OPINION:
“Do you miss me yet?” questioned former President Donald Trump as he greeted the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday.
Yes, we miss you.
The college-educated white suburbanites, who gave President Joe Biden the White House, must be having some serious buyers’ remorse right now.
The average price of gas in the United States has hit an 18-month high, according to new data from Gas Buddy. The average retail gas price in the U.S. is now $2.73 per gallon after soaring from $1.74 in April 2020.
Mr. Biden, on his first day in office, halted the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline that would’ve transported 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Canada to Nebraska and destroyed 11,000 jobs along with it. He also signed an executive order stopping oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters and reentered the U.S. into the Paris Climate Agreement. Gone are the days of U.S. energy dominance in the name of the Green New Deal.
We’re also facing a humanitarian crisis at our southern border.
Less than two months on the job, Mr. Biden has stripped away all border and immigration enforcement. Now, our southern border is bracing for a migrant crisis. Customs and Border Patrol are expecting a peak of 13,000 unaccompanied children crossing the border in May, exceeding the height of the 2019 crisis, Axios reports. There will be more children in cages as the Biden administration ramps up temporary shelters across the country.
Yet, as we take care of the migrant children at the border, our own children are going without education. Mr. Biden has sold out his administration to the teachers’ unions. The science supports schools reopening now for in-person learning — but the Biden administration has refused to tell the teachers to get back into the classroom.
And, when our children do get back into school, our girls will be left at a terrible disadvantage. On Day One, Mr. Biden signed an executive order that threatened to pull federal funding from schools unless they allow transgender students to compete on biological girls’ sports teams. Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Equality Act to make this move permanent.
Biological men competing against biological women in sports for scholarships is obviously unfair and hurtful. It wipes out all the progress women have made since Title IX was enacted nearly half a century ago.
Yet, taking us backward in the name of equality is where the Biden administration seemingly wants to go. A senior adviser to the Biden White House said it’s “going to start now” in addressing reparations to African Americans, as Congress debates forming a commission to study how the policy could be enacted.
“We don’t want to wait on a study. We’re going to start acting now,” Cedric Richmond told Axios on HBO in an interview airing today. “We have to start breaking down systemic racism and barriers that have held people of color back and especially African Americans.”
The price tag on such a bill could run into the trillions, the primary victims are now dead and can’t be repaid, and how would one even identify who is entitled to a payment, especially given immigration from Africa and the Caribbean long after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery?
Reparations have long been on the progressive wish list, but it’s a divisive, expensive and logistically impossible policy to enact — all to pay for a sin committed before 1865.
Mr. Biden campaigned on unity and bipartisanship. He pledged he would work across the aisle and govern in moderation. Yet the policies he’s enacted in his first 41 days in office have been radically progressive — surely leaving some of his voters with buyer’s regret.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.