by George Neumayr
“Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders Deepen Their Cooperation,” reports the New York Times this week. The story underlines what a puppet of the far left Joe Biden has become. He is taking his policy cues from a socialist and his supporters.
“Allies of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled a sweeping set of joint policy recommendations on Wednesday, a significant if tentative sign of cooperation among Democrats as Mr. Biden’s campaign continues its appeals to the progressive left,” says the Times. “Mr. Biden is expected to adopt many of the recommendations, which were submitted by six policy task forces and cover a wide range of issues including health care, criminal justice, education and climate change.”
Biden had set up these task forces to pacify progressives: “The formation of joint policy working groups had been a crucial compromise from the Biden campaign that helped ease the way for Mr. Sanders to withdraw from the presidential race in early April.”
But the task forces signal more than that. They give a foretaste of his presidency. Should Biden win, he will usher into his administration a raft of wild-eyed progressives. Sanders, pleased that Biden is borrowing policy ideas from him, says that Biden could be “the most progressive president since FDR.”
RNC spokesman Steve Guest noticed that the “unity” task forces took passages straight from the Sanders platform. “The fact Joe Biden has embraced Bernie Sanders’ radical agenda verbatim is proof that while Bernie may not be the one leading the Democrat Party, Biden is more than happy to be his champion in its lurch to the left,” Fox quotes Guest as saying. “Bottom Line: Joe Biden has years of experience copying from others, now his task force is straight up copying from Bernie’s 2020 campaign proposals.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez co-chaired the climate task force. She bragged that it had pushed Biden to take more liberal positions: “I do believe that the Climate Task Force effort meaningfully & substantively improved Biden’s positions.”
Allies of Sanders told the New York Times that they are generally pleased with the outcome of the task forces. “The people who supported Bernie Sanders — this absolutely gives us a step forward,” said Sara Nelson. “We improved Biden’s policies, and you can always be stronger in the fight when you’re fighting from higher ground.”
Biden recently said that he will not only “rebuild America” but “transform it” — an allusion to Barack Obama’s promise to “fundamentally transform” America. “Transform” is a euphemism for “destroy.” If you read through the jargon-filled pages of the Biden–Sanders task force report, it is a litany of tax-and-spend policies that have never worked, combined with promises to thwart policies that do. Take its section on education, which treats charter schools and vouchers as the enemy of reform:
Charter schools were originally intended to be publicly funded schools with increased flexibility in program design and operations. Democrats believe that education is a public good and should not be saddled with a private profit motive, which is why we will ban for-profit private charter businesses from receiving federal funding. And we recognize the need for more stringent guardrails to ensure charter schools are good stewards of federal education funds. We support measures to increase accountability for charter schools, including by requiring all charter schools to meet the same standards of transparency as traditional public schools, including with regard to civil rights protections, racial equity, admissions practices, disciplinary procedures, and school finances. We will call for conditioning federal funding for new, expanded charter schools or for charter school renewals on a district’s review of whether the charter will systematically underserve the neediest students. And Democrats oppose private school vouchers and other policies that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system.
Under a Biden presidency, the Department of Education would be an annex of the NEA. “Transforming” America will mean applying every bad idea liberals couldn’t get around to in Obama’s two terms. And many of those ideas will be supplied to Biden by Bernie Sanders. Trump’s joke — that a President Biden would retire to a “home” while “super left radical crazies” run the country — may become a reality.
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is co-author of No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.
