Written by Peter Baker
President Joe Biden laid out an bold agenda Wednesday evening to rewrite the American social compact by vastly increasing household go away, baby care, well being care, preschool and faculty schooling for thousands and thousands of individuals to be financed with elevated taxes on the wealthiest earners.
The $1.8 trillion plan he unveiled his first deal with to a joint session of Congress together with earlier proposals to construct roads and bridges, broaden different social applications and fight local weather change characterize a basic reorientation of the function of presidency not seen because the days of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
“We have to prove democracy still works, that our government still works and can deliver for the people,” Biden deliberate to say in his nationally televised speech, in response to excerpts launched by the White House earlier within the day.
Taken collectively, the gathering of initiatives that Biden has launched in his first 100 days in workplace recommend a wide ranging scope of change sought by a 78-year-old president who spent a lifetime as a extra typical lawmaker. After presenting himself throughout final yr’s marketing campaign as a “transition candidate” to comply with the unstable tenure of Donald Trump, Biden has since his inauguration positioned himself as a transformational president.
But the succession of pricey proposals quantities to a dangerous gamble {that a} nation deeply polarized alongside ideological and cultural strains is prepared for a extra activist authorities and the kind of redistribution of wealth lengthy sought by progressives. Biden’s Democrats have solely the barest of majorities within the House and Senate to push by way of essentially the most sweeping of laws and, profitable or not, he might have framed the phrases of the talk for the following election.
“Our best future won’t come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams,” Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., deliberate to say in his get together’s televised official response, in response to advance excerpts. “It will come from you — the American people.”
For Biden, who watched such speeches as a senator or vp for almost a half-century, it was the primary time behind the microphone setting the agenda for what was the useful equal of a State of the Union deal with. But coming within the latter days of the coronavirus pandemic and fewer than 4 months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, the occasion was not like some other presidential speech as Biden confronted a half-empty chamber.
On the recommendation of the Capitol doctor, solely 200 members of Congress and different officers had been invited as an alternative of the same old 1,600, all carrying masks in assigned seats at the very least 6 ft aside. The president, who fist-bumped his method down the aisle, arrived amid tighter safety than regular, with streets across the constructing closed and patrolled by swarms of cops and National Guard troops.
In a notable first, Biden turned the primary president to ship an deal with to Congress with two girls sitting behind him representing the following within the line of succession to his workplace, Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. After addressing her as “Madam Vice President,” Biden stated to applause, “No president has ever said those words, and it’s about time.”
