Biden Whines about His Own Mess

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, December 14, 2023

 

As mentioned earlier this week, President Biden should stop defending the status quo on our border and agree to the GOP’s reform proposals. In exchange, Republicans should go along with the administration’s funding request for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.

 

There are some encouraging signs that the administration and congressional Republicans are slowly inching their way toward a deal. From the Associated Press:

 

Top Biden administration officials labored Wednesday to try to reach a last-minute deal for wartime aid for Ukraine by agreeing to Senate Republican demands to bolster U.S.-Mexico border policies, with urgency setting in as Congress prepared to depart Washington with the impasse unresolved.

 

The White House was racing to lock in a deal in principle with key Senate negotiators, according to two people familiar with the plans who demanded anonymity to discuss them. A core negotiating group, which has included Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, departed the Capitol Wednesday evening after making progress but without the principles of a deal finalized.

 

From the Washington Post:

 

Key details remain to be fleshed out, including the number of migrant crossings that would trigger that new power. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who has been involved in the negotiations, said Wednesday that he believed the authority should kick in on days when crossings reach 3,000 or less, while some Democrats prefer a higher number of 5,000 crossings or more before agents can turn away migrants.

 

“We’re talking about what would be the triggering mechanism to detain and do expedited removal,” Tillis said.

 

The administration’s arguments about the importance of Ukraine aid are self-defeating. President Biden contends, “Putin is banking on the United States failing to deliver for Ukraine. We must, we must, we must prove him wrong.”

 

Then why is the administration holding out for a threshold of 5,000 crossings per day? Agree to the 3,000 threshold and get the aid to Ukraine moving again. This is how negotiation works: You get something you want, but the other side gets something they want, too.

 

Biden offered the old, tired complaint that his opponents are “holding Ukraine funding hostage in an attempt to force through an extreme Republican partisan agenda on the border.” (When eight Americans are literally being held hostage by Hamas, is this really the right time for hostage metaphors in congressional negotiations?)

 

Why is the man who keeps getting called “the negotiator in chief” so perplexed by this?

 

Republicans control the House. They’re willing to go along with another round of Ukraine-aid funding, but they want their top priority addressed as well, which means everyone must walk away from the deal with something they want.bor

 

On today’s Washington Post op-ed page, one of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s former aides, Antonio De Loera-Brust, objects to the discussed deal and warns, “Reimplementing former president Donald Trump’s border policies, in turn, could weaken support for Biden among Latino and young voters” and concludes, “It is paramount that U.S. aid to Ukraine not alienate important parts of the Democratic Party’s coalition.”

 

Oh, is that our top priority here?

 

Well, you can have no parts of the Democratic Party’s coalition alienated with Biden — or at least no more alienated than they already are — or you can have Ukraine funding. Pick one. To govern is to choose. There is no magic third option where Biden and the Democrats get to keep the border and asylum rules they want in place and Republicans go along with another round of Ukraine funding.

 

What is truly frustrating is that whatever deal emerges probably could have been reached last month, or in October, or perhaps even earlier. The crisis on our southern border did not suddenly appear recently. The waves of migrants arriving each month has steadily worsened, starting in 2021, continuing in 2022, and worsening even more in 2023.

 

Hard truth number one: You must craft your policies and your negotiating positions to deal with the reality in front of you, not the narrative that you wish was reality.

 

The ‘Progressive Elite Talks to Itself about an America That Does Not Really Exist’

 

James Bennet is the former New York Times editorial-page editor who was unceremoniously thrown out on his keister for publishing an op-ed by Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton. This morning Bennet offers a 17,000-word essay in The Economist on the future of journalism that is likely to hit his former employer like a bucket of cold water to the face first thing in the morning. You will want to set aside some time to read the whole thing, but here are a couple of highlights:

 

The Times’s problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasize: courage. . . .

 

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

 

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact. It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other. I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.

 

Hard truth number two: If you are writing and talking about an “America that does not really exist,” you are actually leading people further away from constructive solutions instead of closer.

 

Eighty-Five Percent of West Bank Residents: Hamas Is Doing a Terrific Job, Way to Go!

 

I see a lot of people talking as if Israel is the primary obstacle to Middle East peace, believing that if the U.S. would just apply enough pressure on Israel regarding settlements, doves would be chirping from the Gaza Strip to Jerusalem to the Golan Heights to the West Bank.

 

The people who hold this view apparently rarely if ever ask Palestinians what they think:

 

Almost three in four Palestinians believe the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was correct, and the ensuing Gaza war has lifted support for the Islamist group both there and in the West Bank, a survey from a respected Palestinian polling institute found.

 

Seventy-two percent of respondents said they believed the Hamas decision to launch the cross-border rampage in southern Israel was “correct” given its outcome so far, while 22 percent said it was “incorrect”. The remainder were undecided or gave no answer.

 

Fifty-two percent of Gazans and 85 percent of West Bank respondents — or 72 percent of Palestinian respondents overall — voiced satisfaction with the role of Hamas in the war. Only 11 percent of Palestinian voiced satisfaction with PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

 

There are Palestinians who are decent people who want nothing to do with Hamas. But they are not a majority, and judging from the numbers above, they are particularly few and far between in the Gaza Strip. If you find the American people strangely insufficiently sympathetic to the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip right now . . . it’s probably because Americans remember seeing all those ordinary Palestinians in the Gaza Strip celebrating on October 7, cheering on the thugs with the abducted and brutally raped woman in the back of that truck. No doubt, the Israeli counterpunch has been brutal and has generated a significant number of civilian casualties. But I suspect a lot of Americans see that as a natural, inevitable, or perhaps even needed consequence for a population that largely cheers on Hamas and that terrorist group’s barbaric brutality.

 

Applying American pressure on Israel is easy. Notice the Biden administration is delaying sending Israel more than 20,000 rifles. (Hey, remember when President Biden visited Israel in October and said, “My administration has been in close touch with your leadership from the first moments of this attack, and we are going to make sure we have — you have what you need to protect your people, to defend your nation”? Good times, good times.)

 

Pressuring anybody on the Palestinian side to be less murder-y in their worldview is difficult. So people don’t really even bother to try.

 

Hard truth number three: Many lawmakers will choose the easy and unproductive path rather than the difficult and needed path.

 

No One Cares about What You Call Your Big Spending Bills

 

A little-noticed detail in the CBS News poll released this weekend: Thirty-five percent of Americans have never heard of the “Inflation Reduction Act,” 40 percent have never heard of the “Build Back Better Act,” 44 percent of Americans have never heard of the “American Rescue Plan,” 61 percent have never head of the “CHIPS and Science Act,” and 69 percent have never heard of the “Consolidated Appropriations Act.”

 

Hard truth number four: What Democrats in general and the Biden administration in particular believe is the best economic policy — big spending bills that they insist are “wise investments in America’s future,” blah blah blah — not only are not particularly appreciated by the American general public, but a significant portion of the American general public doesn’t even notice them.