On the campaign trail, Joe Biden often promised that, if elected, he would appoint an individual with experience teaching in the public school to run the Department of Education.
This promise was, in his mind, to correct a wrong committed by President Donald Trump who named Betsy DeVos as his Education Secretary. The Left slammed DeVos for not having experience teaching in the public school system. The narrative Biden was presenting was that he’d pick qualified, experienced people to serve in his administration.
And then he announced Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California and former congressman, will be his secretary of the Health and Human Services Department.
Becerra has never worked in the Health and Human Services Department, has no medical background, and also lacks any executive experience.
Even the New York Times couldn’t turn a blind eye to this bizarre choice. “Some medical experts, who have been pushing the Biden team to name people with medical or public health expertise to serve in health leadership positions, were caught off guard — and unhappily so — by the news of Mr. Becerra’s selection,” the Times reported earlier this week.
A week prior to the announcement, five prominent medical groups called on former Vice President Joe Biden to pick “qualified physicians to serve in key positions critical to advancing the health of our nation.”
Instead, Biden picked a politician with a background in criminal justice and immigration to run the Health and Human Services Department.
In the middle of a pandemic.
So, why would Joe Biden, who has been highly critical of the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, pick Becerra? According to the New York Times, “as attorney general in California, [Becerra] has been at the forefront of legal efforts on health care, leading 20 states and the District of Columbia in a campaign to protect the Affordable Care Act from being dismantled by his Republican counterparts. He has also been vocal in the Democratic Party about fighting for women’s health.”
Translation: Biden picked someone solely on his advocacy of Obamacare and abortion. Perhaps Biden sees that legal challenges to both Obamacare and Roe v. Wade are likely to occur with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and rather than choose someone to run the Health and Human Services Department with health experience in the middle of a pandemic, he chose someone more suited to lead the fight for Biden’s health care agenda: expanding Obamacare and preserving unrestricted abortion.
Bacerra is also a supporter of Medicare for All. He told Fox News Sunday, “I’ve been a supporter of Medicare for all for the 24 years that I was in Congress. This year, as attorney general, I would fight for that if we had an opportunity to put that forward in the state of California, because I think what we do is we give people that certainty that they’re going to able to access a doctor or a hospital.”
How does Biden go from saying the Secretary of Education should have experience teaching in the public education system to picking someone with zero experience in health care or HHS to run the Health and Human Services Department during a pandemic?
Does Biden not realize we’re in the middle of a pandemic? He literally spent most of the campaign in his basement because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so why would he choose a political hack to run the Health and Human Services Department instead of someone with the appropriate experience?
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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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