Joe Biden will launch presidency with appeal for unity – but whose unity?
When Joe Biden takes the oath of office on Wednesday, the new president will appeal for national unity from the steps of the US Capitol, where two weeks ago a mob, incited by Donald Trump, stormed the building in a violent attempt to prevent this very moment.
Though their efforts failed, the bloody insurrection exposed the fragility of America’s commitment to a peaceful transfer of power, underscored by Trump’s absence at his successor’s inauguration ceremony.
As he takes his oath, Biden will not look upon an expanse of cheering crowds and American flags: a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic which has claimed about 400,000 American lives. Instead, in the aftermath of the assault on Congress, he will see the nation’s capital fortified on a scale not seen since the civil war. So begins the Biden era.
“Not since FDR, in 1933, has a president come in facing so many urgent challenges,” said Bob Shrum, the veteran Democratic strategist.
Upon his inauguration, the culmination of a career-long pursuit, Biden must immediately confront an everworsening pandemic that killed more Americans each day last week than died on September 11 or Pearl Harbor and an ailing economy that is exacerbating inequality along lines of race and gender, while the persistence of racial injustice and the global threat of climate change demand action.
All of this while the Senate begins an unprecedented second impeachment trial of his predecessor over his role in provoking the 6 January unrest that left five dead, endangered the lives of lawmakers, congressional staff and the vice-president, and delayed the certification of the electoral count.
Biden ran as a rebuke to the divisiveness and cynicism of Trumpism, promising to “restore the soul of the nation” and serve as a president for “all Americans”. Though the events of recent weeks have made that task demonstrably more difficult, Biden and his team say they are prepared to plow ahead with their agenda, all under the inaugural theme of “America United”.
Hours after his inauguration, according to a memo by his incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, Biden is planning to rejoin the Paris climate accords, repeal the ban on citizens from majority-Muslim countries, extend the temporary pause on student loan payments, evictions and foreclosures as well as implement a mask mandate on federal property and inter-state travel. He will also send an expansive immigration bill to Congress that seeks to provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million people living in the US with irregular immigration status – a promise that has eluded past presidents.
Last week, he called on Congress to pass a $1.9tn economic stimulus package that includes $1,400 checks to Americans and funding to mobilize an unprecedented vaccination campaign against the coronavirus. Biden has pledged to inoculate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days, an ambitious goal that could be an early test of his presidency.
But the conditions under which Biden will assume the presidency are – remarkably –more auspicious than it first appeared in the wake of his November win.
Democrats unexpectedly won a pair of runoff races in Georgia, handing the party control of the Senate. Now the Senate will be divided evenly between the two parties, with Vice-Ppresident-elect Kamala Harris serving as a tie-breaking vote. A unified government gives Biden significantly more latitude to pursue an expansive legislative agenda and more freedom to fill his cabinet and judicial vacancies.
Even so, Biden faces an uphill struggle enacting his legislative agenda. Congress has been mired in gridlock over immigration, healthcare and government spending for years. Already, Republicans, suddenly concerned once again about the national deficit, have signaled an unease with the size of his relief package.
Biden has spent much of his 50year career in the political mainstream, evolving as the center of gravity moved, with his party marching leftward on issues of crime, abortion and immigration. Some have argued his reputation as a consensus-minded institutionalist may help push through more liberal policies. Biden himself has envisioned an FDR-sized presidency, outlining a massive economic agenda that he presented as a pragmatic response, given the scale of crises.
“The magic of Joe Biden,” Andrew Yang, a former Democratic presidential rival, once observed, “is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable.”
Biden has signaled he plans to work extensively with Congress, aiming to build on his knowledge of the institution and his personal rapport with senators to attract bipartisan support.
Yet even if his drama-free approach to governance does help calm the body politic, substantive ideological and policy differences remain – both between and within the political parties.
For now, Biden has sought to overcome these differences by seeking counsel from across the political spectrum, including Republicans and progressives. More than ideology, Biden has focused on experience as he assembled his cabinet and White House Staff. His cabinet also reflects unprecedented racial and gender diversity.
Part of Biden’s legacy, after serving eight years as the vice-president to the first Black president, will be elevating Harris to the vice-presidency. When she is sworn in on Wednesday, Harris will become the nation’s first female, first Black and first south Asian American vice-president.
Biden’s legislative agenda will require at least some Republican support at a moment when Democrats consider a number of their colleagues accomplices to the assault that put their lives at risk on 6 January. Deepening their fury, several Democrats have tested positive for the coronavirus after being locked down together with Republican lawmakers who refused to wear masks.
Multiple Senate Democrats have demanded the resignations of Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, who led challenges to electoral votes in the chamber. Instead of calling for them to be removed, Biden said the Republican senators should “just be flat beat the next time they run”. Neither are up for re-election until 2024, a presidential election year in which they are both viewed as potential contenders.
But Democrats and progressive groups are pushing for more accountability. The Democratic congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri introduced a resolution calling for the possible sanction or expulsion on House members who voted to throw out the electoral votes of some states. Their actions, she contends, amounted to a violation of the 14th amendment, which bans those who “engaged in insurrection” against the US government from ever holding federal office.
“In our country’s struggle for multiracial democracy, there have often been calls for unity that avoid holding white supremacists accountable before the American public,” said Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, a group that works to elect progressives. “It happened after the civil war and it happened after Jim Crow. I fear it could happen now.”
Barring Trump from holding future office and expelling Republicans are only part of the solution, Shahid said. Biden and the Democratic party, he continued, must “act on their mandate to deliver change for the American people rather than compromising on an agenda by co-governing, with a party that just paved the way for one of the most terrible episodes in American history.”
Some Republicans have claimed that pursuing accountability, particularly in the form of a Senate impeachment trial against a former president, threatens national unity.
The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who amplified Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud before denouncing the president’s actions after the riot, called Democrats’ push to convict Trump after he leaves office “an unconstitutional act of political vengeance” that stands in the way of the “national healing that the country so desperately yearns for”.
Biden has said his first priority remains combatting the coronavirus and stabilizing the economy, but added that there must be accountability for “those folks who engaged in sedition”.
He urged the Senate to split its work days between Trump’s trial, confirming his cabinet nominees and passing a new round of coronavirus relief.
Though a growing number of Republicans have split from the president in the wake of the attack, including 10 who voted to impeach him last week, recent polling underscores the depth of Biden’s challenges rallying the nation behind his agenda.
An Axios-Ipsos poll found that a majority of Republicans still believe Trump was right to challenge the results of an election he lost decisively in November and do not hold him responsible for the riot on Capitol Hill.
A new survey by the Pew Research Center found that 62% of Democrats want Biden to work with Republicans “even if it means disappointing some of his voters”. Nearly as many Republicans – 59% – say their party leaders should “stand up” to Biden, “even if it means it’s harder to address critical problems facing the country”.
Critics have cast his appeals for bipartisanship as willfully naive, especially after senior Republicans waited weeks to acknowledge him as the president-elect and two-thirds of the House Republican caucus voted to overturn the result of the presidential election in the hours after the riot.
Publicly Biden has sought to downplay the depth of opposition to his presidency. Speaking to reporters last week, Biden suggested that the violence would only loosen Trump’s grip on the Republican party, making his goal of bipartisanship more achievable.
Whether Biden can – even to some degree – unite a profoundly polarized nation will depend in part on how successfully he meets the myriad challenges that await him upon his swearing-in.
On Wednesday, Biden will draw on the same themes of unity he outlined when he launched his campaign for president in April 2019, motivated by the white supremacist violence of Charlottesville. Far from being naive, Biden insists the message is even more urgent now.
“Unity is not some pie-in-the-sky dream,” Biden said last week, unveiling his vaccination plan. “The only way we come through this is together.
“And starting at noon on Wednesday, that is exactly how we are going to govern.”