First 100: Growing Pains Between Biden and the Left

On education finance, immigration, and the minimum wage, the strains of governing begin to show.

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It’s February 19, 2021 and welcome to First 100. You can sign up to have First 100 delivered to your email by clicking here.

The Chief

The left has viewed Joe Biden with skepticism throughout his presidential campaign and the transition to the White House. But a popular story in recent weeks has been this idea that Biden has tamed the left, through outreach and hiring of certain personnel and adoption of certain agenda items. I think the transition was relatively smooth, and the large relief package has kind of overshadowed everything else going on.

But this marriage, if you could even call it that, was never going to last. Progressives simply want more than Biden is willing to give. Yes, Biden positions himself in the center of the party, and that center has shifted left. But that’s not going to be good enough for a lot of people, and there’s still decades of reflexive recoiling from aggressive policy to cut through.

We have seen this most directly in the debate over student debt cancellation, which I think we can say that Biden really doesn’t want to do. He obviously is unwilling to cancel up to $50,000 of an individual’s debt, which has been set up as the left pole in the debate since Elizabeth Warren got Chuck Schumer to come aboard with it. But when Biden talked about this at the Milwaukee town hall, you could see from his arguments that he isn’t interested. He opposes the idea of cancelling debt from people “who have gone to Harvard or Yale or Penn,” who would be eligible whether the threshold is $10,000 or $50,000. (By the way only 2 percent of Harvard students have federal student loans; they have need-based scholarships.) He’d do the $10,000 if Congress gave him a bill but he knows that Congress won’t; even if the filibuster is abolished it’d be dicey in the current Senate.  

I think there’s a fear that the broad public would get mad about special breaks for elite college students, but the kind of people who take out student debt are children of middle-class families. The left is pretty invested in this issue, and there’s been a lot of pushback. The latest is that Biden will ask his Justice Department to review the legality of executive action. But that will take many months, and kicking things to a review traditionally is how politicians make them go away.

But there are other painful breakups looming.

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Senators released a Biden-supported comprehensive immigration reform bill this week. But it appears to be dead on arrival, and advocates are mainly wondering whether there’s a strategy to pass any of it. Already there have been rumors of piecemeal fixes, which doesn’t exactly signal a strong negotiating position.

That’s to be expected. But the bigger issue concerns Trump border policy, where Biden is trying to thread a sharp needle between advocates for a more humane system and moderates living in fear of the charge of “open borders.” Biden notably didn’t put stiffer enforcement measures in the immigration bill, but he’s been deporting immigrants, notably Black immigrants, at similar rates as his predecessor. By one count over 26,000 have been deported since Inauguration Day.

Biden did attempt to institute a 100-day moratorium on deportations, but was blocked by a judge in Texas. Yesterday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released temporary guidelines for enforcement and removal. The guidelines will target resources at threats to national security and public safety, and set up a pre-approval system for cases outside of that framework. But this obviously isn’t a moratorium, and advocates believe Biden could go much further while staying within the judge’s order, by for example refusing to deport asylum seekers who may be harmed in their home countries, or expanding Temporary Protected Status for refugees from countries experiencing disaster or civil strife.

The ACLU says the guidelines “continue giving ICE officers significant discretion to conduct operations that harm our communities and tear our families apart.” In particular the presumptions of what constitutes “national security” or “public safety” are overbroad, the ACLU claims, as they assume that “all border crossers are threats.”

You can’t talk about a split between Biden and the left without making room for the $1.9 trillion rescue package about to move through Congress. That includes a great deal of long-sought progressive policies like a child allowance (though it could be better structured), robust funding to support child care and expanded broadband infrastructure, and bigger subsidies for Affordable Care Act exchanges. Administration officials have been pushing for the biggest bill possible.

But even here, a couple moves are concerning. Biden keeps saying, in public and now in private, that the $15 an hour minimum wage will be taken out of the bill. He always couches this by saying that he really wants the increase, but it’s completely unclear how things will proceed. (Admittedly, to set up a parallel process for passage would amount to pulling it from the rescue bill.) Biden’s also floating a smaller number like $12 or $13. In addition, with $1.9 trillion a cap in the reconciliation instructions, you’re starting to see bargaining that would cut programs like paid federal sick leave or health insurance subsidies for laid-off workers out of the bill.

Nobody should have expected Biden to turn into a bold progressive overnight. And ambition always falters on the shores of governing. But a lot of these things are within Biden’s personal control, and the rest within the control of the Democrats, without Republican interference. The Biden team has spoken consistently about the need for tangible progress. Obviously a successful resolution to the pandemic will go a long way. But come 2022 and 2024 people are going to wonder what else has been done to improve their lives. We know that complaining of “obstacles” doesn’t work in an electoral context. There’s room to get things done, and Biden had better figure out how to do them.

What Day of Biden’s Presidency Is It?

Day 31. Biden will be at the Pfizer vaccine factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan today.

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