New York Post, December 29, 2023

Joe Biden and the left are putting the rule of law at risk

President Biden will portray his re-election campaign as a crusade to save American democracy.

But Biden has ravaged Americans’ rights and liberties ever since he took his oath of office almost three years ago.

Biden presumes he is entitled to force Americans to pay any price to buy votes for his re-election.

Promising to wipe out student debt helped Biden win the 2020 presidential election. In August last year, Biden announced a $500 billion cancellation of federal student loans, boosting Democratic candidates in the midterm congressional elections.

But the Supreme Court ruled in June that Biden’s loan cancellation was an illegal power grab. Instead of respecting the Supreme Court, Team Biden concocted endless schemes to wipe out student debt. Biden boasted Tuesday that he has “canceled a total of $132 billion” in student debt “through various actions” — as if presidents have unlimited power to waive any obligation to the federal government. No wonder almost half of student-loan debtors are not bothering to pay what they owe to Uncle Sam.

Maximizing dependency is the recipe for perpetuating Biden’s power. In 2021, the Biden administration canceled the food-stamp work requirement for able-bodied adults without children.

COVID overreach

At a time when employers were begging people to accept jobs, the government portrayed the necessity of working as a human-rights violation — at least for minorities and women. The Biden administration tacitly invoked obesity to justify the biggest food-stamp benefit hike in history. But Team Biden fought reform proposals to prevent food stamps from being a junk-food entitlement.

The Biden administration presumed that federal policymakers are an elite automatically entitled to run Americans’ lives. Biden championed COVID vaccines as panaceas for the pandemic, promising that people who got injections would not get COVID. After vaccines massively failed to prevent COVID infections, the White House strong-armed the Food and Drug Administration to speedily bestow full approval on the Pfizer vax regardless of myocarditis problems. Biden then dictated that 100 million American adults must get those vaccines.

Biden derided the unvaxed as aspiring mass murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you” with COVID. In January 2022, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s vaccine mandate for 84 million employees of large private companies. But the president’s team perpetuated the COVID emergency and all the additional powers for the White House as long as possible.

The Supreme Court issued the most emphatic ratification in this century of Americans’ Second Amendment rights last year. Biden responded by demonizing gun owners, calling for banning all semiautomatic firearms — more than 40 million guns possessed by private citizens.

Deranged gun outbursts

Biden also calls for banning any gun magazine that holds more than 10 bullets, effectively criminalizing ownership of most modern pistols. Biden has rarely missed a chance to talk as if every gun owner is collectively guilty for the outrages committed by random maniacs.

Guns have spurred some of Biden’s most deranged outbursts.  On March 24, Biden announced he wanted to “keep guns out of the hands of domestic political advisers.” The White House did not disclose the specific weaponry possessed by Biden’s advisers. Three months ago, Biden bizarrely proclaimed: “I’ve been to every mass shooting.” The White House did not reveal if Biden has been using time travel and a magic carpet. To justify banning so-called “assault weapons,” Biden perennially falsely claims that Americans were prohibited from owning cannons in the 1790s. Even The Washington Post Fact Check Czar Glenn Kessler lamented: “We have no idea where [Biden] conjured up this notion . . . but he needs to stop making this claim.”

Since Biden took office, the dollars in American paychecks have lost 18% of their value. Inflation rose more than sixfold after January 2021, reaching the highest rate in 40 years. But when Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked about the impact of inflation, Biden called him “a stupid son of a bitch.” Biden implied that soaring food prices wouldn’t be a real problem if Americans simply bought no-name, store-brand Raisin Bran instead of Kellogg’s.

Inflation threat

Biden sounded sane compared to Georgia Democratic Party leader Stacey Abrams, who touted abortion as a cure for inflation: “Having children is why you’re worried about . . . how much food costs. For women, this is not a reductive issue.”

Soaring inflation sent mortgage rates to their highest levels of the century. Team Biden responded in May by practically making it a federal crime to be creditworthy. Biden policies intentionally punish homebuyers with good credit scores to subsidize people with shaky histories of paying their debts. The Biden Social Justice Mortgage Surtax could add $20,000 to the cost of a 30-year mortgage. Windfalls for dubious borrowers will turbo-charge bankruptcy rates in the coming years.

Crosshed here

But it would be unfair to say the Biden administration has completely ignored the burden of federal regulation.

For decades, Americans have groused about TSA agents browbeating them to “show your papers” prior to “enhanced patdowns.” The Biden administration solved the paperwork problem by permitting illegal aliens to board domestic flights merely by showing their arrest warrants from the Department of Homeland Security. Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) growled this year: “If an Idahoan gets a speeding ticket, they can’t use the ticket to board a plane, so why does the president seem to think an illegal immigrant’s arrest warrant is a valid form of identification to board a plane?”

Biden is weaponizing federal law at the same time he is exempted from the statute book.

FBI agents conducted a heavily televised raid in August 2022 on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., seizing 33 boxes of evidence and documents. Five months later, the Justice Department announced that Biden may have also wrongfully stored or possessed numerous classified documents in his home and offices. Trump was speedily indicted for his alleged offenses while Biden was effectively quickly absolved.

To save democracy, Team Biden treats cynicism like a weapon of mass destruction. Biden’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism explicitly proclaimed a “broader priority” of “enhancing faith in government.” In an early 2022 meeting with Twitter bosses, Laura Dehmlow, chief of the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force, “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the US government,” The Intercept reported.

Weaponizing law enforcement

The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”

The Biden administration is expanding the federal Enemies List faster than any time since the Nixon era. It designated guys who can’t get laid as potential terrorist threats due to “involuntary celibate violent extremism.” The FBI has illegally wiretapped more than 3 million Americans in recent years, but the Biden administration recently torpedoed congressional efforts to curb that surveillance crime spree.

Because of its brazen bias in the last three years, FBI now stands for “Following Biden’s Instruction.” New details continue to emerge from Capitol Hill on the FBI’s secret targeting of traditional Catholics and their suspicious rosaries. After parents protested at school-board meetings, the FBI counterterrorism division swooped in to investigate them across the nation.

The biggest FBI boost to Biden’s re-election is propelling his claim that “white supremacy” is “the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland.” The FBI classified all 1,000 people arrested for the Jan. 6 Capitol Clash as domestic terrorists — even the people busted for “parading without a permit.”

Numerous FBI agents have become whistleblowers to expose the bizarre “threat inflation” behind this panic mongering. As former FBI agent Steve Friend lamented, “There is this belief that half the country are domestic terrorists . . . Unless you are voicing what we agree, there is an understanding that you are the enemy.”

Perhaps Biden’s biggest innovation is his doctrine that preserving democracy requires destroying freedom of speech. His appointees launched the Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board — which The Post helped shoot down.

‘Attack on free speech’

Federal Judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration on July 4 for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history,” and a federal appeals court condemned Team Biden for “suppressing millions of protected free-speech postings by American citizens.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) declared, “Twitter was basically an FBI subsidiary before Elon Musk took it over.”

Federal censorship tainted the 2020 and 2022 elections, suppressing tens of millions of tweets, YouTube videos and Facebook posts from conservatives and Republicans. But this is not a problem because Team Biden discovered another “Doing God’s Work” hidden exemption to the Constitution. It wasn’t “censorship” — it was simply “content moderation,” even if victims were “moderated” to oblivion.

And there was no coercion because federal SWAT teams never battered down the doors of social-media companies. The Supreme Court will issue the final word on that matter — but perhaps not until pro-Biden censors steal the 2024 election.

In the meantime, Team Biden is working overtime to destroy Elon Musk, who helped let the federal censorship cat out of the bag. The Federal Trade Commission demanded, as The Post noted, “all internal communications by, from or about Musk — and telling him to name reporters he’s shared info with” — as if exposing White House misconduct were a federal crime. Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr declared that “Biden gave federal agencies the green light to go after” Musk, spurring a campaign of “regulatory harassment.”

Ironically, Biden is almost certain to campaign next year as the “anti-dictator candidate,” all the damning details of his record notwithstanding. Las Vegas is not yet taking wagers on how many Revolutionary War cannons Biden will dredge up for his campaign speeches.

James Bovard is the author of the new book “Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.”