by Conrad Black
After just two weeks, a few political realities are starting to encroach upon the Biden fairyland, whose nativity was heralded in Fox News’ Trump-hater Chris Wallace’s assertion that Biden’s inaugural address was the best in over 60 years.
After all the tear-jerking promises to emancipate Central American waifs from the “Auschwitz-like” cages, as they were called in Pelosi-speak (despite the fact that President Obama set them up), and the compassion-signaling to the open borders advocates, Biden punted. He reopened a “cage” claiming to emancipate the country from the “moral shame” of his predecessor. He is waiting for the reunification of children “ripped out of the arms” of migrant families, although he knows many of the children were brought in as public relations props by people to whom they are not related; in any case, they were abandoned.
It will be ahistorical if a substantial number of these youngsters are actually reclaimed by their migrant traveling companions, long since vanished in the anonymous vastness of America’s “sanctuary cities.” Construction of the southern border wall has been suspended amidst the constant crescendo of strictures against Trump evil (which reduced illegal entries by 90 percent), as teeming numbers of eager migrants assemble on the southern side of the wall, prepared to assert the apparent birthright of virtually every Latin American to enter the United States and remain here, with no commitment to assimilate to American society, or seek citizenship (now more of a nuisance than a reward to many).
Shuffling to the Left
One of Biden’s early executive orders was for the Census Bureau to enumerate everybody without regard to whether they are actually citizens, a direct contravention of the constitutional requirement that elections of public officials are to be by citizens. This is a well-established form of vote harvesting by the Democrats. A nationality that does not value its own citizenship and regulate admission to it will eventually evaporate or be overwhelmed by foreigners who are not put to the trouble of a military invasion to occupy whatever they wish. This issue will not go away; it will only become more vexatious.
Despite all the puffery about what a splendid meeting ten Republican senators had with the president and vice president on Monday evening, Biden’s Covid relief bill is already entering the budget reconciliation process. The hero of the hour, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), is still talking a pretty good game about requiring some bipartisan negotiation to attract Republican votes for the bill. But it appears that he is unlikely to seek more than a softening of the $15 minimum wage and some reduction of the obscene $350 billion slush fund that is proposed to be handed over to the largest and most incompetently governed of the blue states, especially California, New York, and Illinois, (having nothing to do with COVID-19 relief).
The administration has been buffeted by the incongruity of shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline and throwing 11,000 Americans out of work (and up to 40,000 Canadians, with whom Biden has committed to “rebuild alliances”), throwing another 10,000 Americans out of work by shutting down oil and gas exploration in federal lands, accepting the backbreaking yoke of the Paris climate undertakings that involve the disemployment of scores of thousands of other Americans; all while promising to open up the borders, raise the minimum wage, and recycle all the displaced energy industry workers into the manufacture of solar panels and windmills. Some may remember the Obama promises of “green, American, union jobs,” (which never materialized and won’t now).
Self-Defeating Policies
Foreign policy is already producing inconveniences. The State Department has announced that Iran is about to become a nuclear military power, which is news to the inspectors in whom Obama and former secretary of state John Kerry reposed such confidence and is reducing to a complete mockery this administration’s proposed negotiation of revival of the insane Iran nuclear agreement. Secretary Blinken was purposeful at his confirmation hearings, but purports to find common ground with admitted rival China on fighting global warming—i.e. China will continue to pollute the atmosphere for the next 40 years while the U.S. impoverishes itself shutting down the oil industry, supposedly to keep the world cool.
The president has scrupulously avoided burning himself in the incipient inferno of this fatuous and unconstitutional impeachment trial of the ex-president. In this, while he has avoided self-immolation, he has also lost a great opportunity. The old guard McCRomBush Republicans in the Senate—including Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) himself, but also Senators Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Pat Toomey (R-Penn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and perhaps even Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—have made their usual unctuous NeverTrump noises and presumably several of them will vote to convict, but the great majority of the Republican half of the Senate, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, will assure that the ex-president is not convicted. As former Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said in the only memorable words of his congressional career, “It’s the president’s party now.” And so it remains, as polls indicate that the former president has been the chief beneficiary of the comparative quiet and civility in Washington in the two weeks since his departure.
The reply of Trump’s counsel to the impeachment charge on Tuesday was a withering dismissal of trying to remove from office someone who does not hold that office, a textual reminder that he did not incite violence, that the disgraceful action at the Capitol was not encouraged by him and was not an “insurrection,” and that he was only exercising his First Amendment right:
to express his belief that the election results were suspect, since with very few exceptions, under the convenient guise of COVID-19 pandemic ‘safeguards,’ state election laws and procedures were changed by local politicians or judges without the necessary approvals from state legislatures. Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th president’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies that they were false. Like all Americans, the 45th president is protected by the First Amendment . . . If the First Amendment protected only speech the government deemed popular in current American culture, it would be no protection at all.
In allowing the impeachment of Trump to proceed, Biden is placing front and center in the political arena the outright assertion that his election was illegitimate, which Biden’s supporters in Congress and the totalitarian media have tried to expunge and cancel.
Biden is arming his late opponent with an argument similar and in some respects stronger than the one General Andrew Jackson carried to victory through the four years separating the elections of 1824, when he led in the polls but lost in the House of Representatives, and 1828.
Biden could have shelved this foolishness and been credited by most Americans with having de-escalated tensions and avoided an absurd, unjust, and divisive proceeding. Instead, he and his media supporters will see the prohibition they have imposed on any questioning of the election result blow up in their faces.
There seems to be some spontaneous movement among some senators of both parties to try to replace impeachment with a censure vote. It is very late for that, but if any senior people in this administration are thinking sensibly, they will get that bandwagon rolling at once. If they do not, Trump will have the last laugh at the end of this term and loom as a force of great electoral formidability as the clock ticks toward the next election. Joe Biden’s honeymoon is passing with the swiftness of air leaving a punctured balloon.
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Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.
