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What kind of attempts do you have in mind?
She has no signature policy, no specific crisis to solve. She doesn’t have a particularly unified Congress. The limiting factor on the Democrats is not the Supreme Court.
I see a Harris presidency leading to one or two Bruen and Dobbs level decisions.
The southern border would be an obvious "specific crisis", and Venezuela is likely to just keep getting worse well and long before it gets better. And it doesn't hurt that the 'obvious' solution, at its most charitable, involves funneling billions of dollars to immigrant and refuge assistance groups that overwhelmingly support Dems, and more credibly involves large-scale amnesty and eventual citizenship to large groups of people that Dems believe will vote reliably Democratic.
(cfe 2020's estimate of 2.1 million.)
On culture war stuff, "does the ADA cover gender identity" is very likely to come to a head at SCOTUS in the next four years no matter how hard Roberts tries to punt on it, and regardless of what SCOTUS decides is going to be a massive political deal. If it ends up a Gorsuch opinion, it's hard to overstate how much of both law and everyday life that it touches. Either answer is likely to have a Harris admin run as far as SCOTUS will let them in the rulemaking postgame.
College debt is a ticking time bomb.
I would be very surprised if we go two and a half years without some high-profile shooting of some kind that makes gun control the matter of the day.
And that's suggesting Nothing Ever Happens re: Taiwan, Russia, Iran, so on.
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This seems like more of the "vote Biden for moderate normalcy" propaganda from 2020. It was a lie, the people saying it knew it was a lie, but it was an effective way to con people so they said it anyway.
I don’t think it was a lie.
In the primary, he was certainly more moderate than Sanders. In the general, he played the straight man to Trump’s firebrand; I’d say both of them turned out pretty moderate indeed.
Like most administrations, Biden’s has had boring responses to boring problems. What was the moderate/normal version of dealing with inflation?
I think the "Fair Game" order on Elon Musk was pretty abnormal. Multi-agency conspiracies to retaliate against domestic dissent are pretty serious business. Yes, it's not entirely unprecedented, what with literal Watergate and the Trump-Ukraine affair (and, if you really want to dredge things up, the Sedition Act), but Biden's Musk harassment is possibly larger in scale than the former two and in any case even "on par with Nixon and Trump in abuse of the office" is hardly a "return to normal".
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Not causing it with a massive vote buying giveaway after the causes of a non-central "recession" were already solved.
The border was stable. He destablized it intentionally by repealing a bunch of policies.
There was no war in Israel. He released billions of dollars to Hamas's patron Iran.
He tried to fire millions of workers over a vaccine that ended up being meh.
He stopped the Keystone pipeline more or less permanently.
He tried getting a PR win by evacuating Afghanistan in a totally illogical way just so it could happen before 9/11.
These are not moderate left wing ideas like raising the payroll tax cap by 50% or expanding school lunch programs to include a new disadvantaged class (indeed he also radically threatened to pull funding for school lunches if schools didn't enable transing the kids). They are wild attempts at reforming things significantly in a very left wing way.
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I don't know, but I think I could come up with something more moderate than ensuring the executive has to participate in white privilege struggle sessions, or pressuring an already radical organization to promote the removal of age limits on transgender care.
I remember the LockMart shitshow. I also observe that it was in the long hot summer of 2020, months before Biden was elected. Trump nominally banished any training which mentioned those terms with this order; looks like Biden overrode that with another. I don’t like his framing, but I also don’t think you can describe that as requiring struggle sessions.
Point conceded on trans issues. No return to quietly ignoring them from Biden.
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Every. Fucking. Time. It's worse than Darwin ghosting and pretending it never happened. It's like pulling chatGPT's teeth to get it to acknowledge something against its RLHF, then refreshing the window and having to do it all over again, every time.
Nah, he's alright.
It bothers me to see it.
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Red flag laws and assault weapons bans, specifically as they are likely to be unevenly applied against more conservative groups, would be annoying at best. A continuation of Biden's "what border?" policies would be annoying at best. Following her running mate's record on transing the kids or preventing religious universities from promulgating their own views would be annoying at best. Under a Harris administration, we could expect the Department of Education to do everything in its power to undermine SFA v. Harvard, which would be annoying at best.
These are all things that aim toward shutting down the ability of the "deplorables" to defend themselves from government overreach, to maintain democratic influence in their own nation, to protect their children from politically popular social contagions, to participate in society on the basis of merit, and so forth.
I'm not so sure about this. I agree that she probably will not enjoy the assistance of a particularly unified Congress, but that remains to actually be seen. Court Packing remains unlikely, but it is certainly more likely under Harris than under any alternative administration.
Scott, prescient as always.
As for the substance. My point is that endorsing red flag laws or abortion rights or gender whatever is not sufficient to make those things happen at a federal level. Most of the time, the President gets to pick an appropriately-aligned justice or two, sign the budget, and then go back to meeting with foreign leaders or ordering bin Laden’s death.
Also, I observe that most of your example tyrannies were enacted by and for individual states. Given that Biden and Congress have failed to override Dobbs trigger laws, despite the vivid backlash, I have little expectation of a sweeping rule on lesser CW battlefronts.
Would Harris sign a federal assault weapons bill? Sure. Would any Democrat not? I have seen precious little evidence of conscientious objectors saying, “no, this time the party has gone too far.” By the time something crosses the Resolute desk, it’s got the explicit approval of hundreds of congressmen and, by proxy, roughly half the country.
That’s not true for executive action, and I’ll agree that a Democrat is more likely to use the administration against the interests of “deplorables.” Does that really get you to “an end to the possibility of flourishing”? I don’t think so.
I would expect Kamala to go after religious colleges through to department of education- and I think BYU specifically is important to Mormon flourishing- at the very least.
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I immediately imagined having to pretend I’m an anarchist (full grey tribe mode) in order to continue being a libertarian conservative (grey-red).
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