The red wave failed to materialize. Republican gains will not end Joe Biden’s propensity to rule without Congress, in a dictatorial fashion, using only his pen and his phone. Between now and 2024 little will change. Everything depends on the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. They will decide the fate of the nation.
Unwilling to limit his role to taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, Joe Biden, since his first day in office, has usurped congressional law-making, unilaterally issuing order after order affecting every American and aggregating to himself powers that the Constitution grants exclusively to Congress. Biden’s usurpation is a tyranny largely unaffected by the political fate of Congress.
While neither the Courts nor Congress can stop this renegade president from issuing executive orders that usurp legislative power, the Courts can declare (and have repeatedly declared) those actions unconstitutional, enjoining them. Judicial review to block Biden’s excesses in the first two years of his presidency has proven the continuing indispensability of constitutional checks and balances. The federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court, will remain an essential redoubt, a final bulwark in defense of individual liberty and of constitutional limits on power, presenting a superior checkmate to Biden’s moves to legislate. That is among President Trump’s most important and lasting legacies.
Biden won the presidency with a bare majority without a mandate to lead, but that did not stop him from proclaiming the existence of a mandate for his every action: Biden’s so-called mandate to eliminate fossil fuels within ten years of his election; his so-called mandate to require COVID-19 vaccination and masking; his so-called mandate to pump more federal dollars into the market than ever before, yielding skyrocketing inflation and impoverishing Americans; his so-called mandate to fund radical gender and CRT indoctrination in public schools and the military; and his so-called mandate to permit unlimited entry through our Southern border of illegal aliens, drug traffickers, sex traffickers, gangs, terrorists, and petty criminals.
Biden will surely describe the lack of a red wave as the equivalent of a public endorsement of the very policies he champions that the public hate. While Biden appears not to comprehend the electorate, he largely does not care what voters think anyway; he steadfastly veers left, regardless of voters’ preferences.
The American people did not vote for any of the destructive acts Biden has authored or advocated. In the mid-terms, the American people did not endorse a nihilistic agenda to destroy themselves (their own lives, livelihoods, and liberties). Biden will nevertheless hold fast to that agenda. He will continue to proclaim as fact the farce that the failed, ruinous policies his administration implements are working well, that inflation is under control and will come around, that the border is actually not open to illegal entry, and that Americans are doing very well indeed.
Biden lacks the humility, wisdom, courage, and finesse necessary to repent for the many catastrophic injuries he has caused our country to suffer, from the ignominious Afghanistan retreat leaving Americans behind to the deaths of thousands from fentanyl overdose from his refusal to secure our Southern border. He will not sincerely repent for any of his acts of maladministration, corruption, false statement, and abuse of power. He will not disown the radicals advising and directing him and filling the leadership of the administrative agencies. He wed himself to them and their cause long before the inauguration. They run the federal show, and he is so mentally ossified and so incapable of managing any meaningful change that no matter how much agony and revulsion they stir up among the people, they will remain in place. Biden forever answers to the radicals whom he follows and fears, and not to the American people, whom he takes for granted.
The incoming red tide is necessarily scene one in a political drama that is still unfolding. If either the House or Senate gains a Republican majority, Congress can prevent Biden from passing legislation, including most importantly new tax and spending measures, but it cannot stop him from unconstitutionally legislating by executive order. Moreover, if the Republicans do manage to pass a bill to cut spending, secure the border, support law enforcement, uphold the criminal justice system, or protect parents’ rights, Biden will surely veto it. The two-thirds majority is not there to override a Biden veto, and it would not have been even if there had been a red wave. Nevertheless, if Republicans can pass such bills, they must, to ensure Biden is held to account for his vetoes if he chooses to run for re-election.
Biden will now become a sort of doddering old Don Quixote-type champion of the far-left cause because the radicals in his party will accept nothing less of him, and because he has nowhere else to go politically. Having broken bread with the Marxist wing of the Democrat Party before he was elected, he has almost no political allies left in the virtually non-existent Democrat center, which he and the radicals condemn. He cannot disempower his far-left base; and even if he could, doing so would leave him utterly alone politically (and subject to their wrath).
Biden will not be a lame duck for the next two years, fading into the presidential sunset. He will continue to rule dictatorially with his pen and his phone via the administrative state, furthering the radical agenda through the over 200 federal regulatory bureaus, agencies, and departments. He will also consistently veto any bill offensive to his radical base. There will be no Bill Clinton type, post-mid-term mea culpa and overtures to the opposition.
Scene 2 of the unfolding political drama, the 2024 election, is now more important than ever in light of the failure of a red wave to materialize. In 2024, the long-awaited restoration of the rule of law, parents’ rights, law enforcement, border protection, and national security will hinge on the election of a Republican president and on major additional Republican gains in the House and Senate. To be electable, those candidates must not just complain about the ruination caused by the Democrats but offer instead clear solutions to each problem plaguing our nation. Only then will the votes cast in 2022 bear fruit in the election of candidates with an equally clear mandate to introduce new laws to restore economic growth, restore energy independence, cabin the regulatory state, cut federal spending, protect parents’ rights, support local law enforcement, and restore border protection.
This article was written on November 10, 2022, and published on Townhall.com