OPINION:
Achievement is rewarded in America, and failure typically isn’t, but such fundamentals have fallen out of whack in Washington. President Biden and his administration commit blunders that menace the nation, and nothing happens. That’s troubling. If leaders face no consequences for the damage they cause, the American people will suffer instead.
On Jan. 20, Mr. Biden undertook his lofty role when he intoned: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Though Mr. Biden recited the presidential oath of office, he apparently has missed its implicit point: to safeguard the nation’s people.
It has taken Mr. Biden less than nine months to utterly bollix his duty — by handing Afghanistan over to America’s enemies and by welcoming to the United States unfamiliar and unvetted individuals, likely to number in the millions.
Recent Senate testimony by Pentagon leaders — Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and head of U.S. Central Command Kenneth F. McKenzie – disclosed that the president disregarded a recommendation to leave 2,500 troops in place to prevent the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government. Moreover, Mr. Biden dissembled when he claimed in an Aug. 19 ABC News interview that he received no such advice from his advisers before the disastrous withdrawal.
Subsequent chaos in Kabul resulted in the killings of 13 U.S. troops, the helter-skelter evacuation of 95,000 Afghans to the United States, and the abandonment of U.S. armaments worth billions and American citizens numbering thousands. Although his top military leaders framed the operation as “a strategic failure, Mr. Biden has clung to the delusion that the Afghanistan withdrawal as “an extraordinary success,”
Senators’ calls for their resignations in the name of accountability led Gen. Milley and Mr. Austin to respond, in essence: Go pound sand. Military failure without consequence is a formula for future defeat.
In a similarly incompetent fashion, the president is botching his duty to secure the southern border. On his orders, U.S. authorities disregard both a federal court ruling that illegal immigrants should remain in Mexico while petitioning for asylum and Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act, which authorizes an outright halt to immigration health emergencies.
The most recent border-crisis episode saw at least 12,000 Haitians who recently crossed into Texas en masse rapidly dispersed across the nation. Americans are welcoming by nature, but they can’t help but bristle when settlements of uninvited refugees suddenly appear in their midst. It’s little wonder that the president’s job approval has fallen to a dismal 45 percent.
With no opportunity until 2024 to hold Mr. Biden accountable for his mismanagement of the nation’s affairs, his failures are to be the inheritance of future generations. The country doesn’t deserve this.
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