Vice President Biden Moves Further Left

May 13, 2020

If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, it is now – Vice President Joe Biden has fully embraced the Democratic progressive movement. Biden may have entered the campaign race as an “establishment Democrat,” but the team he’s surrounded himself with, and the policy he is promoting, now represents that of a Democratic socialist.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) will now co-chair a task force for Biden’s campaign on climate change. Biden was once opposed to extreme environmental policies. In December, he told a campaign rally attendee, “Because you can’t ban fracking right now; you’ve got to transition away from it.” When challenged, Biden said, “You ought to vote for somebody else.” Just a few months later, during a national debate with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), he expressed his support for a complete ban on fracking. Now, he is assembling a team of extremists that have been demonizing the natural gas and oil industry for years.

Last year, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal. As Power The Future has outlined before, this proposed legislation would mean 1.4 million jobs lost and a $3.9 trillion hit to the economy by 2040. Power The Future also conducted a study that calculates exactly how much this radical proposal would cost the average American family – $74,287 in its first year of implementation, and over $40,000 in the subsequent four years. 

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is certainly not the only far-left member of Biden’s task force. The group includes Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement. The Sunrise Movement, a long-time proponent of the Green New Deal, is one of the largest and most extreme eco-activist groups in the nation. Former Attorney General Eric Holder is another member of the task force, who said at a campaign event in 2018, “Michelle (Obama) always says, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ No. No. When they (Republicans) go low, we kick them.”

Not surprisingly, Senator Sanders has been very complimentary of Biden’s task force, claiming that he is “working together with my campaign to assemble a group of leading thinkers and activists who can and will unify our party in a transformational and progressive direction.” While Biden’s efforts are certainly taking the party in a progressive direction, they are not unifying it or tackling important issues – he is pandering to the eco-left in hope of their support. As he continues his movement farther and farther left on the political spectrum, he is leaving the millions of Americans behind who depend on the natural gas and oil industry to put food on their tables. As we approach election day, hopefully, that will only become more and more apparent.