Biden is using his remaining time in office to give the country what it rejected
You may have heard that President Biden and his team have been focused during their last days in office on building his “legacy.”
That word used to mean using the last days in office to cement an administration’s successes, while maybe adding a bow on top with a few small extras that people like. Today, it is code for having the left inflict upon us all of the really radical stuff that voters just rejected, now that the election is over and there can't be any accountability.
That might mean taking huge swaths of land out of potential energy production, allowing federal workers to stay home for the next five years or pardoning Hunter Biden. In each one, one has to wonder how any of that actually contributes to any sort of "legacy" that Biden would want.
But I suppose it is all consistent with the current mentality of the left — that people are just too stupid to vote for what is good for them, and therefore progressives will give it to them anyway.
Of course, it isn’t just the outgoing president looking to leave its mark on the nation before giving up the levers of power. Never to be left behind when it comes to reminding people what irresponsible progressive legacy-building looks like, Rohit Chopra has been burning the midnight oil making sure that people get exactly the sort of government they just voted against.
Although he will likely be one of the first people to receive his walking papers next Monday afternoon, Chopra, through his role as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and his seat on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has proposed, issued or finalized at least five new rulemakings since the election. He has filed more lawsuits than that.
He continues to hound private equity over its passive ownership — emphasis on passive — of FDIC-insured banks.
His justification — for not only proposing new regulation, but for also breaking all sort of rules regarding pre-determining the outcome of the rulemaking — is that large asset managers were a “natural oligopoly.”
He cites no evidence of injury to consumers — maybe he forgot what the “C” stands for in "CFPB." In fact, consumers seem to like passive asset managers. Chopra certainly does, at least when it comes to investing his own money.
It's hard to imagine that sticking it to questionable “natural oligopolists” passively invested in FDIC-insured banks is the sort of “legacy” Biden dreamed of back in the 1980s when he was plagiarizing speeches during his first presidential campaign. It’s even harder to imagine working class folks in Pittsburgh or Milwaukee reading about Chopra’s actions today and clamoring for a redo on the election so that they can vote for these folks.
The bottom line is that none of this has anything to do with legacy. It has to do with power. Leftists hate oil (hence the ban) and love federal workers, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat (hence the work rules). They especially hate capitalism, banks and rich people — at least the ones who don’t give to liberal causes.
Private equity investing in banks checks all of those boxes.
Might makes right, and for one more week, progressives have the power to really stick it to people they dislike. That is the real legacy here.
Six years ago, when I was running the CFPB, a group of lawyers led by Brian Johnson and Eric Blankenstein came up with a way — consistent with the statutory law — for a president to effectively shutter the Bureau. For this, Blankenstein was subjected to a Stalinesque character assassination by the left that foreshadowed what many Trump team members would face after leaving office.
Turnabout, as they say, is fair play. Trump should look to put people like those two back at the Bureau.
In fact, we had people throughout the government who were truly committed to fixing the place. Those folks are still out there. Many are getting ready to go back in the administration.
Unlike Biden, who is using his last hours in office to give the country what people expressly rejected in November, Trump is in a position — not just at the CFPB, but everywhere across the executive branch — to give people what they actually voted for: undoing everything the progressive left has done to this country.
Now that would be a legacy to be proud of.
Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.