On Thursday, Joe Biden announced that he is mandating vaccinations for all Americans who work at companies with 100 or more employees, apparently because the virus isn’t interested in anyone who works at smaller businesses. The type of workplace apparently matters not as well. You could be one of a thousand employees in a company with no office and only online connections and apparently, the mandate applies to you too. But if you have just 99 employees packed into a workplace together, apparently you’re fine.
If that’s science, let’s see the math that got them here.
AP has the rules, which shed light on what Biden really wants to do. He would shut the whole economy down if he could, but that would trigger a massive unified response against him even in some blue states. College football fans sent him a pretty strong message last week: We’re not going back to lockdowns. So Biden devised a way to be divisive, as he has done across his entire political career. This is who Joe Biden is and will always be. Those of us who opposed him informed the rest of you thusly. This is who he is.
On Thursday, after Biden scolded the nation with more sternness than he aims at the Taliban, the actual president, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, retweeted a tweet that he ought not to have. As Sen. Ted Cruz responded, Klain said the quiet part out loud.
Important.
Foolish RT from WH chief of staff. He said the quiet part out loud.
Biden admin knows it’s likely illegal (like the eviction moratorium) but they don’t care. https://t.co/AlfmYtuvhp
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 10, 2021
Ted Cruz was the Texas solicitor general before his election to the Senate. During that part of his career, Cruz argued and won several Supreme Court cases. He knows how the court works and how it thinks. Biden…is a hack who spent decades being a partisan while avoiding direct responsibility in the Senate. What Cruz is saying here is Klain’s retweet can be used to establish intent. Klain is a policymaker in the Biden White House; in fact, with Biden’s obvious mental decline, plus Kamala Harris’s routine disappearing act and DOCTOR Jill heading back to community college (where she teaches, allegedly), Klain is now arguably in charge. As in, running the country. Biden sure isn’t. He keeps telling us that someone is telling him what to say and what to do. That’s likely Klain plus the communications shop and Jen Psnarky.
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So Klain’s retweet may matter. Several states and probably multiple businesses will sue to stop Biden’s mandate. It can be challenged on several grounds including its being obviously arbitrary and capricious. Court challenges are a given. Texas, South Dakota, and Florida will definitely sue, and the rest of the red states will probably join them. Klain’s intent to skirt the law as demonstrated in the “ultimate work-around” tweet will likely matter.
It’s also a given that this is how Biden intends to govern from now until the midterms, at least. He is massively tanking in the polls. That poll that my colleague Stephen Green wrote up yesterday is a case in point. It’s a YouGov with a D+10, which skews it left twice. Then it’s registered voters, as opposed to likely voters, skewing it left a third time. And yet with all that, Biden only reaches 40% approval. His actual approval, as actual president Ron Klain realizes, is surely somewhere in the low 30s. This means Biden has no clout on Capitol Hill (or in any other capital around the world, having irked our allies in Afghanistan and now playing nice with the terrorist Taliban because he stupidly left American hostages behind). To change the dynamics and get out of his self-created tailspin, Biden will push partisan policies by executive orders and rules. He will divide to generate positive media coverage and attempt to keep the rump of his former support intact and build from that. He can’t get anything done any other way. The lawless rent moratorium is evidence enough that the Biden White House will take actions it knows are illegal, daring anyone to challenge them in court.
A president’s default position should not be to test the bounds of his office and sharply divide an already on-edge country in this way. But it will be the Biden-Klain administration’s go-to move from here on out, damn the law, full speed ahead. This will do lasting damage to the country, but that may be a feature to them rather than a bug.
God help us.
