Tag Archives: Joe Biden

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President for ‘all Americans’

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden’s campaign pledge to be “president for all Americans, not just those who voted” for him sprang to mind as he made a major disaster declaration for Texas.

Why is that a big — or even a medium deal? It’s because his predecessor at times politicized these decisions, taking aim at officials in states that didn’t vote for him in the 2016 election; the California wildfire disaster comes immediately to mind.

Biden approves major disaster declaration for Texas: FEMA (msn.com)

President Biden has told the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pull out all the stops to help Texas recover from the monstrous winter blast that knocked power out for millions of Texans and continues to cause major water-quality problems for thousands of us.

It’s interesting, too, that the White House has been working closely and feverishly with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who was one of those who refused to recognize initially that Joe Biden, a card-carrying Democrat, was really and truly elected president in 2020.

None of that matters one damn bit … not to Gov. Abbott now or to the president.

Presidents do govern the entire country and must answer to all Americans. They also must set aside partisan differences when Americans are suffering.

As the saying goes: We live in the United States of America.

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‘America is back’

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden has made it abundantly clear that the nation he was elected to lead is going to return to the world stage.

There will no more talk of “putting America first” at the expense of our nation’s international alliances.

Biden spoke to his fellow G7 leaders this week during a virtual conference and informed them in no uncertain terms that he intends to reverse the direction that his presidential predecessor intended to take the nation.

The nation has rejoined the Paris Climate Accord; the U.S.A. is re-engaging in negotiations with Iran with the aim of preventing the Islamic Republic from obtaining a nuclear weapon; he has affirmed out commitment to NATO; he also has put Russia on notice that he won’t be “pals” with that nation’s strongman leader.

Donald Trump sought to stiff our allies whenever and wherever possible. Joe Biden is not wired that way. He intends to demonstrate his understanding that the world is figuratively shrinking and that the United States intends to reassert its role as the world’s pre-eminent world power.

This is what presidents of the United States have done for the past 100 years. I am one American who supports the tone that President Biden is taking.

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Welcome them, however …

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden said he is wants to “go big” on an immigration reform proposal for Congress to consider.

I agree with him, but with an important caveat. I want there to be strict border security and enforcement of immigrant-entry rules for those seeking to come to the United States.

The president has unveiled a sweeping reform that enables undocumented residents already living here an eight-year path to seeking citizenship or legal resident status; it seeks to speed up that path for agricultural workers and recipients of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program; and, yes, it seeks technology to help patrol the nation’s borders.

The childhood arrivals idea, aka DACA, became a favorite target of the Trump administration. Donald Trump rescinded President Obama’s executive order granting a form of amnesty from deportation for those who were brought here illegally as children. Joe Biden then rescinded Trump’s order in a kind of take-that approach to peeling back his predecessor’s policies.

Democrats unveil Biden’s immigration bill, including an eight-year path to citizenship (msn.com)

I am trying to take a longer view of the approach to immigration reform is taking. For sure I do not want to see a continuation of the heartlessness espoused by many of Donald Trump’s immigration advisers, namely that prince of darkness Stephen Miller who sounded for all the world like someone who wants to shut the door completely to all immigration. As the grandson of immigrants, I take deep personal offense at the approach that the Trump administration took and I welcome the more compassionate approach being expressed by the Biden team.

And no, I do not favor any sort of “open border” notion that has become a sort of whipping boy for those on the right who suggest that anything short of walling off the United States is an endorsement of welcoming everyone … legal and illegal immigrants alike. That is the stuff of demagogues.

I want President Biden to deliver on his 2020 campaign promise to fix the nation’s immigration policies. He has thrown a bold plan out there to ponder. Finding common ground is the basis for sound legislation. The president’s decades of experience as a U.S. senator puts him in position to lead that effort.

national news

Get well, Mr. President

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden apparently suffers from an ailment that has afflicted millions of Americans just like me.

He is infected with Trump Fatigue. The president took part Tuesday in a CNN-sponsored town hall event in Milwaukee and declared that he is “tired of Trump.” He is tired of talking about his immediate predecessor. He wants to focus on the crises that confront him and plans to deal with them.

“I don’t want to keep talking about Trump,” Biden said, vowing that during his term in office he wants the subject to be “millions of Americans.”

Well … isn’t that a refreshing change?

I am all in, Mr. President.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/02/16/biden_im_tired_of_talking_about_donald_trump_i_dont_want_to_talk_about_him_anymore.html

The town hall also included another fascinating — and in a way a related — notion from the president. He referenced the Justice Department and declared that it isn’t “my Department of Justice.” He said the department doesn’t work for the president, but that it works for all Americans. He noted that DOJ became, during the Trump administration, the “most political” DOJ in U.S. history.

Indeed, I would implore President Biden to shuck the first-person possessive pronoun when referring to the government. President Obama had an annoying habit of constantly referring to “my vice president,” or “my national security team,” or “my Cabinet.” Donald Trump continued that practice during  his term, making reference to “my generals” and “my Justice Department.”

Memo to all presidents: You don’t own these individuals or the departments where they work. All of you, and that includes the individual at the top of the chain of command, are hired by us, you and me, to do our bidding.

So, with that President Biden — in office now for just four weeks — is seeking to chart a new direction for the federal government and for the media that cover it and report on it to the public.

He also must cure himself of the fatigue that has set in.

Get well, Mr. President.

media news, national news

We can breathe again!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I cannot possibly take credit for this, for it came brilliantly from a young broadcast journalist to whom my wife and I were listening this afternoon.

Yasmin Vossoughian, an MSNBC anchor, offered an insightful analysis of what the nation and the world have just experienced in the past week: the end of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial.

Vossoughian said, simply, that we are now able to breathe again. Donald Trump no longer is president, and for that I sense many of us are grateful for reasons that go far beyond the contemptible manner in which he conducted himself as president.

He took the air out of the proverbial room seemingly every day he was in office. Indeed, it seems like the longest four years in many of our lives … you know?

Bloggers like me were sucked into the maelstrom that Trump created. The media, too. Yes, the folks Trump labeled as the “enemy of the people” became his most visible enablers.

Now, though, we can turn our attention to other things. Issues abound. Crises are all over the place.

We’re still waging war against a killer pandemic; our economy has collapsed; we have an environment in trouble; many Americans are treated unfairly by police authorities only because of the color of their skin.

President Biden won’t suck the air out of the room the way his immediate predecessor did. That is more than OK with me.

As for the media, my hope is that reporters also will relish the opportunity to chronicle the struggles that require government’s attention. My sense, given my own experience, is that they will welcome the relief from the exhaustion from which they will need a bit of time to recover.

national news

Biden set to re-emerge

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

While many of us around the country were fixated on the Senate impeachment trial of Donald John Trump, his immediate successor as president was, shall we say, lurking in the shadows.

President Biden chose to do the smart thing. He said virtually nothing about Trump’s troubles in the Senate. The president blew off questions from reporters on the impeachment trial. He said the Senate would do its work; that the managers would do their work; he expressed next to zero interest in the trial.

I don’t believe much of that. I cannot possibly know how the president spent the bulk of his day, but I feel reasonably certain he had one eye on the trial even as he sought to gather support for the COVID relief package he is ramrodding through Congress.

What I do find refreshing, though, is the relative public silence that President Biden has maintained. It’s remarkable, too, given that Vice President Kamala Harris’s name emerged as a possible witness in the Trump trial; Trump’s legal team reportedly was interested in issuing a subpoena for the VP. The “why” of it, though, remains a mystery to me.

The trial is now over. Donald Trump is officially acquitted of the charge that he incited an insurrection. Our attention now can turn to actual governance, actual legislation, actual negotiation between the head of the executive branch of government and those who lead the legislative branch.

Trump’s future as an active politician, by my reckoning, is likely finished.

I intend to focus more attention on issues that matter and on the politicians who have a direct hand in determining the direction of this great country.

national news

Trump skates … again!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It’s over.

The ending didn’t produce a result that I wanted. Fifty-seven U.S. senators voted to convict Donald Trump of inciting an insurrection against the government of this country; 43 of them voted “not guilty.”

But … the U.S. Constitution requires 10 more “guilty” votes to hold the ex-president accountable for what I know he did on Jan. 6, which was to whip an angry crowd into a frenzy, to march on Capitol Hill and to subvert Congress’s effort to certify a duly conducted free and fair election for president.

I acknowledge that the result is final. Most of our senators put country ahead of party or ahead of a man. Seven Republicans mustered up the guts to do the right thing.

There will be a lot of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over the post-vote speech delivered by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, which was riveting in its own right. McConnell had just minutes before cast a not guilty vote for Donald Trump. Then he stood before the nation and said, in effect, that Trump did all the things that the impeachment article alleged he did. He incited the crowd, which acted on the then-president’s own words.

McConnell also said that Trump didn’t get away with anything, that he will be held accountable later. Hmm.

So, we can move on to more pressing matters that are relevant to the here and now. President Biden is at work seeking to press Congress for COVID relief; we need help to jump-start the economy; we have environmental concerns that pose an existential threat to our national security; we have racial unrest still boiling in communities across the land.

I am ready to put this sorry episode aside. However, I won’t forget it.

Nor will I ever forgive Texas’s two senators — Ted Cruz and John Cornyn — for refusing to recognize what we all witnessed in real time, that Donald John Trump interfered in a free and fair election.

national news

Let’s move on … but do not forget!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Our latest national nightmare is winding its way to a conclusion.

I’ll toss a single bouquet at Donald Trump’s legal team. It took next to no time to finish its job in defending their client in the U.S. Senate trial against charges that he incited an insurrection against the U.S. government.

I don’t believe Trump’s team made the case. But that’s just me. He did what the House of Representatives alleged he did in its impeachment article. The remaining task will be for the Senate to cast its vote.

I do not expect a conviction. Trump will walk away. The Constitution sets a high bar for conviction, two-thirds of the senators have to agree; they won’t get there.

What now? Well, it is time to move on. It is not time to forget. Nor is it time to shove aside what happened on the Sixth of January. What happened was an egregious attack on our system of government. It was an attack on our democratic process.

The terrorists who stormed Capitol Hill intended to stop Congress from fulfilling its constitutional duty of certifying the results of an election that Donald Trump lost. He still hasn’t accepted his defeat, that Joe Biden is now president.

The Senate very soon can get busy with other pressing matters. COVID relief needs approval. There needs to be attention paid to economic revival. President Biden can now step out of the shadows cast by the impeachment trial and insert his own efforts at fixing what ails the nation.

I am fine with that. I only wish we could anticipate a more just outcome from the Senate trial. We won’t get it.

Instead, we are going to witness a majority of Republican senators continue to lick the boots of a cult figure. There might be a few crossovers, just not enough of them.

If I was King of the World, I would suggest that the Republican Party needs to assess whether it believes that “character matters,” and that it hues to the tenets of inclusion that made it a great political party. The Party of Trump represents none of it.

But, hey, that’s politics, right?

DC riot, national news

Trump-Pence: Done!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Imagine where former Vice President Mike Pence is at this moment and then ponder: What is he thinking if he is watching the U.S. Senate trial of Donald John Trump?

The House managers who are prosecuting the ex-president today told a chilling (true) tale of what happened on the Sixth of January, the day Trump incited the riotous mob to storm Capitol Hill.

Vice President Pence was at work in the Capitol Building at that time doing his constitutional duty, which was to preside over a joint congressional session that was meeting to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election — which Trump lost to Joe Biden.

Trump said Pence didn’t “have the courage” to go far beyond his constitutional responsibility and reverse the outcome of the election. The rioters went looking for Pence, declaring their intention to “hang” him.

Did Donald Trump call the VP to offer him comfort? Did he deploy security officers to rescue Pence from the murderous mob? Did he do anything to protect Pence, let alone members of Congress who were doing what the Constitution required them to do? No to all of it! Donald Trump did nothing.

So now I am left to wonder about the former vice president: What in the world is he thinking? How does he remain silent based on what I believe he has seen? How in the name of all that is decent does he maintain any kind of relationship with the man for whom he stood foursquare during their joint term in office?

I noted a while ago that Pence’s relationship with Trump likely ended when he did his job and declared that the 2020 presidential vote was legal, just and that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would become the next president and vice president of the United States.

Today’s testimony only cements my view that former Vice President Pence likely loathes the individual who asked him to join the clown car parade that ran the executive branch of the federal government.

national news

Restore ‘peaceful transition’

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

This myth must be dispelled … which is that the presidential transfer from Donald Trump to Joe Biden was not the “peaceful transition of power” we all cherish about our system of government.

That transition included the infamous terrorist riot of the Sixth of January, the one that killed five people, including a Capitol Police officer who died trying to keep the mob from overpowering the Capitol Building.

So, a Senate trial is about to commence. We must never — not ever! — lose sight of what we nearly lost on that terrible day and in the weeks that preceded it. We nearly lost what arguably is the most significant positive aspect of our system of government.

We go through a presidential election every four years. They produce a winner and a loser. The winner is filled with joy and anticipation of assuming the awesome power of the office. The loser is disappointed, and understandably so. But the candidate who loses that contest usually then calls the winner, offers a word of congratulations and then pledges to “work with” the winner in continuing our national journey.

That didn’t happen in 2020. The loser bitched and moaned about phony “vote fraud” and said the election was “stolen” from him. He mounted legal challenges ad nauseum against the result; state and federal courts threw them all out.

Then we had the riot. We all witnessed the horror.

Have we lost our bragging point? Has it been consigned to some historical trash heap? No. It hasn’t. The only way we can lose it forever would be if it were to repeat itself in four years, or any time after that.

We must be mindful of what happened during this transition. It wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t orderly. President Biden took office after harvesting his vast knowledge of government to ensure that when he took over the executive branch that he had as much of his team installed and ready to go as he could.

The transition from Trump to Biden should have been peaceful. It wasn’t. Let’s  not forget what we all witnessed and let us be sure we remind those who come after us about the danger that lurks when a losing presidential candidate refuses to concede that he or she has lost a free, fair and democratic election.