WTH did Biden say in his joint address to in office

Episode #100 | April 30, 2021 | and

Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen.

Danielle Pletka: Marc?

Marc Thiessen: Well, today it's just us, Dany, and we're talking about 's first address to a joint session of Congress. And we watched it, so you don't have to. Dany, what did you think?

Danielle Pletka: Well, actually, I'm most curious to ask you what you thought, and I'll tell you why. You've written two of these. In addition, you had a very nice column writing what Joe Biden should say. So, what did you think?

Marc Thiessen: Well, first, let's talk about what he did say. Last night, Biden delivered what was both the most expensive and least attended presidential address to a joint session of Congress in American history. It was a miasma of spending unlike Chamber holds 1,600 people. When you write a State of the Union address, you get to attend it, so I've been in the House Chamber and it's packed to the gills. The White House staff is standing along the walls. The galleries are full of people. Everybody's jostling to get the seat on the row where the president walks in so they could shake his hand. And it was empty last night because they limited it to 200 people.

Danielle Pletka: Let me ask you a question. I didn't understand that. And I didn't read a ton about it, but I was confused. Isn't every single person in that room vaccinated?

Marc Thiessen: Yeah. Every single one of them is. So, Joe Biden is vaccinated. The Vice President is vaccinated. The Speaker of the House is vaccinated. Every single member of Congress has access to the vaccine, so do the cabinet officials, so do the Supreme Court Justices. And yet they were all wearing masks and they had seats taped off for social distancing. It was like an unpaid advertisement for the anti-vax movement. I've looked it up, this is what the Center for Disease Control guidance says about what fully vaccinated people can do. "Fully vaccinated people can visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing

2 masks or physical distancing." That's the CDC guidance. That's what was happening in that room last night. Every single one of them was vaccinated and they were in the indoors. And instead of following the CDC guidance, following the science, they were wearing masks, they were social distancing. It was the most absurd thing I've ever seen.

Danielle Pletka: So, I think a lot of people say to themselves, "Obviously, the president and the members of Congress are vaccinated, but at the same time, they're trying to send a message to people that the danger isn't over." And this is part of the problem. The problem here is that people need to see the rewards. They need to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And the president and all around him seem absolutely determined to prove there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Get vaccinated and you can dot, dot, dot, what? Oh yeah, you can not wear a mask outside, but that's it. And oh, if I'm the president, I'm still going to wear a mask outside because, I don't know. It seems to me they're using their signaling power to send exactly the wrong message, which is the vaccine means freedom, go and do it.

Marc Thiessen: So, two thoughts on that. First of all, the message they need to start sending is the vaccines work. Because as our colleague, Scott Gottlieb, has pointed out, we're fast approaching the point where everybody who's eager to get the vaccine is going to get the vaccine and be fully vaccinated. We're now going to get to the point where we need to start convincing the vaccine hesitant to start getting the vaccine. And if the message is you still have to wear a mask, you still have to social distance, you can't hug your grandparents, you can't live your life as normal, then they're not going to get it. Because why? If they're worried about the vaccine and there's no reward at the end of the tunnel, as you say, why would they do it?

Marc Thiessen: They had a great chance last night to send a message that the vaccines work, because we are all vaccinated, we were able to have a normal joint session of Congress. And if you get vaccinated, your life's going to return to normal too. This was pandemic political theater. And the reason is because they understand that if they had done that, the message would have been that a return to normalcy is at hand. The coronavirus crisis is reaching an end. Democrats don't want the crisis to end because it is the pretext they need for the $6 trillion in spending that Biden proposed last night. It's all supposed to be his response to the crisis.

Marc Thiessen: But if the crisis is over, then how do you justify $6 trillion in spending? So, they wanted to send the message that we're not out of the woods yet, that we still have to mask. We're still in a COVID crisis, when the rest of the country is starting to move on from this stuff, because if they don't have the crisis, they don't have the pretext they need to spend all that money.

Danielle Pletka: Again, I'm not enthusiastic about any of these bills. I'm not enthusiastic about the government spending $6 trillion. I think here, the challenge really is to explain to people that in fact, they're not spending $6 trillion on what they say they're spending $6 trillion on. If you said to me, "We're spending on infrastructure." I'd say, I think that's probably not the right amount, but at the same time, we need to spend on infrastructure, we need to maintain our infrastructure, and in many

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3 cases, we need to upgrade our infrastructure. Fair enough. But the vast mass of the spending on the infrastructure is not infrastructure. The vast mass of spending on families is not spending on families. And I will be frank with all of our listeners, what bothers me the most about all of this isn't what's bothering or a lot of my colleagues at AEI, which is where the hell is this money coming from?

Danielle Pletka: What bothers me the most about this, is that it is built on a foundation of the American public being a supplicant at the trough of government. You need the government to go to school. You need the government to get an education. You need the government to tell teachers what grades you need to get. You need the government to tell people what tests you're supposed to take. You need the governor to tell you whether to be in a union or not. You need the government to tell you what kind of a job you can have and what kind of a job you can't have. You need the government to tell you what you can say and what you can't say. I could go on for a while on this thing.

Marc Thiessen: Shorter Dany Pletka? Socialism. That's what it is. What you've just described is socialism. The government tells you what you can and cannot do, how you do it and gives you what it wants to give you and takes away what it wants to take away. That's what we're talking about.

Danielle Pletka: Marc, I think actually there's a better word for it, which is of course, what all socialist economies actually are.

Marc Thiessen: Communism?

Danielle Pletka: Dictatorship. I don't understand this vision, and I don't understand why the American people would be excited about it. In years past, you would say to people, "I'll give you money not to work," and they'd say, "No, I want the dignity of a job." What are we turning into? That's the Biden vision that I don't understand.

Marc Thiessen: Well, it's what they're turning us into. It's not what we're turning into on our own. I think most Americans want to work. I think most Americans still want to earn their own success, to quote our older leader, Arthur Brooks. Here's what's happening. First of all, you're absolutely right that they're lying about what the bills are about. So, we've now redefined infrastructure. This is a analysis of the bill, 37% of the infrastructure bill is actually infrastructure, and the rest is infrastructure adjacent to not even close.

Marc Thiessen: One of Biden's economic advisers was on Sunday, and Chris Wallace asked him about the $400 billion for long-term care for the elderly that's in the bill. And he said, "Well, it's our healthcare infrastructure." And he said, "You're stretching the word to the point where it has no meaning. It might be a worthy goal to increase support for caring for the elderly, but it's not infrastructure." It's the same thing with COVID relief. They told us that we needed to spend $400 billion on American schools in order to reopen the schools. Only like 6% of that was going to be spent this year. The rest is spent over the next 10 years. So, it has nothing to do with it. They keep redefining, and now the latest thing is they're redefining bipartisanship.

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4 Marc Thiessen: So, bipartisanship used to mean that Republicans and Democrats come together, compromise, find consensus, and pass the bill. Now Biden defines bipartisanship as well, some Republican voters support this, even if their elected representatives don't, so that's bipartisanship. They're using Orwellian language to justify a level of spending that is without precedent in American history. I mean, 100 days, $6 trillion. When we were in Capitol Hill, what, 15 years ago or something like that, there was a saying, "A billion here, a billion there, soon you're talking about real money." Now it's a trillion. The idea that Republicans came forward with an $816 billion COVID relief package, which is about the same as Obama's entire relief package for the 2008 financial crisis, and they were like, "That's not even serious. That's not real money." I mean, are you kidding me? Hundreds of billions of dollars is not considered real money anymore. They've lost their minds.

Danielle Pletka: Well, okay. Nerd asterisk here for everybody. That quote, that very famous quote, which is, "A billion here, a billion there, soon we're talking about real money," has always been attributed to Everett Dirksen, after whom the Senate office building that you and I worked in, Marc, is named. But in fact, that's apocryphal because apparently, he didn't actually say that. He said something a little bit different. But yeah, of course, the disregard that all of these people in government have for the hard work of the American people, the disregard that they have for how it is that by the sweat of their brow people earn money, seems to me to be something that is truly offensive to our ethics.

Marc Thiessen: Here's what I think is happening. The Democrats realize that they have a very tenuous hold on unified government. They have a 50-50 Senate. Their congressional majority in the House, I think, is only about six seats right now. They could lose both houses in less than 18 months or so. So, they are going to ram through as much spending as they possibly can during the time that they have this power, because they know that they could very well lose it. All the things that Biden laid out last night that are spending, they can probably do through budget reconciliation. They could do it without any Republican votes.

Marc Thiessen: The other stuff, like DC statehood, he didn't mention that last night, but the other things on his agenda, raising the minimum wage, packing the Senate with more senators, packing the Supreme Court, all that you need to get rid of the filibuster. So, if Joe Manchin holds the line and keeps his promise that he's not going to weaken or eliminate the filibuster, what we're going to experience for the next 18 months or so is going to be the greatest miasma of government spending in the history of our Republic, but they won't be able to change the institutions of our country.

Marc Thiessen: They won't be able to change the composition of the Senate. They won't be able to change the way the Senate votes. They won't be able to change the Supreme Court. If that happens, I'm afraid I have to say, that's a victory for us. If all they can do is raise taxes and spend like drunken sailors by the end of two years, if we can take back one of the houses of Congress and put the brakes on it, we're lucky to come out alive.

Danielle Pletka: Well, we may be lucky to come out alive from this, but two things. Number one, who do we have to thank for this nightmare? . If we had won

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5 Georgia, none of this would be happening.

Marc Thiessen: No argument here.

Danielle Pletka: Actual bipartisanship would have been imperative because the Republicans would have controlled the Senate. That's number one. Number two, I mean, talk about defining deviancy down. If $6 trillion spending is a victory, I don't know what losing looks like.

Marc Thiessen: That's only the first 100 days. There could be more. They're not done.

Danielle Pletka: So, here's a question for you. You're still talking to a lot of people on the Hill. Are these things going to happen? I mean, is every Democrat going to fall in line behind what will lead to the destruction of our economy? What will lead to us being even further in debt? What will lead to the end of the Wall Street boom, as we know it? Are they all going to sign up to this?

Marc Thiessen: Oh, I think they're going to pass infrastructure. They've already got agreement that they can take up another bill through reconciliation. And Marty Gold, who was on our podcast with us laying out this whole process, actually said they can bring up three reconciliation bills in a single year. They've already done COVID through budget reconciliation without Republican votes. They can go to the reconciliation again to do the infrastructure bill, and they could go to reconciliation again to do this America's Families plan, theoretically. At least those three bills could happen.

Danielle Pletka: But Marc, they need every single Democrat to go along with this. I get the fact that there are plenty of Democrats for whom the economy and posterity are totally irrelevant, but surely there are some responsible Democrats. I know there are, who will look at this-

Marc Thiessen: Well, there's one, Joe Manchin. He's pushing back on some of this stuff already.

Danielle Pletka: But aren't there others? Look, just to give you one example of how they think they're going to pay for this, is they want to take away what's called stepped up basis for people. Now, you know how that works? Mary Jo and Bob inherit their family farm, and they don't want to run a farm. So, they sell it. If their parents died, the price on the date of their death is the price of the farm. What Joe Biden wants to do is say, "No, no, your value, your capital gains on that are the value of the farm when your parents bought it in 1962 for $4,200. And just because it's

Danielle Pletka: The notion that this isn't going to impact the middle-class, the notion that the destruction of everyone's 401k, because this will devastate the stock market, is not going to affect the middle class. Every single person who's thinking about retiring today, you better take a hard look at your 401k because within a short period of time, a short period of time, it's going to be worth way less than it was today. So, take a picture of that because you're going to miss it.

Marc Thiessen: And also taxing corporations, which seems very popular, who, they pass on all

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6 their taxes to their customers. There are studies that show that upwards of 40% of all corporate taxes are passed on to consumers and paid for by the middle-class workers. So corporate tax increase sounds great, except you pay for it. So, they're going to raise your taxes and all that. But yes, they're going to pass this stuff, Dany. They're going to negotiate with themselves. They're going to have some negotiation between the moderates and then, but there's no Democrat that's going to stand up and stop Joe Biden from signing the American Families bill into law. There's no Democrat that's going to be the deciding vote to stop Joe Biden from passing his infrastructure package. They're going to extract something for it. The Republicans are going to be on the sidelines and not getting consulted, not involved in the process. And they're going to pass it.

Marc Thiessen: And what they're not going to be able to do is change the filibuster. They're not going to be able to pass H.R.1, this federalization of the election laws, which is the Democratic Unified Government and Perpetuity Act. That's not going to pass unless Joe Manchin caves and Kyrsten Sinema. Both of them, the two of them have said they wouldn't do it. So yes, this is going to be absolutely horrible and destructive. And it's like a giant tsunami and we've just got to duck and hopefully let it pass. And then we can at least get some divided government back in 2022 so that they do actually have to negotiate and not ram this stuff through on a partisan vote.

Danielle Pletka: So, Joe Biden was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The reason that Barack Obama picked him.

Marc Thiessen: We worked with him.

Danielle Pletka: Yep, exactly. But the reason that Barack Obama picked him was because he was like the aminos glaze. It was going to give him some cred on national security. Boy, where was Chairman Joe Biden last night? Foreign policy, what did it get, like two minutes, three minutes?

Marc Thiessen: It was a complete afterthought. I mean, he literally said nothing. He did a few paragraphs on China because he needed to address China, but there was nothing of substance. There was one paragraph combined on Iran and North Korea, which was, he said that he will address the threats posed by both there was a lot of justification for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said that, s to the

Danielle Pletka: Okay, that's bullshit. Okay, let's just call that what it is.

Marc Thiessen: Come on. Let's use this explicit rating to its fullest. You can do better than

Danielle Pletka: I definitely can. But look, this is bullshit. First of all, our colleague, Mackenzie Eaglen has done great work looking at what it's going to cost. It's going to cost more to pull our troops out of Afghanistan than it's costing to keep them there. and total garbage because over the horizon still requires intelligence. And we

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7 can't get intelligence if we are not there because they don't trust us because we have betrayed them. That's what we're seeing in Yemen now. That's what we're seeing all over the world. When we run, skedaddle, out of places like Iraq and places like Afghanistan, thank you, Joe Biden, in both instances, what happens is people on the ground don't trust us and we don't have the intel necessary to conduct the surgical strikes that Biden is so excited about.

Danielle Pletka:

Marc Thiessen: A strongly worded letter.

Danielle Pletka: I mean, embarrassing, just absolutely embarrassing. And even China, you would think that this administration that took Donald Trump to task for not being tough enough on Russia and China would in the first hundred days have done something meaningful. Particularly on Russia, where Trump actually had a pretty good policy. All we've seen from the Biden administration is a few symbolic sanctions. They've allowed Nord Stream to go forward, which is a great reward to Vladimir Putin and a slap in the face to our Ukrainian allies. They've allowed Alexei Navalny to be treated like a war criminal. And none of it has excited much reaction from the administration. A few sanctions for Hong Kong, a few sanctions for Burma, but that's about it. I don't know what they think is going to happen when they start spending money in the United States and in the United States alone. But our enemies are still out there.

Marc Thiessen: Look, when Joe Biden presided over the withdrawal from Iraq, there were, according to CIA Director John Brennan, roughly 700 ISIS fighters in the country, 700. And we pulled out and within a matter of months, they had gathered their forces, reconstituted themselves, and claimed a caliphate the size of Great Britain.

Marc Thiessen: So, if we don't think history is going to repeat itself in Afghanistan, that the terrorists aren't going to come back, and let me tell you something... You're talking about the strongly worded letter to Russia, if we pull out of Afghanistan and the Taliban came back into power, that is not just going to have an impact on Afghanistan. That is not just going to have an impact in terms of creating a new terrorist sanctuary. Russia is watching. China is watching. North Korea is watching. Iran is watching. They all see a message of weakness and weakness is provocative. It is no coincidence that it was just after President Barack Obama failed to enforce his red line in Syria, that Vladimir Putin invaded and annexed Crimea. Those two things are not disconnected. And so, this withdrawal is going to have implications not just in Afghanistan.

Marc Thiessen: It's going to have implications from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea to Eastern Europe because leaders smell weakness. Leaders smell a lack of American resolve. And when they smell that, they test us. Because they want to see what our resolve is like in the South China Sea? What's our resolve like when it comes to Taiwan? What's our resolve like when it comes to maybe taking a little bit more of Ukraine? What's our resolve like when it comes to Iran tearing out more terrorism in the Middle East? This is going to have massive implications beyond Afghanistan.

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8 Danielle Pletka: You're right. What can I say? I just got off an event with our AEI colleagues talking about the first 100 days. Hearing from Fred Kagan the litany of threats that are before us, the risks that we're facing of Russian military action against one of its neighbors, God forbid a NATO neighbor, the spread of al Qaeda, the proliferation of ISIS, all of it is absolutely horrifying.

Marc Thiessen: Dany, he actually used that metastasis of terrorism as a justification for pulling out of Afghanistan. He said the threat isn't in Afghanistan anymore. Terrorism has metastasized. Al Qaeda and ISIS are in Yemen and Syria and Somalia and Africa and all across the Middle East and beyond. Look, well, why is that? Because when you withdrew from Iraq, ISIS rose up and they carried out terrorist attacks in 148 countries that killed 2,000 people after that metastasis. What do you think is going to be the result of the withdrawal from Afghanistan?

Danielle Pletka: Well, we know what the result is going to be. This is intensely depressing. It really is. I can't find a single good thing to say. I want to. I wanted Joe Biden to be the president that he promised he would be. Everybody kept telling us he was a candidate of the moderates. Everybody kept telling us that the Democratic Party wasn't crazy. Look, they could have nominated Bernie Sanders, they could have nominated Elizabeth Warren, but they nominated Joe Biden. I don't see how Joe Biden is any better than Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, do you?

Marc Thiessen: No, I mean, honestly, we talk about the big lie of the 2020 election. That's the big lie of the 2020 election, that Joe Biden is a moderate. He said, "I beat the socialist. I want to unify the country." It's a lie. He was the Trojan horse for the left,

as soon as you do, the Trojan horse opens up and all the mad socialists come running out, running rampant over our country.

Marc Thiessen: Let me give you one more thing on foreign policy that will make your head explode, because I don't know if you caught this during the speech. Let me read you this quote when he's talking about terrorism: "And we won't ignore what our intelligence agencies have determined to be the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today, white supremacy is terrorism. We're not going to ignore that either." Is that the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland, Dany?

Danielle Pletka: Of course I saw it. And you're right that I put it to the back of my mind because it was so absurd, because I was speechless. This is so offensive. Why would you want to pour oil on the flames of racial dissension in this country? Why would you not want to unify people? Why would you want to suggest that somehow there's something wrong with one group of people? And why, by the way, is it okay to say terrible things about white people as a group any more than it is unacceptable to say terrible things about Black people as a group or Jews as a group? Why has this become okay, and why is this coming from the mouth of the president of all of us? It is gross.

Marc Thiessen: This is the first time I think in American history that the response to the State of the Union address was better than the State of the Union address itself. Normally, the response to the State of the Union is just... I wish we could just get back the airtime, because you've got the president with the rostrum of the House of

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9 Representatives with all the pomp and circumstance and then some guy standing in front of a TV screen has to give a rebuttal.

Marc Thiessen: Tim Scott did a great job last night. He laid it out pretty dang clearly that this is a guy who has experienced racial discrimination, who's been followed in stores and pulled over because he's Black. He understands that there is racism in this country and that it still exists, but he said, "America is not a racist country." And that to discriminate against people, to look at everything through the lens of race is so destructive.

Marc Thiessen: But I think you asked the question, why do they say things like this? The reason is, is because they think it helps them win. Tim Scott, we had him on the podcast last year after his police reform bill went down in flames, and he did everything possible to get something bipartisan done. He wrote a bill, the Justice Act, that incorporated a lot of the Democrats' proposals. And then he offered them, together with Mitch McConnell, unlimited amendments on the floor. And he said own bill if they didn't get the votes that they wanted. And they still said no. And they filibustered.

Marc Thiessen: They used the tactic that they now call a "relic of Jim Crow" and racist. They use that supposedly racist tactic to stop a Black man, a Black senator, from passing police reform legislation. Why did they do that? Because they didn't want a bi- partisan solution, because they didn't want to unite the country. The division sells. The division, it feeds their base.

Marc Thiessen: We talked a lot last year about how we've got to gotten into this base maximization politics, and a lot of it focused on Donald Trump and not trying to expand his base and just throwing red meat to the conservatives. The left is just as awful about this. They just want to throw red meat to their people and demonize the other side. And they are as responsible for the division in our country as anyone else.

Danielle Pletka: Well, on that intensely depressing note, and I think I ended our last podcast with exactly the same expression.

Marc Thiessen: Because we're in depressing times, Dany.

Danielle Pletka: It's become my sign-off note.

Marc Thiessen: You know what I'm optimistic about?

Danielle Pletka: What?

Marc Thiessen: I'm optimistic that we're going to have a lot of fun with this podcast throughout the course of the year.

Danielle Pletka: Very good. Well, folks, don't hesitate to join in. Email us, write, subscribe, review, share, do all of that good stuff, and take care. We've got a great show for you next week.

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10 Marc Thiessen: Take care. Bye.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org