The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

US President Joe Biden is halfway through his first term in the nation’s top job. After an initial boost in favourable poll ratings and with TV and other media pundits, Biden began to slip, until earlier this year he achieved a dubious distinction when he sank “under water” with less than 50 percent approval ratings in the polls. Oddly, Donald Trump and “his” Supreme Court have rescued Biden twice.

First, as Biden’s ratings were tanking, he was unquestionably the beneficiary of the increasingly negative attention attracted by the behaviour, legal jeopardy and undeniable continuing magnetism of his immediate predecessor in the White House. The media, the increasingly fractious Republican Party and Trump himself generated plenty of distractions without any assist needed from Biden.

Trump’s impact on the recent election cannot be overstated. Judging by the results, it was sufficient to overcome what voters resented about Biden and his performance.

But the Republicans were not so divided and distracted by Trump that they forgot how to attack the president. And Biden’s early missteps and some bad luck gave them plenty of ammunition. Among these issues were the lingering COVID pandemic and the mind-boggling succession of new flu variants that seemed to appear – and may be continuing to appear – just in time to keep people on edge.

Another effective issue for the GOP was inflation that seemed to surge just as Biden took office. There is little question that the gigantic government-spending bills for rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, relief for COVID-afflicted households and other worthy goals such as climate change mitigation deepened the national debt and reawakened traditional Republican fiscal concerns that were completely abandoned during the Trump tax-cutting and budget-busting years.

And Biden’s impetuosity in pulling the US out of Afghanistan did give him and the nation a bad look. Detaching America from yet another no-win, largely pointless overseas military adventure had clearly been a high Biden priority when he moved into the White House, and his sense of urgency was intensified by his inability to prevail in national security debates on Afghanistan while he served as Barack Obama’s vice president.

But despite the bad press Biden got at the time of the US withdrawal, popular furor has largely dissipated. For most Americans, Afghanistan was and is a remote mountainous nation known mostly for opium production and internecine strife. It was a convenient if mostly inappropriate target for American revenge after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11 but otherwise, most people agreed with Biden that we had been there decades too long.

Now, kids are back in school and many state and local jurisdictions are reluctant to impose mask mandates, even in the face of rising rates of COVID-related illness. There is a general sense that Americans who are not preternaturally disposed to distrust any kind of vaccination or blinded to the benefits of inoculation by religious or other concerns have been vaccinated. COVID is, at least for now, gone from the headlines on most days.

Economic numbers are gradually improving. No one can miss the big drop in gasoline prices at the pump. A potentially crippling nationwide railroad strike was averted by Congressional action. Prices still seem too high in the grocery store and elsewhere, but the acute sting of inflation seems to be ebbing away.

So as Biden begins the second half of this first term, many of the major issues that plagued him early on have lost their sting or retreated. But there is one major exception. That issue is immigration and the porous American southern border.

When Trump tried to build popular support for his “beautiful wall” along the US – Mexican border, he often conjured up visions of caravans of illegal migrants making their way up from lower Central America through lax Mexico to push for admission to the American land of opportunity.

These visions actually began to materialize in the weeks after Biden won the 2020 election. The narrative developed that with Trump’s failure to win re-election and a liberal Democrat replacing him, the pent-up immigration demand in Central America and Mexico was stimulating massive pressure on the southern US border.

There were reports that traditionally Caribbean-based illegal migration schemes involving Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans were even being rerouted to Mexico in anticipation of the suspension of the US Title 42 immigration authority that permits American border authorities to expel asylum-seeking immigrants without any hearing process. Title 42 was instituted under Trump to squelch illegal immigration, using as the pretext the emergency public health conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the Republicans complain now about the porous US border since Biden took office, they have a point. Consider these fiscal year statistics that are drawn from the US Customs and Border Protection website. The US fiscal year is October 1 – September 30, so fiscal year 2020 ended September 30, 2020. That means the FY 2021 figures roughly equate to the time of Biden’s election.

Expulsions of asylum-seekers at the southern US border with Mexico under Title 42 (northern border with Canada for comparison):

FY 2020: 197,043 (328)

FY 2021: 1,040,220 (475)

FY 2022: 1,045,084 (420)

FY 2023: 142,857 (59) – for first two months only

It’s easy to see the trend. Biden recognized the issue as serious months into his presidency, and appointed Vice-President Kamala Harris to oversee a government effort to reform the process. There’s a sense little progress is being made. But wait: Conservatives are now bailing out Biden again. On Tuesday afternoon the conservative US Supreme Court, of all people, helped Biden out. The justices overturned a lower court ruling to basically let stand Title 42 until at least June when they will hear arguments in a related case.

Since Biden & Company have hardly solved the migration crisis along the Mexican border very well so far, the Supreme Court has saved the Democrats from themselves. Now, they can blame the high court for pinching off the flood of asylum seekers while they are not seen as betraying their high-minded liberal principles.

It’s commendable that the current administration aspires to revise US immigration procedures, for which there has long been political and social pressure. But it’s difficult to argue that effectively turning on the immigration spigot by setting aside Title 42 while you’re seeking a viable solution is the best way to proceed.

Neil Gorsuch, appointed to the high court by Trump because of his staunchly conservative views, sided with the court’s three liberals in dissenting on the court’s Title 42 ruling.

He offered this cogent explanation: “Courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not a policymaker of last resort.”

19 Republican state attorneys general had brought the Title 42 suit. Republican governors in Texas, Arizona and Florida have been resisting the Biden administration’s immigration policies differently. They have been transporting some of the asylum seekers to Washington, DC, and other northern liberal cities to let them deal with the migrants.

On Christmas Eve, Vice President Harris was greeted by several busloads of migrants, parked near her DC residence.

A local aid group responded by organizing food, clothing and shelter on the coldest Christmas Eve on record in Washington. A spokeswoman said “whether it’s Christmas Eve, whether it’s freezing cold outside or warm outside, we are always ready to welcome people with open arms and make sure they have a warm reception in this community.”

Texas governor Greg Abbot, who authorized the Christmas Eve bus trips, said “our Texas communities and the state are ill-equipped to do the job assigned to the federal government — house the thousands of migrants flooding into the country every day. This terrible crisis for border communities in Texas is a catastrophe of (Biden’s) own making.”

The White House decried the bus trips as “a cruel, dangerous, and shameful stunt.”

In this holiday season, the last word should go to an official from a migrant support organization, who said “the trip upward to the border is quite dangerous and violent. Then, there is the chaos at the border and in border facilities. There are reports of it being cold and cruel. So many of the refugees were really happy to arrive to smiling faces.”