Washington, Jan 16 (EFE )
.- A year after coming to power, US President Joe Biden has entered a decisive phase in his mandate, with a countdown to promote his priorities before the elections legislative elections in November, which bring bad omens for his party.
The first anniversary of Biden 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 Congress to approve his measures.
The persistence of the pandemic and the problems of inflation and supplies have further complicated their task, added to the iron control of former President Donald Trump over the Republican Party, whose voters still believe , for the most part, that Biden is an illegitimate president.
THE ACHIEVEMENTS
To judge the first year of Biden there is to take into account that the United States has “a party -the Republican- that denounces a non-existent electoral fraud” in the 2020 presidential elections, and “far-right elements that have entered the predominant political current,” the expert in policies Mark Peterson.
According to that professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, Biden “has achieved more” than expected, given that governs with “a Senate split 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 $1.9 trillion stimulus package and a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, coupled with the recovery of the economy and falling unemployment.
Biden has also nominated and gotten confirmation. He has more federal judges — a total of 40 — than any first-year president in four decades, and has overseen a COVID-19 vaccination campaign that has generally worked well, though more than a quarter of the nation’s adults continue without being vaccinated.
Internationally, Biden has managed to revitalize relations with the traditional allies of the United States, despite leaving them cold in some moments, as with its chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan or the submarine crisis with France.
THE PENDING
The last month has been especially hard for Biden : The Supreme Court blocked his mandate to vaccinate or test the majority of the employees of companies in the country, and his Government confirmed that inflation has reached its historical maximum in 40 years.
Furthermore, the chances of approving his great pending legislative priority, the spending package $1.75 trillion in social security, tumbled 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 not much hope that this reduced package includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented in the country, and it is not guaranteed that it contains ambitious measures against the climate crisis or to reinforce gender equality.
TIME IS RUNNING OUT FOR BIDEN
The timetable for approving this and other legislative priorities is very short: what has achieved for the summer “will probably be the last” of his man data, in the words of Karen Hult, an expert on the Presidency at Virginia Tech University.
«In terms of promoting great legislative packages, the Biden government is almost over,” agreed James Thurber, a professor at the American University (AU), in a telephone conversation with Efe.
The reason is the proximity of the mid-term elections in November, which historically benefit the opposition party and will most likely cause the Democrats to lose control of the Lower 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, an index which is barely three points higher than what Trump registered at the same point in his term, according to the average of FiveThirtyEight web polls.
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki opined 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 the control of Biden and his team.
His waning 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 the strong resistance of two party senators.
This blockage is worrying for progressives, who fear that voting restrictions approved by conservatives in 19 states will allow the Republican Party to take the reins of the electoral processes this year and 2024, in order to turn around a possible result that does not favor them.
«It will be very difficult to approve measures that protect the basis of our democracy. The future is bleak”, Thurber concluded.
Lucía Leal
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