Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

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Biden Bungles Again, Now on Coronavirus Print
By Timothy H. Lee
Thursday, March 19 2020
[R]egarding the coronavirus pandemic, the most salient public policy issue today, Biden has once again managed to expose his incompetence and outright dishonesty.

Of the innumerable broadsides that Joe Biden earned throughout his five-decade public career, perhaps the most damning came from sober-minded former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. 

Hardly a partisan bomb-thrower, Gates served under both Republican (George W. Bush) and Democrat (Barack Obama) presidents. 

And when it came to assessing Biden, Gates was brutally frank.  Biden, Gates stated in 2014, has proven “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” 

Ouch. 

That’s particularly potent considering that Biden served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, even as its Chairman multiple times. 

Asked to expand by National Public Radio, Gates recited a litany of particularly embarrassing Biden miscalculations: 

The Vice President, when he was a Senator, a very new Senator, voted against the aid package for South Vietnam, and that was part of the deal when we pulled out of South Vietnam to try and help them survive.  He said that when the Shah fell in Iran in 1979 that that was a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran.  He opposed virtually every element of President Reagan’s defense buildup.  He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX and so on.  He voted against the First Gulf War.  So, on a number of these major issues, I just frankly over a long period of time felt that he had been wrong. 

Although a full recitation of Biden’s significant misjudgments since Woodstock and the moon landing could fill an almanac, he was also behind the inexcusable effort to toxify Judge Robert Bork, he voted for the Second Gulf War but against the troop surge that proved so successful and he warned President Obama against the mission that killed Osama bin Laden. 

Bizarrely, Biden recently denied opposing the bin Laden raid when confronted about it on the campaign trail, but he has publicly admitted it on multiple previous occasions.  Voters must judge for themselves what that suggests about Biden. 

And now regarding the coronavirus pandemic, the most salient public policy issue today, Biden has once again managed to expose his incompetence and outright dishonesty. 

Most egregiously, Biden falsely asserted during his debate against Bernie Sanders this week that the Trump Administration refused an offer from the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) of coronavirus testing kits: 

Look, the World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now.  We refused them.  We did not want to buy them.  We did not want to get them from them. 

Even the left-leaning PolitiFact labeled Biden’s assertion “simply wrong”: 

The countries WHO helped are ones that lack the virology lab horsepower that exists across the United States…  The group said it focused most of its efforts on “countries with the weakest health systems.”  “No discussions occurred between WHO and CDC about WHO providing COVID-19 tests to the United States,” said WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris.  “This is consistent with experience since the United States does not ordinarily rely on WHO for reagents for diagnostic tests because of sufficient domestic capacity.”  WHO said there was never any talk of WHO sending test kits to the United States. 

That wasn’t Biden’s only faceplant amid the coronavirus response, however. 

The week prior, he attempted to lambaste President Trump for imposing a travel ban upon certain countries, particularly China.  “A wall will not stop the coronavirus,” Biden angrily tweeted on Thursday, March 12.  “Banning all travel from Europe – or any other part of the world – will not stop it.  This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet – and we need a plan to combat it.” 

But the fact that coronavirus can impact every nation and any person on the planet is precisely why a travel ban was justified, and therefore included in the plan to combat it.  That was precisely the response of Dr. Anthony Fauci, a man respected across partisan lines: 

Yes, there’s no question that if we had not done that in a timely way, there would have been many more travel-related cases from China.  And as you know, the outbreak that we’re having here in the country, those cases originated from travel-related cases that came from China.  And then we had the issue in Washington state, and what we’re seeing now in other states.  So, coming from outside within was the thing that started it.  So, I think that saved us a lot of, a lot of concern and a lot of suffering, I think. 

Beyond that, Biden’s “plan” to address coronavirus essentially copies the Trump Administration’s own announced strategy. 

As just one example, Biden tweeted this week that he would’ve invoked the Defense Production Act to speed production of vital medical equipment, but President Trump had already announced that he was doing precisely that.  Biden also called for the federal government to encourage universities and other private-sector laboratories to speed up testing, but the Trump Administration had already ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow such testing back in February. 

Joe Biden, always on the ball. 

Biden now wants Americans to trust him to lead the nation through at least 2024, including on the coronavirus pandemic policy response that will surely stretch well into the next several years.  Yet on that issue, as with every other major public and foreign policy issue as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted, Biden has again proven himself unfit for the task. 

Perhaps Biden is the George Costanza of American politics, whose only successful approach would be to reach a policy conclusion and then do the exact opposite. 

Notable Quote   
 
"Americans do not trust several major U.S. institutions, including the national news media.The recently released Center Square Voters' Voice poll found that 43% of Americans say the media is trustworthy, compared with 54% who said it is not trustworthy.Younger people were more likely to trust the media, with 47% of those ages 18-34 saying they trust it and 46% saying the opposite.The numbers steadily…[more]
 
 
— Casey Harper, The Center Square
 
Liberty Poll   

Do you believe the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately reject the new Biden administration automobile emissions rule as beyond the scope of administrative agency authority?