President Joe Biden has once again highlighted the guiding principle of the Democratic Party: States only get to govern themselves when a Democrat isn’t in the White House.
Biden, as any good authoritarian would, announced that governors no longer matter. “I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way,” Biden said as he announced his ridiculous (and possibly unconstitutional) vaccine mandate for businesses with more than 100 employees.
We are a long way from the Democratic love of federalism that presented itself over the past four years. After all, former President Donald Trump is now gone. When a Republican is in the White House, Democrats cheer on their governors as they buck the administration. Now that a Democrat is president, any states that don’t buy into the Democratic agenda must be bludgeoned into submission.
Biden, who thinks that the vaccine is so ineffective that we must protect vaccinated people from the unvaccinated, wants to dictate COVID-19 policies from on high in Washington. He and the Democratic Party only view federalism as a useful tool to resist Republican presidents. When a Democrat is calling the shots, Republican governors aren’t afforded the same process.
Biden is doing this for many reasons, including to shift the focus off the disaster he set into motion in Afghanistan and his failed promise to “shut down the virus.” But he is doing this primarily because this is what Democrats want to do when they control the presidency.
Biden has already sicced his Justice Department on the state of Georgia over its benign voting reform law because it doesn’t match what Democrats want. He’s doing the same with Texas’s abortion law, and you will recall that Vice President Kamala Harris wants to require all laws that would restrict abortion to be reviewed (and then struck down) by the Justice Department. You will also remember that, when Harris was running for president, she promised to impose gun control without the input of Congress.
With the exception of a few members, Democrats in Washington have no consistent view of how the government should work beyond “might makes right.” There are only a handful of Democratic senators keeping the legislative filibuster in place, which was never a worry when Republicans ran the chamber from 2015 until earlier this year. Elected Democrats are increasingly in favor of “reforming” the Supreme Court so that it only returns rulings that they want to see.
Biden’s repeated power grabs and attempts to stretch the power of the presidency over the Supreme Court and states are not just because he is an authoritarian. It’s because authoritarianism is the guiding light of the Democratic Party, at least only when Democrats control the necessary levers of power.
