President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has not yet completed his first 100 Days and the wheels are already falling off the cart–but, not for the obvious reasons.
Biden may not realize it for months, but already in Washington, there is a recognition that the president will get nothing done in 2021 and 2022 is not looking good either.
Every day there are new signs that Biden is not up to the job and his administration’s burst out of the gate in the days after the inauguration not the dawn of a new age, but was just a sugar rush.
There are little signs, like the exile of the celebrated White House dogs, Champ and Major, after one of them bit an unnamed security officer at the Executive Mansion. Another sign came when Biden could not remember the name of Defense Secretary Austin Lloyd, nor the name of the very five-sided building the retired four-star Army general works in.
Then, there is the president’s joke at his March 4 virtual visit to NASA, when he joked that with Vice President Kamala Harris and head speechwriter Vinay Reddy and the more than 50 other Indian-Americans in key administration positions they were: “taking over the country.”
It was an odd thing to say, but the reason why Biden got a hall pass on the ethnically-charged remark is that no one takes what he says seriously anymore.
With President Donald J. Trump, the Left and their media allies were always twisting his words for political advantage, but no one really believed Trump had lost his mind.
Biden’s mental faculties are faltering and his gait that just a few years ago that was buoyant and sprite has become a the halting and uneven walk of a man not sure if he will make it to the door.
Tanden debacle leaves OMB in hands of an acting director, stalls out Biden ‘skinny budget’
Another brutal development for the president is the kneecapping of Neera Tanden, daughter of Indian immigrants and George Soros and John Podesta acolyte someone convinced Biden to nominate to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
In her March 2 letter to the president withdrawing her nomination, the president of the Washington-based Center for American Progress wrote: “Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities.”
.@neeratanden will continue to be a tireless advocate for a more equitable and just society. The American people lost her leadership at OMB because of a double standard in Washington, but have not lost her strong voice.
— John Podesta (@johnpodesta) March 3, 2021
Distraction is not even the worst of it.
New presidents often take the opportunity to pass a so-called skinny budget as their own personal amendment to the ongoing fiscal year’s budget. Without a confirmed OMB chief, there will be no Biden skinny budget.
Here we are approaching the Ides of March and the most important job in the White House is held by an acting director, Shalanda Young. The Senate confirmed Young to be the deputy director easily and many Capitol Hill Democrats what Young for the top job–except Biden is looking around for someone else.
The longer it takes Biden to get an OMB director, the longer it takes to get his reins on the federal government. This is all the more shocking a fumble because the entire federal civil service sees Biden in the White House like the liberation of Paris. The bureaucracy is ready to go, but Biden is not.
Calendar works against Biden for rest of 2021
All of this important, true and the tip of the iceberg, but the president is being done in by something more important than politics or policy: the calendar.
Nothing matters on Capitol Hill like the calendar and it has just tilted against Biden.
Here is simple example: When is Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress?
If you don’t know, join the club. No one knows. Right now, with Western Easter April 4 and Eastern Orthodox Easter April 11, Biden cannot get a slot until after April 18.
As a comparison: Trump first addressed Congress Feb. 28, 2017.
Every year, the bulk of Capitol Hill legislation gets through between the State of the Union address and Memorial Day with a hard pust through June until everything stops after July 4.
This year, there will be House is scheduled to hold floor votes seven days in March, eight days in April, eight days in May and 11 days in June.
Whatever does not get to the House floor before July 30 will have to wait until Sept. 20, when by then Congress will be absorbed in its government shutdown ritual for the fiscal year ending at midnight Sept. 30.
The budget crisis and the threat of a government shutdown is usually resolved in blocks of continuing resolutions that expire around Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and sometimes all the way up to Christmas.
Nothing else gets done between Labor Day and Christmas, which brings us back to waiting for Biden’s 2022 State of the Union address to kick off the next cycle.
By then, Capitol Hill Democrats will have fully appraised their poll numbers going into the 2022 midterms, and they may force some changes.
Biden referred to Harris when he joked that the Indians were taking over. In 2022, he may learn that many a truth is spoken in jest as he returns to private life in Delaware – reunited with his cherished Champ and Major.
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Neil W. McCabe is a national political correspondent for the Star Newspaper Group based in Washington. Before joining Star, he was a White House and Capitol Hill reporter for One America News. His special “Biden Family Corruption” was the highest-rated special in the channel’s history. McCabe was the Capitol Hill correspondent for Breitbart News, where he also wrote up wrote up the 2016 Breitbart-Gravis polls. McCabe’s other positions include a senior reporter at Human Events and a staff reporter at The Pilot, Boston’s Catholic paper. McCabe also was the editor of The Somerville News, The (North Cambridge, Mass.) Alewife and served as an Army combat historian in Iraq. His 2013 e-book “The Unfriendly Skies” examined how the American airline industry went from deregulation in the late 1970s to come full circle to the highly-regulated, highly-taxed industry it is today.
