Biden (Still) Isn't Going Quietly Into that Good Night
Like the late Jimmy Carter, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden is going to go down in history as one of our country's most important presidents.
In the week leading up to President Joe Biden’s exit from the White House, it’s understandable to shift more attention toward the incoming administration (especially since we will be inaugurating a racist felon on Martin Luther King Day) and assume the outgoing one is running out the clock to January 20.
But despite virtual media silence, President Biden, the most legislatively consequential leader in decades, is leaving office with some of the most significant “Trump-proof” additions to his four-year legacy.
Weeks after a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate voted to pass the Social Security Fairness Act, President Biden signed it, eliminating the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO) that reduced or eliminated retirement benefits for more than 2.4 million public service retirees, like police officers, firefighters, teachers, federal, state, and local government employees.
Biden explained at last week’s signing ceremony that beneficiaries will “receive a lump sum payment of thousands of dollars to make up for the shortfall in the benefits they should have gotten in 2024. They’re going to begin receiving these payments this year. That’s a big deal in middle-class households.”
Biden also became the first US president to apologize for generations of Indigenous children’s systemic abuse in government-sanctioned boarding schools.
The Biden administration is also making JetBlue Airways pay $2 million for persistently delaying flights.
According to Department of Transportation (DOT) investigators, the airline was responsible for four chronically delayed flights at least 145 times between June 2022 and November 2023, defining chronic delays as flights flown at least 10 times a month arriving more than 30 minutes late more than half the time.
Also noteworthy, President Biden has invoked the decades-old Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to “protect the entire U.S. East coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California, and additional portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska from future oil and natural gas leasing.”
According to a White House fact sheet:
In protecting more than 625 million acres of the U.S. ocean from offshore drilling, President Biden has determined that the environmental and economic risks and harms that would result from drilling in these areas outweigh their limited fossil fuel resource potential. With these withdrawals, President Biden is protecting coastal communities, marine ecosystems, and local economies — including fishing, recreation, and tourism — from oil spills and other impacts of offshore drilling.
This major decision will prevent expanded oil drilling in 334 million acres of the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) stretching from Canada to the Florida’s southern tip, and the Eastern Gulf of Mexico; the entire west coast; and 44 million acres of the Northern Bering Sea.
This act has no expiration date, and since reversing it would require an act of Congress, it is immune from any executive order the convicted felon and soon-to-be-inaugurated illegitimate president might want to issue to reverse it.
Also on the environmental front, Semafor reported one of the most important components to Joe Biden’s impressive climate legacy — also convict proof.
The Biden administration took what is likely to be one of its last actions on climate, detailing a new clean energy tax credit designed to survive scrutiny by Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump.
The credit follows a basic formula that has applied to wind and solar projects for more than a decade, and extends it to a wider range of low-carbon energy sources, including geothermal, nuclear, advanced batteries, and some kinds of biofuels. It could pay out more than $250 billion over the next decade, and cause emissions from the US power sector to fall up to 73% below 2022 levels by 2035, which would make it arguably the single most impactful element of Biden’s climate agenda. Independent analyses have also shown the tax credit will reduce household electricity costs by up to 10%.
Regarding immigration, the New York Times reported:
The Biden administration on Friday issued sweeping extensions of deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of people from Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela in a move that makes it almost impossible for President-elect Donald J. Trump to swiftly strip the benefit when he takes office.
Next, in what is the last weapons-aid package to beleaguered Ukraine to come out of the Biden administration, the United States has announced an undisclosed “significant” amount to assist Ukraine’s efforts against Russian incursion that started with Russia’s 2022 invasion.
This, however, is not “Trump-proof”. State Department officials explained there will still be “more than a couple of billion dollars” left over for the next administration should it choose to continue assisting Ukraine.
Despite the felon’s insistence he would “get it settled before I even become president,” he is already starting to backpedal with claims he will negotiate a crease-fire within 100 days.
Finally, jobs.
Joe Biden has overseen more uninterrupted job growth in his single term than any of his three most recent predecessors — more than 16.1 million.
Last year saw 2.23 million jobs added, 256,000 in December alone.
To put that into perspective, the first three years of the former host of Celebrity Apprentice’s presidency, we added 6.6 million jobs, 2.1 million of which were shed during the pandemic.
Obama saw job growth of 7.1 million.
George W. Bush, 5.2 million.
While Bill Clinton holds the record with 32 million, his annual average trails Biden’s.
Like the late Jimmy Carter, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden is going to go down in history as one of our country’s most important presidents. While the for-profit corporate media has spent his time in office obsessing over his age or trying to get him to trash his predecessor (now his successor), we will look back on Biden’s four years in the White House with reverence and nostalgia.
First, though, we must get ready for the former slumlord and adjudicated sexual assaulter to take credit for Biden’s success.
Because he will, and the media will let him get away with it.
We will miss you, Joe Biden.