Biden tries to pivot to the center

Biden’s pivot point

When Biden went to El Paso yesterday, his first trip to the US border as president, he addressed a long-standing point of political embarrassment. Over the first two years of Biden’s presidency, with illegal crossings at crisis levels, the Republican complaint that the president hadn’t found the time to assess the situation on the ground was entirely reasonable. A quick pitstop on the way to the summit of North American leaders might not seem like much, and a cursory survey of the border in western Texas amounts to a president doing the bare minimum, but it’s nonetheless worth asking why Biden chose this moment to grasp the nettle.

The timing is, above all, a sign of the unexpectedly comfortable position Biden finds himself in at the start of 2023. After a strong midterm showing and with the GOP distracted by bruising House in-fighting, Biden has reason to feel more bullish than ever about his future. His approval ratings have recovered from their net-double-digit lows and he is set to swat away Democratic challengers ahead of the next election.

Biden seems to see his position as strong enough to break an immigration stand-off between the left-wingers and moderates within his administration. Last week he announced measures designed to stem the flow of migrants crossing from Mexico into the United States. The raft of measures included expanded use of Title 42 expulsions: an abandonment of the promise to junk Trump-era measures that prompted a rebuke from progressive groups. Homeland Security has also announced an update of the Trump-era “transit ban” that will make migrants who did not go through an authorized port of entry ineligible for asylum. It would also prohibit migrants from applying for asylum unless they were first turned away by another country.

In other words, behind the symbolism of Biden’s border visit is a substantive move in a more moderate direction. By expanding his administration’s use of Title 42, for example, Biden is embracing a policy he had been fighting in the courts to end.

Axios’s Josh Kraushaar lists Biden’s border trip as one sign of a “quiet pivot” to the center that has defined the start of 2023 for the president. Other evidence of the pivot includes last week’s show of bipartisanship in a Kentucky visit with Mitch McConnell to promote the results of bipartisan infrastructure legislation. Kraushaar understands the pivot as part of the “emerging Biden bet” that “he can reprise his winning 2020 campaign theme — winning re-election as a center-left incumbent who looks better than the radical alternatives.”

Is a trip to admire a bridge in Kentucky and the acknowledgement of the seriousness of the crisis on the border really enough to mark a serious pivot? Perhaps not. But the moves are in stark contrast to the actions of Biden at the start of last year: he began 2022 with a divisive speech on voting laws and spent the early part of the year pushing big-spending legislation amid soaring prices.

A year on, a divided Congress looks likely to be a blessing in disguise for the administration, limiting the amount of legislative trouble it can get itself into. So far, Biden’s presidency has not matched his 2020 promise of moderation, but a retreat to the center after initial overreach is a well-trodden path for modern presidents, and one that Biden’s party may be willing to contemplate now there’s not much it can accomplish on the Hill.

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Hawks versus holdouts

Kevin McCarthy has barely had a chance to catch his breath after the week-long House floor drama that ended in triumph in the early hours of Saturday. But already he faces a must-win fight that exposes some of the deepest divides in the Republican Party. A vote on the rules package that will govern this House session is set for this evening and is a chance to examine just what McCarthy promised last week’s holdouts and how the rest of the conference feels about those concessions. A major scrap is brewing over defense.

Defense hawks are worried that McCarthy has agreed on a ten-year budget that fixes discretionary spending at 2022 levels. That would mean at least a $75 billion cut in defense spending by 2024 — and at a time when the world looks a lot more dangerous than it did a few years ago.

Tony Gonzalez has announced he will be voting against the package because of “a proposed billions of dollars cut to defense.” In an interview Sunday, Nancy Mace said she was “on the fence” about the package and identified defense spending as an area of concern.

Jim Jordan spoke for the less hawkish faction when he expressed his support for the move yesterday: “Frankly, we’d better look at the money we send to Ukraine as well and say, ‘How can we best spend the money to protect America?’”

War games

As if to underscore the importance of the debate over defense policy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies has just concluded what it claims is one of the most thorough war-game simulations of an invasion of Taiwan. It finds that, in the event of a hypothetical 2026 invasion of Taiwan by Chinese forces, the Chinese would lose, but that the US and Japan would suffer heavy losses. “The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of service members. Such losses would damage the US global position for many years,” the report finds.

What you should be reading today

Freddy Gray: How long can Biden go on?
Ben Domenech: What has Kevin McCarthy won?
Teresa Mull: Don’t believe everything you hear about the teacher shortage
Liz Wolfe, Reason: In 2022, the IRS went after the very poorest taxpayers
Eliza Collins et al, Wall Street Journal: How a tense, late-night push won Kevin McCarthy the speaker’s gavel
Matt Dixon, Politico: Miami Democrats feud after 2022 disaster

Poll watch

President Biden job approval
Approve: 43.5 percent
Disapprove: 51.8 percent
Net approval: -8.3 (RCP Average)

Percentage of … who think gender is determined by sex assigned at birth
Americans: 60 percent
Democrats: 38 percent
White Democrats: 27 percent
Black Democrats: 66 percent
Hispanic Democrats: 44 percent (Pew)

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