Team Biden Puts Final Nails In Coffin Of Presidency

Outgoing President Joe Biden took a few hyper-political swipes on the way out the door of the White House during his farewell address. Or at least his handlers did, as he likely just read the script.

Accordingly, his policy shop has been hard at work on placing several “hurdles” for the returning Commander in Chief Donald J. Trump, as Newsweek has called them. We’ll call them nails in the coffin of a regime that has almost since its inception been powerless to solve the nation’s many challenges or has been complicit in worsening conditions for working Americans.

Time Magazine ran down a list of actions the Biden Administration has taken during it’s last month before leaving the White House “presumably for the last time” (is that a joke?). We’ll summarize the key points here, plus a few items we noticed elsewhere, as Team Biden feverishly flips through the Acme Catalog before Inauguration Day on Monday.

‘Ratifies’ Equal Rights Amendment
Before you joke about Biden not knowing what decade it is, remember that the Democrats have been looking for backdoor ways to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment since it expired in 1982. The ERA, supposedly meant to equalize pay between men and women (however that’s defined nowadays), received a renewed push last year as Senate Democrats requested Biden “direct the archivist of the United States to certify and publish the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as the 28th Amendment …” It will not work for reasons stated here.

Methane tax
A Politico op-ed bemoaned that the Biden Administration was not regulating cow flatulence this time. But the rest of the Democrats’ long-term dream of curbing methane emissions seems to be going through, after Biden recently signed a final rule creating an EPA-enforced Methane Tax, largely on the backs of oil and gas producers (the non-bovine kind). Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a press release this week said he was leading a 23-State coalition to sue the EPA for taxing the oil and gas industry in an illegal manner. “The proposed regulations represent arbitrary and capricious actions that exceed the agency’s statutory authority,” the Texas AG release said.

Student loan forgiveness
The Biden-Harris Administration announced its final round of student loan forgiveness, approving more than $600 million for 4,550 borrowers through the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) Plan and 4,100 individual borrower defense approvals, a press release from the Department of Education stated. That’s $188.8 billion in forgiveness for 5.3 million select borrowers, thanks to 33 total executive orders. Add more executive orders to the heap, leaving borrowers who do not qualify, borrowers who finished paying back their student loans, trade school graduates, and those who went straight to the work force or the military paying the bill.

Offshore drilling ban
Biden issued an order covering around 625 million acres of federal waters, including the U.S. East coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Coast along California, Oregon, and Washington, and parts of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska, banning drilling activity. Trump has said he would immediately reverse the bans. Four days later, Biden expanded sanctions on Russia’s energy sector, as it continues to wage war in Ukraine. This will make tensions with Iran better, we’re sure.

Frees Cocaine convicts
Hunter Biden‘s pardon wasn’t apparently enough. Biden set the record Friday with a massive list of 2,500 names of non-violent drug offenders to be granted clemency. The White House claimed in a press release this set a record for number of pardons granted by a president. “Today’s clemency action provides relief for individuals who received lengthy sentences based on discredited distinctions between crack and powder cocaine, as well as outdated sentencing enhancements for drug crimes,” the release read.

Block U.S. Steel Japanese buyout before Trump can
Team Biden blocked a nearly $15-billion deal from Japan’s Nippon Steel to acquire Pittsburgh-headquartered U.S. Steel. They have until mid-June, and Trump has also signaled opposition to the merger, which means that Biden obviously wanted the credit — as he did with the recent Israel-Gaza ceasefire agreement.

Ban on AI chip exporting
As part of a lengthy cybersecurity order, Biden blocked the exports of U.S. artificial intelligence tech to foreign countries, along with other reforms long-promised by the administration but a little too in-the-weeds to make a priority. It’s long, and likely to spend years in the courts, which is probably why Biden is only signing it this week. Here’s more from Forbes.

December was busy, too
According to TIME, Biden had in December announced nearly $2.5 billion in security assistance for Ukraine, commuted almost every federal death-row sentence, and granted clemency to a then-record number of prisoners. “Biden has used his remaining days in office to tout his administration’s accomplishments — on everything from LGBTQ rights to health care to small-business growth — as well as to assert his domestic and foreign-policy principles through a series of executive actions,” TIME noted.

Time will tell whether Biden will go down in history has the worst U.S. President or the second-worst.