As the Biden administration winds to a close, the time has come to examine President Joe Biden’s record.
Certain policy decisions stand out as colossal mistakes, while others are noteworthy for their extremism. The following are three policy areas where Biden administration extremism caused American voters who believed he would restore normalcy after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic to say “no thank you” to a continuation of his policies in 2024.
1. Abortion
Biden began by implementing abortion policies that have become standard for Democratic administrations. He rescinded the Trump administration’s strengthened version of the Mexico City Policy, which prevents U.S. tax dollars from funding abortion organizations overseas.
He also overturned the Trump administration’s Protect Life Rule that restricted Title X family-planning dollars from funding abortion facilities. The Biden administration Department of Justice challenged state laws that protected unborn babies in the womb.
However, the Biden administration took its pro-abortion agenda much further, especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Biden’s Food and Drug Administration removed the basic safety requirement for chemical abortion pills to be dispensed in person.
Biden’s Department of Defense unilaterally changed its policy to begin paying for service members and their family members to travel across state lines to obtain an abortion. When Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., held up military promotions over the illegal policy—something senators do routinely—the Defense Department did without promotions for months rather than back away from its abortion policy.
2. LGBT Agenda
Earlier in his term, Biden directed all executive agencies to pursue a “whole of government” approach to advancing the LGBT agenda, which means deeply integrating the issue throughout the entire federal government. This played out across the administration in a variety of small ways. For instance, the State Department added preferred pronouns to all email bylines, many of which were wrong. Also, on Easter Sunday 2024, Biden issued a public proclamation recognizing a Transgender Day of Visibility, but not one recognizing Easter.
A much bigger issue was the Department of Education’s attempt to rewrite Title IX, which was written to protect women’s rights and women’s spaces in schools. The Biden administration’s rule would have allowed biological males to compete in women’s sports, it would have punished school officials for using incorrect pronouns, and it would have let biological males into women’s locker rooms and restrooms. However, while the rule’s extremism was clear, its legal justification was not.
By summer’s end, courts had temporarily blocked the rule from taking effect in more than half of American states. [Editor’s note: On Dec. 26, the Education Department withdrew a sports-related Title IX rule while the broader reinterpretation of Title IX continues amid court proceedings.]
Then there was the Biden administration’s unnecessary meddling in efforts to protect minors from gender-transition procedures. It started with officials in Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services pressuring transgender activists to modify their treatment guidelines based on political considerations—although those emails only became public in 2024. Biden’s Department of Justice also intervened in a lawsuit against a state law protecting minors from gender-transition procedures, arguing before the Supreme Court in early December that minors have a constitutional right to access these dangerous, experimental treatments.
3. Weaponization
Speaking of the Biden DOJ, that department has engaged in weaponized lawfare against the president’s political opponents. In mid-2022, the FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s home. This raid kicked off a whirlwind of political prosecutions of the former president, who was widely expected to be Biden’s chief challenger in the next presidential election.
The DOJ prosecuted Trump on federal criminal charges in both Washington, D.C., and Florida, but the charges were ultimately dropped after Trump won the 2024 election.
Meanwhile, Biden’s DOJ sat on serious federal charges against the president’s son, Hunter, until the statute of limitations ran out on the most serious charges. It then tried to offer Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea deal, derailed by a judge asking too many questions. The younger Biden eventually pleaded guilty to charges, but then received a pardon that father Joe had previously promised not to grant.
The Biden administration’s weaponization of justice was not only directed against Trump. The DOJ colluded with school boards to investigate (using counterterrorism resources) parents who confronted the school boards at public meetings over their woke policies. The FBI spied on traditional Catholics on the absurd notion that they were domestic terrorists.
The DOJ also aggressively prosecuted pro-lifers for protesting at abortion facilities years earlier, while doing nearly nothing to investigate scores of acts of vandalism against pro-life pregnancy resource centers committed in 2022. It arrested Mark Houck, father of seven, in an early-morning SWAT raid on his home, only for a jury to later acquit him for the trumped-up charges the DOJ brought against him.
The Biden administration carried out this campaign of terror under a veil of secrecy. When a doctor blew the whistle on a hospital secretly providing gender-transition drugs to minors, in violation of state law, the DOJ investigated the doctor (not the hospital), charged him with serious criminal penalties, and tried to obtain a gag order against him. The DOJ retaliated against government whistleblowers and subtly threatened more punishment if any DOJ staff informed congressional committees tasked with oversight.
The weaponization of government stretches all the way back to the COVID-19 era, where the Biden administration fired military service members and others who refused to take an untested vaccine. The Biden administration tried to implement a similar mandate for private businesses, but federal courts quickly struck that down.
Additionally, files released after Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter showed intense collusion between the government and Big Tech entities to censor the legitimate opinions of American citizens who questioned the official government narratives about COVID-19 or other issues.
Conclusion
It doesn’t take a right-wing extremist, or even a conservative, to find such brazen radicalism distasteful. These extreme policies were out of step with what even the average American swing voter wanted, and they collectively spewed these policies out by returning Trump to the White House with a convincing victory in November.
For now, conservatives have retaken control of power in Washington simply by standing for commonsense principles like, don’t force taxpayers to pay for abortions, don’t allow men in women’s sports, and don’t use the force of law to persecute political opponents.
True conservatives believe the government should do far more to promote human flourishing, and they must do a better job persuading the American people of their very good reasons for the convictions they hold.
In the meantime, however, if radical progressives want to stand against everything that is “normal,” conservatives are quite willing to stand for normalcy, too.
Originally published by The Washington Stand
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
