Time once again to demonstrate that "presidents have no mandate to wield power after close elections" is a scam directed solely and entirely at Republicans. By any objective standard, Biden has less of a "mandate" than anyone in memory, but no one in the media will say that.
The "mandate" narrative is silly as a matter of constitutional law. Nowhere is it written that a president's authority is diminished if the election was close, or people who didn't vote for him think his victory was illegitimate. But that's all we heard for years after Trump won.
Of course, not a single such complaint will be leveled at Biden. No one in the political/media class will insist he has an asterisk after his name and should be prevented from exercising the full powers of office, and then some.
Biden won't have to worry about "resistance" bureaucrats sabotaging his administration from Minute One or crazy Hawaiian judges stalling his policy agenda. If anyone tries it, the media will absolutely savage them, instead of cheering them on. Their very lives would be in danger.
As a matter of politics, it's fair enough to suggest that policies should be crafted with due recognition for the feelings of the opposition, and if the election was razor-close, extra care should be taken to recognize the divided electorate.
But of course, in practice that suggestion is only made with vigor when Republicans win. They're always lectured about the need to respect the passionate opposition of the Left and they must make power-sharing deals with Democrats to admit they didn't really "win" the election.
When Democrats win, they have total power to enact every bit of their highly coercive agenda, and anyone who resists is a lunatic, a selfish monster, or an intransigent political hack. Checks and balances become hideous "roadblocks to progress." Dissent becomes un-American.
In Biden's case, the idea of a "mandate" for sweeping power is especially laughable. Even leaving aside the question of outright fraud, he won by harvesting votes from lazy people who didn't give a damn about the down-ballot and knew nothing about any issue except Orange Man Bad.
Biden hid in his basement throughout the campaign, and the media studiously avoided asking him tough questions about policy. The election became a straight up-or-down referendum on Donald Trump after a year-long crisis of cataclysmic proportions. Biden was just The Other Guy.
And even at that - with the media absolutely BECOMING the Biden 2020 campaign, pop culture demonizing Trump, a constant drumbeat of bad Covid news, and a fair number of GOP voters turned off by Trump's style - he came within, what, 50k votes of winning in a couple of key states?
By the near-universal estimate of the political and media class, expressed through polls and punditry, Trump went into the 2020 election with the longest odds any incumbent ever faced. The media carried his snoring opponent down the racetrack in a sedan chair.
And yet, Trump ended up winning on Election Night, and only the Mystery Votes After Midnight turned the tide against him. There's little question he would have won except for the coronavirus, and even that was more a matter of rhetoric and feelings than policy.
Even if all challenges to the legitimacy of those vast bundles of "blank except for Biden" ballots and those absolutely absurd mail-in votes are set aside, they reveal no "mandate" whatsoever for Biden. It was just visceral anger at Trump after an unprecedented year of calamity.
Democrats moved heaven and earth to make those ballots into thumbs-up/thumbs-down comment cards and used their media to whip disaffected voters into spending ten seconds filling them out. Dems disabled all ballot security measures to ensure the sloppiest ballots were counted.
It was clever and ruthless, and Republican officials were absolute fools to let the Dems run their ballot-weakening strategy, but it confers nothing resembling a "mandate" upon Biden. On the contrary, the opposition party did astoundingly well in the election.
But of course, none of that will matter to the people who shriek about mandates and compromise when Republicans win. They'll insist Biden has complete power to do whatever he wants and employ unlimited coercive force against the millions of voters who disagree with him.
A lesson no one in the political class will learn: if you really believe "mandates" are important, and executive power should be limited by the size and intensity of the opposition, then you MUST logically insist on the tightest ballot controls and voter ID measures.
You should want those tight ballots not just to prevent fraud, although that's obviously important, but to make voting HARDER so people take it more seriously. If "mandates" are a thing, then aggressively harvesting the votes of people who don't give a damn is wrong.
We should maximize the serious vote. The opposite strategy was pursued with gusto in 2020, and now we'll be told the candidate who won with the most unserious votes ever has a "mandate," even though his margin of victory clearly came from people who didn't vote "for" him. /end
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