LA) reintroduced the bill last year, and it passed the House in November 327–75 after lawmakers applied a discharge petition to force a floor vote without republican leaders’ approval. After it passed the Senate this weekend, Spanberger and Graves stated in a press release:
Finally, Congress showed up for the millions of Americans — police officers, firefighters, teachers, federal employees, and other local and state public servants — who worked a second job to care for their families or began a second career to afford to live. Congress showed up for the hundreds of thousands of widows and widowers who are denied their spouses’ Social Security benefits while grappling with their loss. Virginians, Louisianans, and Americans across the country have for more than four decades implored their representatives in Congress to listen to their stories and protect their retirement security and ability to support their families. Today, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate voted to correct this glaring injustice. We will not take our foot off the gas until this bill reaches the president’s desk and is signed into law to repeal the WEP and GPO.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):
The WEP reduces benefits for retired or disabled workers who have fewer than 30 years of significant earnings from employment covered by Social Security if they also receive pensions on the basis of noncovered employment. The GPO reduces the spousal or surviving spousal benefits of people who receive pensions on the basis of noncovered employment.
American Federal of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten explained:
Today, justice was finally done for the millions of American workers who dedicated their lives to serving the public but had their retirements throttled by a punitive and unnecessary loophole.
Everyone knows a teacher, firefighter, law enforcement officer, nurse or public worker who’s paid into Social Security year after year, only to have their payments curbed by the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset when they retire. Now, that penalty will be consigned to the dustbin of history, where it belongs.
Once President Biden signs the bill, the changes would apply to all benefits payable after last December.
Next on the list: junk fees.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week finalized a rule prohibiting those exploitative hidden fees irking us every time we buy concert tickets, or book a stay at a hotel or vacation rentals. Vendors will now be required to present all prices transparently before prospective customers finalize transactions.
According to an FTC release, the rule change “targets specific and widespread unfair and deceptive pricing practices in the sale of live-event tickets and short-term lodging, while preserving flexibility for businesses.”
It clarifies:
It does not prohibit any type or amount of fee, nor does it prohibit any specific pricing strategies. Rather, it simply requires that businesses that advertise their pricing tell consumers the whole truth up-front about prices and fees.
Arguing “the time for rulemaking by the Biden-Harris FTC is over," the lone dissenting vote was that of FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, the convicted felon’s choice to run the agency after the current chair, Lina Khan, steps down next year.
Add this to the list of ways the Biden administration has worked tirelessly to ease working-class Americans’ daily financial burdens.
Biden just surpassed his predecessor in federal judgeship appointments — 235.
This means, on his way out the door, President Biden has secured a Supreme Court justice, 45 appeals court judges, 187 district court judges and two judges on the U.S. Court of International Trade.
Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explained:
The majority has now confirmed more judges under President Biden than any majority has confirmed in decades. This is historic. We have confirmed more judges than under the Trump administration, more judges than any administration in this century, more judges than any administration going back decades.
Of course the media collapsed onto its fainting couch when President Biden rightfully pardoned his son Hunter at the beginning of the month for the politically motivated specious gun-possession and tax penalty charges our supposed “non-partisan” Attorney General pursued.
But Monday morning, President Biden announced sentence commutations for 37 death-row inmates.
While the corporate media outrage machine warms up, though, let’s clarify who was not on that commutation list (names intentionally redacted):
— The man convicted for the 2018 mass Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
— The man convicted for the 2015 mass shooting at the Mother Emmanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C.
— The man convicted of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
Two weeks ago, Biden granted clemency for nearly 1,500 people — the most in a single day — primarily for those who, according to a White House press release, “Were placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic and who have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities. He is also pardoning 39 individuals who were convicted of non-violent crimes.”
Biden has already pardoned thousands of Americans with simple marijuana possession convictions and decriminalized marijuana at the federal level.
The following week, President Biden traveled to Newcastle, Maine to proclaim the Frances Perkins National Monument.
As the White House press release explains:
Frances Perkins was the leading architect behind the New Deal and led many labor and economic reforms that continue to benefit Americans today. During her 12 years as Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she envisioned and helped create Social Security; helped millions of Americans get back to work during the Great Depression; fought for the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively; and established the minimum wage, overtime pay, prohibitions on child labor, and unemployment insurance.
During a visit to the Department of Labor’s Frances Perkins Building, President Biden will showcase Frances Perkins’s foundational legacy, which civil rights and women’s rights leaders have built upon to further expand opportunities for all Americans. The President will also highlight how his Administration has continued to stand with labor and strengthen America’s workforce.
Let’s not forget, Biden is the first sitting president to march a picket line with striking union workers, lending to his distinction as “the most pro-union and pro-worker president in history”.
In his tenure, he created the “Made in America” office, required Project Labor Agreements on most major federal construction projects over $35 million, and signed the Butch Lewis Act to save more than one million pensions — which Vice President Kamala Harris helped deliver when she broke the Senate vote tie for the American Rescue Plan which included Butch-Lewis.
No matter what pundits say about President Biden’s age, “inflation” (aka corporate greed), and our tepid pushback on the Israeli government’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza, Joe Biden will go down in history as the most legislatively consequential president in modern history.
Since taking office three and a half years ago, the Biden/Harris administration has:
•Invested $12 billion in new funding for women’s health research;
• Capped out-of-pocket expenses for pharmaceutical drugs at $3,000;
• Lowered the cost of hearing aids by allowing them to be made available over the counter;
• Launched the American Rescue Plan ARPA-H initiative for advanced
research on cancer and other diseases;
• Reignited the “Cancer Moonshot” initiative with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half over the next quarter century.
13 million families covered under the Affordable Care Act are seeing health insurance costs decrease by an average of $800 a year, and three million more Americans are now insured.
Two years ago, the “ No Surprises Act,” which bans most unexpected medical charges from out-of-network providers, took effect. For the past two years, it has been illegal for medical providers to bill patients more than in-network insurance costs.
Medicare is negotiating for more affordable pharmaceutical drugs.
Insulin costs are capped at $35 per month for almost four million diabetic seniors on Medicare.
These are just a few consequential health care accomplishments in a long and growing list, which includes:
The administration paused a series of plans for gas projects environmental groups have dubbed carbon “mega bombs”. This is in addition to the formation of the American Climate Corps and provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that invests about $385 billion in energy and climate change incentives that include tax credits for solar and wind energy equipment production and electric vehicles purchases. With historic $385 billion investments in tax credits for domestic clean energy production to combat climate change devastation, we are creating up to nine million new good-paying jobs and reducing carbon emissions 40% by 2030.
Urban parks and resilience for tribal communities will see significant funding, including $60 billion in new resources for environmental justice communities’ legacy pollution clean-up efforts, and rural communities will be able to take advantage of lower cost and cleaner energy sources.
The new greenhouse gas reduction fund will provide low-cost financing for clean energy projects, with at least 60% of the benefits of these investments flowing to disadvantaged communities.
For consumers, this means additional tax credits that encourage purchases of energy efficient homes, vehicles, and appliances, reducing energy costs and utility bills.
The IRA also requires companies that report more than $1 billion in profits to pay a 15% minimum corporate tax rate, and wealthy shareholders pay a 1% tax on stock buybacks.
The Biden administration has forgiven $180 billion in student loan interest debt, reunited more than 600 children separated from their families at the Southern border during the Trump administration, and the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America (CHIPS) and Science Act.
Democrats passed and President Biden signed into law the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, a bill designed to expand health care and disability benefits for veterans exposed to toxic chemicals and burn pits.
They accomplished the most significant piece of gun safety legislation in 20 years with the “the Safer Communities Act”.
Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying into federal law the right to same-sex and interracial marriages anywhere in the country, regardless of where the marriages were performed.
All federal employees and federal contractors must be paid at least $15 per-hour minimum wage.
Biden replacing the nation’s lead pipe infrastructure.
He appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.
Let’s not ignore the fact that, due to the prior administration’s negligence and malice, we unnecessarily lost over half a million of our fellow Americans to a plague, and it was the nascent Biden administration that prioritized the vaccine that returned us to a semblance of normalcy.
We are building more factories now than ever before in our history.
Unemployment is at its lowest point in over half a century.
As we enter an uncertain period, where the fate and future of our constitutionally limited democratic republic hangs in the balance, we must be proud of what we have accomplished in only one presidential term.
This is due not just to the Biden administration, but to lawmakers, local, state and federal, who listened to their constituents and stood up to opposition. And that is due to us — we, the people — who pressured those lawmakers to do right by us.
The next few years are going to provide a national stress test. How much we will be able to withstand depends on us.
Sorry, there is no Superman, Batman, Spiderman, or Captain America.
There’s only us, and, as this year’s election showed us again, there are consequences.