Editorial President Biden’s progressive policy agenda

President Joe Biden’s policy agenda has been unmistakably progressive. But is it sustainable? The president, who ran for office as a uniting figure, has come to disregard bipartisanship in favor of an ever more-progressive set of priorities.

Last month, Biden and congressional leaders rammed through a $1.9 trillion spending package without a single Republican vote.

Now, Senate Democrats are once again eyeing means of bypassing the usual 60 voterequirement to advance legislation to speed up Biden’s $2 trillion-plus infrastructure spending proposal.

And on Friday, the president announced a new $1.5 trillion budget plan, a 16% increase in spending on domestic programs.

“Biden seems to believe that bigger government is definitionally better government, almost independent of the policy specifics, so he’s pushing for bigger government just about any way he can,” notes Reason Magazine’s Peter Suderman.

But at some point the federal spending sprees have to come to an end.

Even pre-pandemic, with a booming economy, the federal government was projected to generate deficits of over $1 trillion per year for the next decade.

The closest thing to fiscal responsibility one can see from the president is his wish to raise over $2 trillion in taxes from corporations to finance his $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which is mainly a collection of giveaways to his favored special interests.

How long Biden and congressional Democrats can sustain this approach to the federal budget remains to be seen. But it unfortunately seems to be the case that the president is willing to continue with or without Republican input.

Besides spending, Biden has also chosen to test the waters on changes to the Supreme Court.

Last week, he announced the formation of a commission to study, among other things, “the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court” and “the membership and size of the Court.”

Naturally, this raises the possibility of a deeply divisive court-packing fight in the years ahead.

Curiously, President Biden has stopped short of backing the idea of court-packing recently.

As a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Biden went so far as to outright oppose the concept.

“No, I’m not prepared to go on and try to pack the court, because we’ll live to rue that day,” he said.

Yet, now that he’s president, he’s forming a commission that will open the matter.

Notably, Justice Stephen Breyer, a staunch liberal on the court, has spoken out against the idea of transforming the court.

“I hope and expect that the court will retain its authority,” Breyer said. “But that authority, like the rule of law, depends on trust, a trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics. Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that perception, further eroding that trust.”

This is the debate that Biden has chosen to open. For the average American, a re-examination of the court is probably not one of the biggest issues of concern. But for progressive ideologues who see the court as a barrier to their big-government visions, this is an opportunity.

The question is how far Biden is actually willing to go and how much longer he can shift policy discussions to the left without running into the inevitable backlash.

Whether it’s spending or gun control or court-packing or anything else, Biden has opted to test the limits of going far to the left, and in a hurry.