In November his party will have to defend its majority in Congress in the legislative elections.
A year after coming to power, US President Joe Biden has entered a decisive phase in his term, with a countdown to advance his priorities before the legislative elections in November, which bode ill for his party.
Biden’s first anniversary in the White House, which is celebrated this Thursday, January 20, marks a bittersweet milestone for a president who promised to unite the country and who has had to govern in an environment of extreme polarization, with a minimal margin in the Congress to approve its measures.
The persistence of the pandemic and inflation and supply problems have further complicated his task, coupled with former President Donald Trump’s tight grip on the Republican Party, whose voters still largely believe that Biden is an illegitimate president.
To judge the first year of Biden, it must be taken into account that the United States has “a party – the Republican party – that denounces non-existent electoral fraud” in the 2020 presidential elections, and “ultra-right elements that have entered the predominant political current “, policy expert Mark Peterson told Efe.
According to that professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, Biden “has achieved more” than expected, given that he governs with “a Senate divided in two and a Lower House” with a very narrow Democratic majority.
The president will give a press conference this Wednesday to defend those achievements of his first year, which include the signing of a stimulus package of 1.9 trillion dollars and another of infrastructure of 1.2 trillion, together with the recovery of the economy and falling unemployment.
Biden has also nominated and confirmed more federal judges – a total of 40 – than any president in his first year in four decades, and has overseen a vaccination campaign against covid-19 that has generally worked well, although more than a quarter of the nation’s adults remain unvaccinated.
At the international level, Biden has managed to revitalize relations with the traditional allies of the United States, despite leaving them cold at times, such as with his chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan or the submarine crisis with France.
The last month has been especially hard for Biden: the Supreme Court blocked his mandate to vaccinate or test most company employees in the country, and his government confirmed that inflation has reached its highest level in 40 years.
Also, the chances of passing his big pending legislative priority, the $1.75 trillion social spending package, dimmed when a senator from his own party, Joe Manchin, said in December he would vote against it.
The experts consulted by Efe agree that it is very unlikely that this law will be approved in its current state: a “smaller” version could go ahead, but Biden will need absolute unity in the Democratic ranks for this, in the words of Casey Domínguez , professor of politics at the University of San Diego.
There is no great hope that this reduced package will include a path to citizenship for the country’s undocumented immigrants, nor is it guaranteed that it will contain ambitious measures against the climate crisis or to reinforce gender equality.
with less time
The calendar to approve that and other legislative priorities is very short: what he has achieved by the summer “will probably be the last” of his term, in the words of Karen Hult, an expert on the Presidency at Virginia Tech University.
“When it comes to promoting large legislative packages, the Biden government is almost finished,” agreed James Thurber, a professor at the American University (AU), in a telephone conversation with Efe.
The reason is the proximity of the November mid-term elections, which historically benefit the opposition party and will most likely cause the Democrats to lose control of the House “and perhaps also the Senate,” according to Thurber.
It does not seem that Biden’s popularity is going to help him prevent it: only 42% of Americans approve of his management, a rate that is barely three points higher than that registered by Trump at the same point in his term, according to the average of polls from the FiveThirtyEight website.
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said last week that this figure is due to “the frustration and fatigue” of Americans “because the pandemic is not over”, a fact that is beyond Biden’s control. and your team.
His dwindling political capital is beginning to show: last week he asked to change the rules of the Senate to approve an electoral reform with only Democratic votes, but he immediately ran into strong resistance from two party senators.
This blockage is worrying for progressives, who fear that the voting restrictions approved by conservatives in 19 states will allow the Republican Party to take control of the electoral processes this year and 2024, thus turning around a possible result that do not favor them.
“It is going to be very difficult to pass measures that protect the foundation of our democracy. The future is bleak,” Thurber concluded. (I)
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
