President Biden's approval rating is around 40%. I understand that republicans and conservative independents will never approve of the job performance of a president who is a member of the Democratic Party even though I disagree.
.
.
The campaign for the 2024 presidential election HAS ALREADY STARTED! Dragging the president and throwing him under the bus helps the fascists who only need to win one more presidential election to eradicate our democracy.
.
.
I must confess that I absolutely do not understand why democrats and others on the left would drag him and disapprove of his job performance in this context and given the constraints he faced. It makes zero sense to me. Yes, democrats and those on the left should be "clapping louder" and President Biden did very well in these negotiations in this situation.
.
.
We were going to have to negotiate with these extremists to pass a budget. Even if we could keep passing continuous resolutions for a while, this would have frozen spending as well. And the House of Representatives was not good to keep passing continuous resolutions. The concessions made were ones that were likely to be in the final deal for the budget.
.
.
If we had not engaged in these negotiations because we decided to try this one weird trick, then we would have faced very bad consequences. The president could not simply have invoked the magical chant, "I invoke the 14th Amendment" and abra cadabra, the problem would have been solved. The United States would still have had to sell bonds and those bonds would have been of legally questionable value. This would have been challenged in court by the Republicans and would have created massive uncertainty in the world economy and in the markets. As a consequence, we would likely have seen serious job losses. Eventually it would have worked its way to the Supreme Court where the radical 6-3 conservative majority would almost certainly have rejected the argument that the debt ceiling statute contradicted the 14th Amendment.
.
.
We lost 20 million jobs in April of 2020 when President Trump was still in office. We had a recession and 6.7% unemployment when Trump left office. The unemployment rate was nearly cut in half to a 54 year low, 3.4%, unemployment rate for people of color dropped dramatically, 12 million jobs were created in 2 years, more than were lost due to COVID and more than any previous administration had created in 4 years save Clinton's. 800,000 manufacturing jobs were created. Inflation has dropped NINE MONTHS STRAIGHT. Child poverty rate was cut in half. A tremendous amount of good legislation was passed. The American Rescue Plan which addressed immediate financial needs of the poor and middle class, the Respect for Marriage Act passed, the CHIPS Act passed, SCIENCE passed, the PACT ACT to help veterans harmed by toxic burn pits get help was passed, the first significant gun safety legislation in 30 years passed, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Legislation passed- the most serious effort to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure in decades, and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was passed. Arguably the greatest foreign policy success since World War 2 was achieved as President Biden masterfully used accurate intelligence to expose the playbook and FUTURE ATTEMPTED JUSTIFICATIONS of Russia to take over Ukraine and he managed to keep the European coalition together.
And all of this was done while the GOP remains largely enthralled by Trump and with fascism and we had the most narrow majority in the Senate possible and said majority included two senators who were and are very disloyal and we had a very narrow margin in the House. We kept and expanded the majority in the Senate and only narrowly lost our House majority to the Republicans and that only because of gerrymandering. This all happened despite historical trends and President Biden's low job approval rating, low largely because some non trivial number of democrats are ignorant of these tremendous achievements and the difficulty of these accomplishments with the numbers we have. And these same democrats seem to be unaware of Sinema and Manchin and that Sinema and Manchin are autonomous free agents and how our system of government allows a minority party, the GOP, to dominate the federal government with support from only a minority of voters. We have an unrepresentative Senate, a House of Representatives whose composition is determined by gerrymandering and voter concentration, a president elected by the electoral college and not the popular vote, and a radical conservative Supreme Court which has a majority of justices nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and they were confirmed by an unrepresentative Senate.
.
.
Democracy in the United States is facing am existential threat. If the Republican Party's nominee for president wins the 2024 presidential election, then there is a very good chance that we lose our democracy. We can't afford to lose the 2024 presidential election. We all need to fully support the president as he runs to win reelection in the 2024 presidential election and yes we need to clap harder for President Biden!