On Wednesday, Daily Caller co-founder and publisher Neil Patel delivered a stern warning to the Republican Party over its complacency in re the Georgia Senate run-offs. Noting that Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were surging and ahead in the polls, he emphasized that “Georgia is no longer a reliably Republican state. Anyone banking on that is setting themselves up for a loss.”
Elsewhere in the piece, he spells out the particulars of that loss:
Democrats are out for revenge. If they have the White House, the House and the Senate, the pressure on President-elect Joe Biden to enact a pretty extreme agenda is going to be immense. Will Biden have the strength to push back against this? Will he even want to push back?
A possible answer to those questions was hinted at a day earlier when Biden, during a virtual meeting with eight civil rights leaders and his vice president-to-be, delivered a wakeup call of his own. “I am not going to violate the Constitution,” he improbably pledged. “Executive authority that my progressive friends talk about is way beyond the bounds.”
Here is a video of Biden’s complete statement, followed by a transcript (via The Intercept):
So there’s some things that I’m going to be able to do by executive order. I’m not going to hesitate to do it, but what I’m not going to do is I’m not going to do what used to — Vanita [Gupta], you probably used to get angry with me during the debates, when you’d have some of the people you were supporting saying, ‘On Day 1, I’m gonna have an executive order to do this!’ Not within the constitutional authority. I am not going to violate the Constitution. Executive authority that my progressive friends talk about is way beyond the bounds. And as one of you said, maybe it was you, Reverend Al [Sharpton], whether it’s far left or far right, there is a Constitution. It’s our only hope. Our only hope and the way to deal with it is, where I have executive authority, I will use it to undo every single damn thing this guy has done by executive authority, but I’m not going to exercise executive authority where it’s a question, where I can come along and say, ‘I can do away with assault weapons.’ There’s no executive authority to do away that. And no one has fought harder to get rid of assault weapons than me, me, but you can’t do it by executive order. We do that, next guy comes along and says, Well, guess what? By executive order, I guess everybody can have machine guns again. So we gotta be careful.
Coming from Joe Biden, the comments are more baffling than they are illuminating. But they certainly have to be confounding to the far left wing of the party, especially if he sticks to his guns.
