Triangulation Joe
When it comes to threading the needle, President Biden is no Bill Clinton
When the (Bolshevik) Council of the District of Columbia passed a crime-friendly criminal justice reform law that would have supercharged our national capital’s descent into chaos, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives spotted an opportunity. Though DC has had an autonomous municipal government since the enactment of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act 1973, under Article One of the Constitution Congress retains the right to review and repeal laws passed by the city council, and to intervene in local affairs.
So the House GOP majority drew up a bill to repeal DC’s obnoxious new law and brought it to the floor, daring the Democratic minority to vote against it. The Republicans calculated that with concerns over crime high on the national political agenda, many House Democrats would be politically endangered by a no vote. But the latter breathed a sigh of relief when the White House signaled that President Biden would veto the bill if it reached his desk. A yes vote would therefore be purely symbolic and politically safe. When the roll was called, some thirty Democrats voted with the Republicans. The bill was forwarded to the Senate, where much the same thing was expected to happen.
Then Joe Biden gummed up the works. Unexpectedly, shockingly, the President announced that if the bill repealing DC’s new criminal justice reform bill reached his desk, he’d sign it.
Biden’s volte-face hit House Democrats like an asteroid strike. Progressives, of course, were enraged. To them, the DC law was a counterblast against the “systemic racism” of America’s BIPOC-bashing criminal justice system—and here was a Democratic president, kicking it to the curb! Those Democrats who’d voted for the bill were equally angered. Most of them had done so secure in the knowledge that Biden’s veto would blunt the edge of their hypocrisy: The bill would die in the Oval Office; the story would fade out. Now this!
It’s all good stuff, to be sure. Among other things, there’s the spectacle of the Biden White House’s gross political incompetence. But the story includes another element that hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
It requires no great political acumen to see that Biden’s promise to sign the GOP’s bill is a box check on his reelection to-do list. With crime likely to be a top-of-mind issue for voters in 2024, the President and his team no doubt convinced themselves that Republicans were handing him an opportunity to burnish his law-and-order credentials. If he signed the bill, progressives might whine and cry—but what else could they do? In the end, they’d hold their noses and support him against Trump or any other GOP presidential candidate. That’s the logic of triangulation that was so well exploited by Bill Clinton after the travails of his first term.
Triangulation demands some sacrifice of political principles, of course. The trick is to minimize or paper over those sacrifices. But if he signs this bill, Joe Biden will blow a gaping hole in one of the issues most dear to Democratic hearts: District of Columbia statehood. That’s some sacrifice!
Here’s the awkward question raised by Biden’s ham-handed attempt at triangulation: If the autonomous city government of the District of Columbia cannot be trusted to provide good government, if under its rule the national capital of the United States has become a dystopian cesspool of crime, homelessness, and general squalor, if the federal government must step in to clean up its messes—how in good conscience can anybody support the cause of DC statehood?
Characteristically, Biden insists that though he’ll sign the bill repealing the DC criminal justice reform law, he still supports DC statehood. That logical contradiction, however, is more apparent than real. His and the Democratic Party’s support for DC statehood has never had anything to do with democracy or good government. Let America’s capital remain a reeking cesspool; DC statehood is all about adding two more Democrats to the Senate and one more Democrat to the House of Representatives. And state government? Well, the current city government of DC shows what that would be like: Venezuela on the Potomac, just what America doesn’t need.
It’s our absurd president’s achievement to have exposed the cause of DC statehood as the thoroughly unprincipled political ploy it’s been all along. So thanks to Triangulation Joe, the next time you hear some Democrat appealing for DC statehood in the name of justice and democracy, you’ll know it’s a lie.