Joe Biden may have won the nomination, but Bernie Sanders won the party.
Now Biden, who ran in the Democratic presidential primaries as a centrist — with few ideas of his own — has adopted a series of radical party proposals put together by leftist Democratic Socialist Sanders.
Biden has become a Bernie Bro.
And while Biden defeated Bernie to win the Democratic Party nomination for president, it is Bernie who is calling the shots on party positions, while Biden remains passive, holed up in his basement. He is like a prisoner who is let out on monitored weekend furloughs.
If you have any doubt about who oversees the Democratic Party, just rifle through the 110-page “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations” recently released. A tribute to free stuff, the document reads like something out of Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin.
The task force was put together by Biden in an effort to appeal to the leftist wing of the Democratic Party which is headed by Sanders, a socialist who only registers as a Democrat when he runs for president, as he has now done twice.
And although he has lost twice, he has a committed group of enthusiastic followers, some of whom are dubbed the Bernie Bros. It is an enthusiasm that the Biden campaign totally lacks.
What it shows, though, is that in the battle for the soul of the party, the centrists, moderates and traditional liberals all lost out to the radicals, socialists and the hard leftists. While Bernie lost the nomination, his radicals won the party. Joe Biden is their first POW.
The task force dealt with six areas of concern — climate change, the economy, criminal justice, health care, education and immigration. Its recommendations will be taken up and adopted at the party’s convention.
Besides the usual Bernie Sanders pitch for free stuff, like free college tuition or student debt forgiveness, the plan also calls for the elimination of charter schools, which is a blatant appeal to teachers’ unions.
It would repeal right to work laws that currently allow people to work without being forced to join a union, would support legislation leading to reparations to Black Americans for the slavery of their ancestors, and provide 12 weeks of paid family leave.
Other proposals include open borders and ending construction of the border wall with Mexico and repeal of practically all of President Trump’s initiatives dealing with illegal border crossings. It would also halt the deportation and provide a road map to citizenship for all illegal immigrants living or coming into the United States.
While the document does not specifically call for the defunding of the police, it does propose shifting funds from their budgets to other programs, which is the same thing. It would also create a “civilian corps” of first responders, like medics, to handle nonemergencies, allowing police to focus on more serious crime. They would be unarmed, of course. It also does away with cash ball which means, like in New York, arrested criminals are back on the street to commit more crimes hours after they are arrested.
The leftist document endorses most of the controversial proposals of the astronomically costly big government proposals of the Green New Deal without calling it that, however.
The unity document also would have the U.S. rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement. In this big government utopian dream the U.S. would eliminate fracking and the use of fossil fuel by 2035. All U.S. government vehicles will be fossil-fuel free, including a half million school buses, by 2025.
The cost of Biden’s plans and the unity document comes to at least $10 trillion, which is three times the cost of what Hillary Clinton proposed in 2016. “The goals of the task force were to move the Biden campaign into as progressive a direction as possible, and I think we did that,” a happy Bernie Sanders said.
Spending other peoples’ money has never been a problem for socialists like Bernie and convert Biden. Big time spending doesn’t mean much when it is not your money and you did not work for it.
Bernie and Biden, like good socialists in Venezuela, have fed off the earnings of others all their lives. Why stop now?