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Obama’s third term as president ends with a gasp and wheeze

(You can listen to this column, read by the author, here.)

The final month of the Biden presidency was the political left’s last gasp, punctuated with an unprecedented and shameful avalanche of pardons, commutations of brutal murderers from federal death row, spiteful executive orders, and public statements overflowing with bald-faced lies. Right after Trump’s inauguration, Joe and Dr. Jill skipped town from the White House lawn on Helicopter One, flying off into the wild blue yonder, likely never to be heard from again.

Biden’s legacy will forever be stained by the pardon of his son Hunter (purposefully delayed until after the election) when he had repeatedly promised not to do that.  His last-minute unconditional pardons of other family members granted clemency for any unspecified criminal acts dating back to 2014, along with preemption from future prosecutions.  This immunizes them from criminal findings of a current House investigation alleging Biden’s family members received money from foreign sources through shadow accounts. How’s that for a get-out-of-jail-free card?

During Ronald Reagan’s final months as president in 1988 it was known that his mental acuity was fading but not nearly as dramatically as Biden’s, who could hardly speak much less walk.  Without a teleprompter he was lost.  His scripted and fumbled farewell address on January 15 won’t be ranked with George Washington’s or Abraham Lincoln’s, sounding more like a delusional campaign speech.  Fortunately for the country, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is no longer Biden’s presidential address.

Obama’s fingerprints

The obstacles and landmines Biden planted in his successor’s policy path will be easily cleared by President Trump, as he amply demonstrated just hours after the inauguration with a tsunami of executive orders overriding all of Biden’s, on which the ink had barely dried. Clearly, Biden’s deteriorating state of mind could not have crafted the intricate obstructions pouring out of the oval office in the final days of his presidency.

Instead, the fingerprints of White House staff were all over them. USA Today calculated that three quarters of Biden’s top 100 advisors had worked for Obama. The open secret in Democrat DC circles was that Biden didn’t matter. He may have had the title of president, but Obama-era young radical aides were really running the country.  (And those whiz kids must have had a hearty laugh inserting America-hating left-wing billionaire George Soros among Biden’s picks for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

Biden was the figurehead for the equivalent of Obama’s third term, who had promised to “fundamentally transform America.”  NPR reported that 12 of Biden’s first 16 senior appointments were Obama alumni.  Biden was a puppet whose ego was flattered by handlers portraying him as the new FDR who would create his own “social justice” New Deal (including a Green New Deal), expanding the administrative state, driving up social spending, opening the border, and codifying the Left’s cultural agenda.  Rather than bringing spending sharply down from the hyper-elevated COVID levels, they pretended endless deficits don’t matter and don’t ignite inflation.  Turns out, they do.

Weird finishing act

As a finishing act, Biden’s staff authored a weird speech he dutifully recited on January 17, perhaps a sop to aging feminists of the 1970s, an idiotic resurrection of the long-dead Equal Rights Amendment.  Biden proclaimed that “three-fourths of the states have ratified the 28th Amendment as the law of the land” and that “it has become part of our Constitution.”  He defended that claim by saying, “I agree with the ABA and with leading constitutional scholars.” (Later, he absurdly told reporters, “To get all the facts, I contacted every constitutional scholar in the world.”)  As if he actually wrote the speech himself.

Well, I checked the Constitution.  There is no 28th Amendment.  There are still only 27. In 1972, Congress did approve the proposed ERA and sent it to the states, needing at least 38 to ratify it by 1979 (later extended by Congress to 1982.)  When that never happened, the ERA expired like the date on a milk carton.  In 2020, 38 years after the ratification deadline, a symbolic attempt by Virginia to be the 38th state to ratify was rejected.  Relying on a 2020 ruling by the Dept. of Justice affirming the validity of the congressional deadline, the National Archivist declared the ERA DOA.

So much for the credibility of the partisan-Democrat, liberal American Bar Association and Biden’s left-wing scholars.  Case closed!

Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for CompleteColorado.com.

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