“Do I really look like a guy with a plan?” Heath Ledger’s Joker famously asks Harvey Dent in the 2008 masterpiece, “The Dark Knight.”
Many Americans have been wondering for months if Joe Biden has a plan for, well, just about anything. The president and his administration continue to stumble from one crisis to another, solving nothing and, indeed, often overseeing crises that just get worse.
Critics continue to blast the president for lacking any sort of plan to bring down historic gas prices, rein in inflation that’s currently at a 40-year high, or fix the historic crisis at the border.
While these criticisms make sense, they’re also, in a sense, misguided. Because of course Biden doesn’t have a plan to solve these crises—the crises are the point. The pain we’ve all been experiencing for almost 18 months is the plan.
>>> High Gas Prices: The Pain Is the Point
These challenges we face as a nation are the direct result of intentional and willful choices this administration has made, knowing full well the consequences. The scramble now is just an attempt to escape the political fallout of those choices.
Look at the border crisis. During the transition, Trump officials told the incoming administration what would happen if they ended or removed effective border security policies, such as the Remain in Mexico program or the construction of the border wall system.
Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, made it clear in March 2021 that the incoming administration had been warned repeatedly:
“I was there as the acting commissioner, and I can assure you, prior to the election, we were warning the Biden campaign team, if they won and they did what they said they were going to do, they would create a crisis that would make 2019 pale in comparison. … We warned them, and instead they ignored the border security experts.”
Chad Wolf, former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said in May 2021 that the Biden administration had ignored the border security playbook his team left for them.
Yet despite these warnings at the time and the obvious failures since, Biden has continued to double down on the open-border policies that have caused the crisis. Despite record numbers of illegal aliens crossing the border every month, including an all-time monthly record of 234,088 apprehensions in April. Despite more than 800,000 “got-aways” since Biden took office. Despite more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths in our country in the last year, the most ever.
Despite all this, the Biden administration continues to lie and shirk responsibility. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas even had the gall to tell a congressional committee in April that Biden’s policies weren’t responsible for any of this disaster.
To steal a quote from Fox’s Jimmy Failla, Biden has turned the United States into a college town bar that doesn’t check IDs, and now everyone’s trying to get in even if they shouldn’t be there.
At this point, it’s pretty logical to conclude that this was Biden’s plan all along.
Or consider gas prices. From day one, the Biden administration has pushed policies that have limited domestic energy production, increased prices, and ultimately turned the United States from a net energy exporter to a net importer.
We continue to hit new record highs for a gallon of gas seemingly every other day. The average national price is about to hit $5 per gallon, and Americans could be looking at $6 per gallon of gas this summer.
The administration’s responses have been threefold: 1) high prices are good, 2) there’s nothing we can do about it, and 3) buy an electric vehicle.
Let’s focus on that first one. Biden infamously boasted that the United States is “going through an incredible transition” that will make Americans “less reliant on fossil fuels.”
Administration officials have scoffed at the idea of increasing domestic oil and natural gas production, most notably Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who laughed off the suggestion as “hilarious” last fall.
And in a darkly humorous turn, Politico recently reported that White House chief of staff Ron Klain “has grown particularly absorbed by the issue, checking the average price of a gallon of gas every morning,” with White House staffers desperately searching for solutions.
The solutions are obvious and immediate—this White House just doesn’t want to pursue them. Call off the regulatory attacks on domestic production of oil and natural gas, and prices would start dropping right away. Hold robust sales on federal lands and waters to provide companies with more access, streamline permitting for new energy infrastructure, and get rid of laws such as the Renewable Fuels Standard and Jones Act that only increase costs.
The solutions are so obvious that the most logical conclusion is that the president is content to see millions of Americans suffer in pursuit of his “incredible transition.”
Occam’s Razor dictates that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. What’s more believable at this point? That literally no one in the administration knows how to effectively respond to these crises or that this is the plan they want?
This piece originally appeared in The Epoch Times
