Biden Can Do in Two Years What It Took Obama Eight to Do

     I like to think of Joe Biden's presidency as a return to normalcy. People criticize this, saying that a president needs to have more of a talking point than undoing the legacy of their predecessor. Here's the thing: it's not just Donald Trump's legacy that needs correcting. For 20 years, since that fateful day those towers fell on 9/11, America has been hurting.

     In his first year, President Biden brought an end to the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that had cost thousands of lives (not including the tens of thousands permanently left with physical injuries and hundreds of thousands left with severe trauma and also not counting the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and millions displaced) over the better part of 20 years and 19 years, respectively. These are far from the only less-than-savory results of the post-9/11 era: Islamophobia has yet to dissipate, the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs for Afghanistan and Iraq are still in place, the PATRIOT Act continues a surveillance state, and dozens of inmates are still being held unlawfully in Guantánamo Bay. President Biden has made prosecuting hate crimes and protecting civil rights his government's number one priority while appointing Muslims to prominent government positions and, for the first time, federal judgeships. He has made it his mission to transfer the remaining prisoners from Guantánamo by 2025, he has become the first president to back repealing the AUMFs that serve as blank checks for waging war, and I continue to call on President Biden to renew FISA, not the PATRIOT Act, which would end the surveillance state that has existed since 9/11.

     Congress is currently resolving differences on a $100 billion bill that would make the largest investment in science and manufacturing in 50 years, ending the supply chain issues that became apparent during the pandemic. President Biden has already created nearly 400,000 manufacturing jobs, almost as many as Donald Trump created in the three years before the pandemic combined, and he is on track to create well over a million by 2025. This legislation, combined with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act as well as executive actions taken by President Biden, will undo decades of outsourcing manufacturing to China and restore jobs in America's Rust Belt and auto industry by ensuring the future is discovered, innovated, and manufactured in America. The proposed Build Back Better Act is the biggest piece of legislation of Joe Biden's presidency; the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act comes at number two; the American Rescue Plan Act at number three; the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act will come in at number four. 

     That bill is huge, but, as stated above, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is even bigger. It will phase out lead paint and pipes; provide millions of Americans clean drinking water; provide universal access to broadband internet; repair all of America's damaged bridges; make the largest investment in rail since the creation of Amtrak; repair thousands of miles of road with the biggest new investment since the Interstate Highway System; provide tens of billions of dollars toward creating a clean energy grid; establish a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging stations; invest in new electric buses and ferries; make the largest investments in cleaning up Superfunds and Brownfield sites and capping wells in American history; making the largest investments in America's ports in history; establish new funding to prevent and fight natural disasters (especially wildfires); and more.

     All this funding toward preventing pollution will aid in the Biden administration's goal of cutting the cancer death rate in half by 2047. Cancer death rates rose for 25 years after the War on Cancer was declared, but, in the past 25 years, this rate has fallen by 25 percent. This initiative will end cancer as we know it with increased prevention and screening as well as billions of dollars in proposed funding to research the disease and its potential cures.

     Meanwhile, antitrust enforcement is vigorous for the first time in a century. Every government agency is involved in this effort, from the Department of Justice to the Federal Trade Commission to the Department of Agriculture to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the Department of Commerce and more, taking hundreds of actions to expand reporting of anticompetitive practices and prosecute violators while creating new rules to protect consumers from fraudulent student loan practices, surprise hospital billing, bank mergers and redlining, and dozens of other practices that cost Americans money.

     America's federal judiciary has been far too conservative since the era of the Founding Fathers. With the filibuster still in place for federal judicial nominees during the Obama administration, they, too, were still overwhelmingly old white guys who served as prosecutors. President Biden has appointed judges that are 80 percent female and mostly people of color, including the first Muslim men and women to serve as federal judges, more Native Americans than all prior presidents combined, and enough black and AAPI men and women to ensure that, for the first time in U.S. history, they are not underrepresented on the federal bench. They are also more liberal than any slate of judges in U.S. history, and far more have served as voting rights activists, civil rights attorneys, and public defenders than those appointed by any president in history. President Biden is appointing them more quickly than any president in history, and he is on track to flip dozens of circuit and district courts. He even appointed the first black woman to the Supreme Court, and, for the first time in years, Democratic judges outnumber Republican ones on the federal bench. In the meantime, work continues on flipping district courts and America's appellate court system.

     It's not just the judiciary. The Postal Service Crisis is a direct result of 2006 legislation that changed the way employees receive their benefits and forced the agency to hemorrhage money. As a result, Louis DeJoy, a man with investments in Postal Service competitors, decided to slow down service, which would kill the USPS dead. President Biden moved swiftly to appoint the people who will oust Louis DeJoy while Congress works to pass the USPS Fairness Act, which would repeal the 2006 legislation that caused this crisis in the first place.

     One of America's greatest embarrassments has been the fact that more mass shootings occur here than in every other developed nation combined. That's aside from the tens of thousands of people who die by gun suicides and individual gun homicides every year. President Biden has taken more action on gun violence from the outset of his administration than any president since Bill Clinton 25 years ago, using executive power to combat gun violence and suicide while funding the COPS program and community violence intervention programs.

     President Biden has acted more quickly to combat climate change than any president in U.S. history, setting a goal of securing 100 percent carbon neutrality by 2050 by mandating the federal government do so, promoting the manufacturing of tens of millions of electric cars, instituting rules to shut down America's last coal mines and plants, cancelling the Keystone XL Pipeline, making the first major cuts to methane emissions, rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, making the largest investments in clean energy in U.S. history, fighting deforestation, bolstering America's climate diplomacy, and more.

     For the first time in U.S. history, a president is directly cancelling student debt. While Barack Obama made major positive changes to the student loan system, he never cancelled student debt directly, nor did his successor, who worked to make life harder for student loan borrowers. President Biden has cancelled student loan debt for more than a million people, which is a great start. However, my message is this: if the student loan industry can survive during a two-year debt repayment pause, it can survive the cancellation of $10,000 in student debt per person, which would wipe out student debt completely for more than 15 million Americans. It would be good for the midterms, good for the economy, and good for America.

     The economy truly hasn't been a healthy one in decades. Since the Bush Sr. recession, the average unemployment rate has been six percent in the United States, something people often forget. During the Obama administration, unemployment rose through the end of 2010 before declining sharply; in 2019, America's unemployment rate hit a record low of 3.5 percent before rising sharply to 10 percent in mid-2020. From January 2021 to February 2022, unemployment was cut by 40 percent (from 6.7 percent to 4 percent) and 7 million jobs were created. That's the same drop in unemployment as during the eight years of the Obama administration. During those eight years, Obama created nearly 12 million jobs: a lot, for sure, but President Biden is on track to create far more and perhaps even more than any president in U.S. history. Unemployment claims fell to their lowest rate in more than 50 years as states across the country reported their lowest unemployment rates in history, with multiple states even seeing their unemployment rates fall below two percent, the first time this has happened anywhere in the country ever. That's the American Rescue Plan Act in action.

     That "labor shortage?" It's resulting in massive gains for workers in terms of wages. Workers are striking at 100 times the rate as during the comeback from the Great Recession, with more than a million having done so in the past months and hopefully millions more in years to come. Support for America's labor movement has hit its highest point since 1968, with nearly 70 percent of Americans supporting the right to organize and some of America's biggest corporations, from Starbucks to Amazon, having unions formed for the first time. As a result, America's effective minimum wage, or the average minimum wage for American workers, has surpassed $15. It is no longer a "radical left" idea; it is the industry standard across the nation. President Biden repealed the Schedule F limit on unions for federal workers and gave collective bargaining rights to hundreds of thousands of federal employees while his NLRB has moved aggressively to help hundreds of thousands of private sector employees unionize. The proposed Build Back Better Act, if passed, will represent the most important bill for workers in decades.

     There is still so much more work to do: there are three bills and a Constitutional amendment before Congress that would prevent violence and discrimination against women; Congress needs to act on police reform and also pass the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. A bipartisan group of senators is working to reform the Electoral Count Act. The negotiations surrounding the Build Back Better Act, which would drastically cut childcare, healthcare, housing, and education costs while combating climate change, are going on behind the scenes, as are the most consequential arms control negotiations since the 1990s. Plus, Americans need a raise for the first time in 15 years, and I'm once again calling on President Biden to cancel student debt. If these initiatives succeed, it will be safe to say that America has, in fact, built back better from this pandemic.