A Remarkable Biden Presidency

Bill McKibben, writing at the New Yorker, makes the case for a remarkable presidency if Biden doesn’t care about his reelection in 2024. McKibben argues what Biden can accomplish in four years without looking ahead at his second term:

If Biden’s not guarding his approval ratings for a second run, he could, for instance, demand that his new majority give him a lot of stimulus money to work with, and simply not worry about the G.O.P. and the pundit class as they start warning about deficits. (The fact that the Republicans ballooned the deficit just to give the rich yet more tax breaks takes the sting out of their arguments, anyhow.) At this point, getting rid of the filibuster seems all but certain, but Biden could push to expand and reform the courts. He could embrace the Green New Deal, moving money from the Pentagon to the national-security task of building out solar and wind power and setting irrevocably in motion an industrial transition that would transform our economy over the next generation. He could take millions of undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. He could make sure that we have a commission to examine and recommend reparations for Black and indigenous Americans. And so on. The key things that need to happen if America is ever going to get past its stalemated and sickly status quo are as obvious as they are politically difficult. But, if Biden decided that the next four years were all that mattered to him, he could get to work.