To The Editor:
So, Joe Biden is president: 81 million to 74 million votes. Now the U.S. can go back to normal. Joe claims he’s going to be the president for all of the people. He’ll go across the aisle to get a bipartisan agreement to his agenda.
For me, this is a very problematic position to take. First, is he forgetting that 126 Republican representatives joined in the Texas lawsuit to overturn the election, which even the right-wing supreme court rejected, calling the suit ridiculous? Is he forgetting his eight years as vice president where the Republicans’ goal was to make Obama a one-term president? He certainly couldn’t make it happen then. What makes him think he can do it now? Trump still largely controls the Republican party.
But more importantly, it’s a betrayal of his campaign promises to the people who got him elected. My memories of bipartisanship (working across the aisle) are the Vietnam and Iraq wars, the imprisonment of our fellow citizens on drug charges that everybody knew were wrong. The destruction of nascent democracies in Central and South America: these were bipartisan. The promotion of the idiotic trickle-down economics and the decimation of the working class were bipartisan. The environmental catastrophe is due to bipartisan neglect.
By being bipartisan Biden is betraying those who got him elected. The millions of Bernie voters who then voted for him want an agenda that puts heavy emphasis on the Green New Deal and Medicare For All. Bipartisanship will return us to the path that gave us Trump in the first place. I believe that the 74 million of us who voted for Trump, voted for him because of the desire to change the status quo. All of us, Democrats and Republicans, don’t like the path we’ve been on. That’s the reason so many of us voted for Sanders. It’s not time to go backwards into bipartisanship. It’s time to go forward with a progressive agenda that elevates all of us into the middle class. If the Republicans want to join you as you put forth a forward-looking agenda, of course they are welcome.
Robin Lehman
Warren
