OPINION:
President Biden has a raw political motive for not wanting to strike a budget deal with House Republicans.
He has used a string of spending bills and White House edicts to feed cash to groups that help get Democrats elected. Taxpayers are subsidizing the Democratic Party whether they like it or not. Mr. Biden oversees a network of super PACs disguised as legislation and executive orders.
There is no way, for example, that a Republican-led House would have gone along with the pure political giveaways in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. A Biden budget-constraining debt deal with the GOP would further curtail such slush funds.
The COVID-19 appropriation was jammed with goodies for the teachers unions, the Democratic Party’s most loyal all-round allies, day in and day out. Teachers are one of the party’s major donors as well as suppliers of campaign workers. And they influence children in the classroom to be “woke” voters.
Democrats provided more than $130 billion to keep classrooms open. Huge sums of money went to the states who spent a lot of it to buck up the union ranks as its leaders, such as Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, demanded that schools stay shuttered.
“The extra funds weren’t needed, meaning this was loading up the gravy train with taxpayer money,” David Ditch, a former Senate Budget Committee staffer and now an analyst at The Heritage Foundation, told me. “And the group pushing for the funds — teachers unions — are a leading constituent group for Democrats. This was more than just wasteful. It was politically corrupt.”
Come Election Day 2022, teachers came through for Democrats — big time. Groups associated with the National Education Association, the country’s largest union, gave nearly $25 million, the vast majority to left-wing groups working with Democrats, according to the nonprofit OpenSecrets.org. The union’s affiliates gave over $2 million to Democratic candidates, compared with $24,000 to Republicans.
The 1.4 million-member Teamsters also did not disappoint. It gave $1.6 million to Democratic congressional candidates and $39,000 to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets.
Teamsters affiliates, including its retirement plan, the one the Democrats planned to bail out that fall, contributed $4.5 million, mostly to Democrats, such as the Senate Majority PAC, which received $570,000.
A month after the midterms, Mr. Biden announced a $36 billion infusion into the Teamsters pension plan. It came from a $86 billion fund in the COVID-19 relief bill to shore up a number of private pensions.
“The largest private pension bailout in American history, that only benefits a tiny minority of workers, comes thanks to Democrats allowing those who mismanaged pensions to determine whether their funds qualify for taxpayer assistance with no safeguards,” said Kevin Brady of Texas, then the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee.
For Mr. Biden’s 2020 election, Teamster members and affiliates had already given $6.4 million, mostly to Democrats.
“Unions spent big to boost Biden,” the February 2021 headline of an OpenSecrets article read. “Will he return the favor?”
The answer is yes, to the tune of $36 billion billed to American taxpayers.
Mr. Biden has approved two omnibus discretionary spending bills totaling $3.2 trillion, plus the mislabeled COVID-19 rescue bill ($1.9 trillion); infrastructure package ($1.2 trillion); and the mislabeled Inflation Reduction Act ($700 billion-plus).
The Inflation Reduction Act is actually a big authoritarian climate bill stuffed with industry subsidies. And one of the big beneficiaries is China. That’s because it makes batteries for electric vehicles and mines the needed elements of lithium and cobalt. Ford Motor Co. has already welcomed China to join its EV manufacturing operations in Michigan.
“Unfortunately, 76% of the globe’s electric battery production comes from manufacturers supported or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican. “Hardworking Americans should not be forced to subsidize Chinese companies that make batteries for electric vehicles that cost more than most people make in a year.”
How do subsidies that make their way to China via American firms help Democrats?
Because the Democratic Party is the party of billionaire oligarch donors. And they make big profits from the Chinese market. Do you think Democrats went to the mat protecting China’s Wuhan bat blood laboratory because they really thought it was COVID-innocent? Of course not. Just like the NBA, Hollywood and others on the Chinese communist payroll, they know the campaign cash’s ultimate source. The fatter the American fat cat, the more money to sink into Democratic candidates.
Mr. Biden has also tapped taxpayers to help Democrats via dictatorial executive orders. And there was no House Republican majority to get in his way, to at least enact a bill to rescind his authoritarianism.
Three months before Election Day 2022, Mr. Biden single-handedly announced a program to forgive student tuition debt that could end up costing $400 billion. Congress did not authorize such an appropriation. Even Rep. Nancy Pelosi said he did not have such powers.
But the gambit worked. In the national House of Representatives vote, Democrats carried ages 18 to 29 by a whopping 63% to 35%, exit polls showed.
“It’s really egregious, and it’s the combination of these things that are bad from a policy perspective,” Heritage’s Mr. Ditch told me. “They’re politically corrupt, and all the spending that went out the door that was completely unnecessary helped drive inflation. So they can’t say that no one has paid a price. The American public has paid a price for all that spending.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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