Joe Biden won the White House with one of the most progressive agendas of any major party presidential candidate in history.
But his ability to implement any of it will depend on whether he can govern a divided nation through what he called a “perfect storm” of four crises, starting with the coronavirus pandemic that has taken more than 230,000 American lives.
The three others: “The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The most compelling call for racial justice since the ’60s. And the undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change,” Biden said when he accepted the Democratic nomination in August.
The issues behind those crises were already part of his agenda to varying degrees. Biden promised to address them as “an American president. ... I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did.”
One challenge that Biden didn’t anticipate: a Republican Senate. Many pre-election polls had Democrats taking control of the chamber, but those prospects dimmed when the GOP won several competitive races. The Democrats’ slim chance at a majority almost certainly will depend on runoffs for both seats in Georgia in January.
Unifying the nation — or even Democrats — will be a challenge. Biden managed to weave through the campaign without alienating either those on his left or the Never Trumpers to his right. For at least as long as President Trump’s legal challenges to the election process continue, that detente will last. But assuming those challenges ultimately fail and Trump leaves the scene, it is likely to vanish.
Biden urged Americans to put the partisan rhetoric of the campaign behind them, in remarks Friday near his home in Delaware. The nation has “serious problems to deal with,” he said, “from COVID to our economy to racial justice to the climate.”
“We don’t have any more time to waste on partisan warfare,” Biden said. “But we have to remember: The purpose of our politics isn’t total, unrelenting, unending warfare. No. The purpose of our politics, the work of the nation, isn’t to fan the flames of conflict — but to solve problems.”
But whether in the majority or a substantial minority, Senate Republicans led by Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell will try to jam Biden’s agenda, much as they did to the last Democrat in the White House, Barack Obama.
Biden will have to work with progressive Democrats who supported him throughout the campaign, but have promised to pull him to the left on health care, taxes and the environment.
Here is what Biden hopes to focus on:
Ending the pandemic: Biden promised to “level with the American people” about what needs to be done and to “follow the science” to find answers, not just for public health but to get the economy in order.
This is the issue that got Biden elected and the one he will be judged on foremost. If he fails to pull the nation out of this crisis, it will doom the rest of his agenda.
Biden called for tripling the 1 million tests a day that the U.S. now conducts. He said he would work with governors and local leaders to promote a national mask mandate. And he would use the federal Defense Production Act, which allows the federal government to compel companies to fulfill its orders first, to fortify the supply chain for personal protective equipment and ventilators, especially in lower-income and other hard-hit communities.
Biden said he wants to hire 100,000 people to be part of a national contact-tracing workforce that would help public health departments around the country.
“It’s a pretty detailed plan. It’s quite polished,” George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert with UCSF, told The Chronicle last month. “If Biden wins and starts putting parts of his plan in place immediately, it has potential for being a major turning point in this pandemic.”
Implementing a plan will test Biden’s unifying skills. Opposition will come from many quarters, starting with those who consider mask-wearing to be a political statement.
Red-state governors will resist a national mask mandate as a violation of personal freedoms, even if infection rates continue to soar. Right-wing activists could protest the federal government trying to tell them what to do.
Republicans in Congress may deride invoking the Defense Production Act as a socialist incursion on private industry — or “nationalization,” as Trump referred to it in March.
“We’re a country not based on nationalizing our business,” Trump said then. “Call a person over in Venezuela, ask them, how did nationalization of their businesses work out? Not too well.”
Expanding health care: Biden wants to expand the Affordable Care Act by allowing people to buy into the government-run Medicare program — a plan that’s known as the public option. Those who don’t want to do so would still have their private insurance. He also supports lowering the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60.
Biden recoiled from the multitrillion-dollar cost of Medicare for All during the campaign, saying a government-administered system that did away with private insurance would be too costly.
Even though he inched toward Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ signature issue with his proposals, progressives in Congress and elsewhere will push for fully adopting Medicare for All. Between 5 million and 10 million Americans have lost their work-linked health care coverage during the pandemic, in addition to the 26 million Americans who were already uninsured before the coronavirus spread.
What could upend Biden’s plans: If the Supreme Court kills the health care law, in a case it will hear Tuesday.
If the court strikes down the entire law, Biden said he would “pass Obamacare with a public option — it becomes Bidencare.” That sounds easy, but is unlikely if Republicans hold the Senate.
Reforming immigration: Biden pledged that within 100 days of taking office, he will direct Congress to craft a pathway to citizenship for more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
“It had better happen,” said Jacqueline Martinez Garcel, CEO of the Latino Community Foundation. “Obama promised it, too, but we got shafted by the Obama presidency. (Biden) has a plan that’s ready to go.”
Immigration reform was not a top priority in Obama’s first term, and the Democratic Congress focused on passing the Affordable Care Act and digging out from the recession.
The Senate passed an immigration plan in 2013 that might have cleared the House, but hard-line conservatives wouldn’t let then-Speaker John Boehner bring it to a vote. Little has changed among Republicans when it comes to immigration since then. Without a Democratic Senate, immigration reform could be again be gridlocked.
Biden promised to offer a road to citizenship for people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that provides legal status for “Dreamers,” undocumented people who were brought to the United States as children. But without a Democratic Senate, Biden couldn’t put them on a path to citizenship, said Bill Hing, a professor of law and migration studies at the University of San Francisco, where he directs the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic.
Biden also wants to raise the annual cap on refugee admissions to 125,000 from its current 15,000. He can do so through executive order and would not need congressional approval.
Biden also promised to protect those with Temporary Protected Status, a program that provides relief to undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. if their home countries suffered life-threatening disasters and war. Trump ended protections for 300,000 people in the program through an executive order that Biden could reverse.
Biden also pledged to undo many of Trump’s more hard-line immigration policies, including a travel ban that largely affects people from predominantly Muslin nations, construction of a southern border wall and separation of migrant families at the border. None of those reversals would need congressional approval.
“There’s a lot that can get done immediately,” Garcel said. “And given the fact that (support from) Latinos hands down guaranteed his victory, he must act immediately to keep building the momentum so folks stay engaged into 2022.”
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Stronger action on climate change: Biden wants the U.S. to be fully powered by renewable energy by 2035. Unlike many progressives, however, he hasn’t disavowed fracking, a natural-gas-extraction process that releases large amounts of greenhouse gases and can contaminate groundwater.
He wants to spend nearly $2 trillion over four years on increasing renewable power and creating incentives to build more energy-efficient buildings, homes and cars. Biden says this would create 10 million jobs in the clean-energy sector, triple the current total.
He doesn’t support the Green New Deal, which calls for the U.S. to run on 100% renewable energy within 10 years. Progressives will try to pull him toward its goals.
But again, without a friendly Senate, Biden’s climate plan won’t go far. The top 20 recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industries in the Senate this year were all Republicans, led by Sen. John Cornyn, the just-re-elected Texan, who received $900,725, according the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Free college — for some: Biden proposed to make public college education tuition-free for students whose families make less than $125,000 annually. That would also include tuition at historically Black colleges and universities, about half of which are private. He would make community college free for everyone, regardless of income.
That entire plan would cost $683 billion over the next 10 years. A Georgetown University study said it would pay for itself over a decade in the form of higher tax revenue from people who would have better jobs than if they hadn’t gone to college.
However, there’s a big question hovering over the plan. Biden says the federal government would cover two-thirds of the tuition costs, with states picking up the rest. But the pandemic has crushed many state budgets. California, for example, had to cut spending on its public universities this year to help eliminate a $54 billion deficit.
Biden is also backing a plan that would eliminate up to $10,000 in student loan debt.
Raising the minimum wage: Biden has said he supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, to be phased in over several years. This is a favorite of progressives like Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
However, he might have trouble getting more moderate Democrats from states with a lower cost of living to support raising the federal wage floor from its current $7.25 an hour — let alone Senate Republicans. The wage hasn’t been raised since 2009. (It’s now $12 or $13 an hour in California, depending on how many workers an employer has, and is scheduled to increase to $15 in 2023. It’s already that high or higher in several Bay Area cities.)
Higher taxes for the rich, corporations: So how would Biden pay for all these programs? He wants to raise taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations.
He proposes raising the top income tax rate to 39.6% for people making more than $400,000, the level it was under Obama. He would also increase the corporate tax rate to 28% from its current 21%. And he would raise the capital gains tax rate to 39.6% for investment income above $1 million.
These proposals would raise an estimated $4.1 trillion over a decade. Of course, any attempt to raise taxes would be fiercely opposed by the GOP, which passed a huge tax cut in 2017 that predominantly favored corporations and wealthier Americans. So if the GOP runs the Senate, Biden’s tax proposals would never see daylight.
Unless Democrats somehow win the Senate, Biden’s first call as president-elect may be to McConnell. Some negotiation will be in order if Biden wants to get anything done.
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
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