Senator Bernie Sanders’ political demise hasn’t done anything to exorcise his arty’s demons. The ghost of his radical candidacy still haunts presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, whose political gymnastics have put him firmly in line with the radical socialist bomb-thrower.
Willing to say and do anything to gain power, “Flip-flop Joe” has no ideological moorings to guide his foreign and domestic policy positions. He’s a follower to his core, yet he’s asking us to entrust him to lead the most powerful country on the planet.
Of course, that’s not what the former vice president will tell the American people. Biden wants us to believe that he is a so-called “moderate” who can help unite the country.
But it’s not just the 2020 nominating contest that prompted Joe to flip and flop his positions. Biden’s track-record over five decades in Washington shows that his supposed “moderation” is really just a product of his eagerness to bend with the breezes of popular opinion. He hasn’t done anything to contradict that assessment since joining the 2020 presidential race.
It’s important to remember, for instance, that Biden once voted in favor of reinforcing the U.S.-Mexico border and opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants.
“Folks, I voted for a fence, I voted, unlike most Democrats — and some of you won’t like it — I voted for 700 miles of fence,” he said in 2006, adding that U.S. employers should be punished for hiring illegal aliens.
In more recent years, however, Biden has repeatedly condemned Donald Trump’s border security agenda, even accusing the White House of implementing “racist” policies by enforcing America’s immigration laws. Like Sanders, who underwent a similar conversion on the immigration issue, Biden now wants to essentially open America’s borders and provide generous welfare benefits to anyone who enters the country.
But the long list of betrayals doesn’t stop there.
In 2008, Biden reassured West Virginians that the Obama administration would support “clean coal,” saying, “Barack [Obama] and I believe that clean coal is part of our energy future — a necessary part — and also a great export capacity.” Yet, later Biden was part of the all-out war on the entire coal industry waged by the Obama administration, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs on its path of economic carnage.
Sadly, Joe did nothing to prevent the Obama White House from declaring war on those same coal power plants, putting many of them out of business and devastating local economies throughout coal country. To make matters worse, Biden now insists that his administration would “phase out fossil fuels” if he wins the presidential election — shorthand for shutting down a significant portion of our economy and putting countless Americans out of work. Sanders also wanted to impoverish energy-producing regions with destructive regulations and spurious lawsuits.
Biden has also flip-flopped on perhaps the most morally significant issue of all — abortion. For decades, Biden faithfully supported the Hyde amendment, which prevents taxpayer-funded abortions, only to completely reverse himself when he started campaigning for president in 2019.
“[C]ircumstances have changed,” he explained last year. “I’ve been working through the final details of my health care plan like others in this race, and I’ve been struggling with the problems that Hyde now presents.”
Predictably, Sanders also campaigned on effectively repealing the Hyde amendment as part of a sweeping pro-abortion agenda.
Biden even infamously flip-flopped on gay marriage, voicing his support for same-sex matrimony in 2012 despite voting in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. At the time, President Obama even admitted that his administration was not yet ready to make its support for gay marriage public, suggesting that Biden “probably got out a little bit over his skis.”
Once again, though, Biden was merely staking out a position that Sanders had embraced years before.
Biden’s desperate pandering to the far-left wing of his party hasn’t stopped since Sanders withdrew from the race, either. Just days after Sanders suspended his campaign, Biden shifted closer than ever before toward embracing the complete cancellation of student loan debt that Sanders advocated.
Biden’s political record speaks for itself. His so-called “moderate” political platform is just a haphazard assortment of flip-flops, reversals, and betrayals. Over the course of the 2020 election cycle, Biden and Sanders morphed into two sides of the same extremist coin.
Flip-flop Joe simply can’t deliver the leadership our country needs. Because of the presumptive nominee’s inability to think for himself, the Democratic Party will continue to be haunted by the specter of socialism all the way to Election Day — when Donald Trump is reelected President.
Jenna Ellis is a constitutional law attorney, the senior legal adviser to the Trump 2020 Campaign, and fellow at Falkirk Center at Liberty University. She is an attorney to President Trump and the author of “The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.”
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