President Joe Biden vs. Senator Joe Biden
After House Republicans passed the $1.5 trillion "Limit, Save, Grow Act," the victorious speaker, Kevin McCarthy, proudly stated, "We’ve lifted the debt limit. We sent it to the Senate. We’ve done our job. . . . The president should sit down and negotiate."
The senior senator from West Virginia, Democrat Joe Manchin, agreed. He called on the president to negotiate saying "only the president can prevent this from becoming a full-blown domestic crisis."
But, President Biden, who called the McCarthy plan "wacko" ignored Manchin’s advice and announced he will not negotiate on the debt limit. Republicans, he insisted, must raise the debt limit before there could be any talks on the budget.
Biden’s refusal to negotiate is odd, because as a U.S. senator for 40 years, he constantly preached the need for consensus and bipartisanship.
Sen. Biden was not averse to cutting deals with political opponents.
When it came to debt limitations, taxes and spending, Sen. Biden was a fiscal hawk.
He frequently linked raising the national debt ceiling with spending cuts.
In 1974, the National Taxpayers Union named Biden the sixth most fiscally conservative senator.
Four years later, Biden called for across the board cuts to federal agencies, a hiring freeze, and opened the door to supporting a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
During President Reagan’s first year in office, Biden voted for the president’s budget, that had significant cuts, and supported the Reagan tax plan that lowered the top marginal income tax rate from 70% to 50%.
In 1981 Biden also said, "As I listened over the years in this body, I became more a believer in balanced budgets."
Describing himself as a fiscal conservative he called for a cap on spending.
Biden actually introduced his own proposal in 1984 to freeze spending, which he expected the left to condemn as "draconian."
His plan, if enacted, would have cut spending and would have halted increases in Social Security and Medicaid payments.
Admitting his plan "shocked the living devil out of everyone in the Senate," he added, "If deficit spending was not curtailed the economy [would] come crashing down and could cause an economic and political crisis of extraordinary proportions."
Biden went on to publicly support Reagan’s call for the line-item veto and voted for a bill that required Congress to freeze budget spending for one year before increasing the national debt ceiling.
He also voted for the 1985 Gramm-Rudman "Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985," which imposed spending constraints on the federal budget.
The Act which then-President Ronald Reagan signed into law, "set declining deficit targets for the federal government and established an automatic enforcement mechanism called sequestration."
There’s more.
In the 1990s Biden supported a constitutional amendment that would require the federal budget to be balanced.
While he did not consider the amendment the best answer to the spending crisis he was "prepared to take whatever I consider radical medicine."
"Faced with a choice of an imperfect Amendment or continue spending," Biden said he had "sufficient confidence in our citizens and in our political institutions that we will confront any challenges."
Biden also supported in 1996 the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform legislation that was opposed by Senate Democratic stalwarts, Ted Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
His reasoning for supporting the measure, "It’s time to say we do not care who gets credit for reforming welfare. It is time to just do it -in a bipartisan fashion -for the sake of the American people and for the sake of the people on welfare."
During his years in the Senate, Biden would boast time and again that he was not "as liberal as most people think." He even compared liberals to lemmings. "Every two years,’’ he quipped, "they jump off a cliff."
Let’s see … Sen. Biden supported bipartisanship, debt ceiling extensions connected to spending cuts, "draconian" measures to achieve a balanced federal budget, income tax cuts and was not afraid to challenge the leftist ideologues in his party.
Since moving into the White House, however, Biden has rejected all the aforementioned positions.
Why? Because he is a political chameleon — aka, a shameless hypocrite.
During his long political career, Biden has blown with the prevailing political winds. To hold power and to actualize his Messianic belief that he was destined to be president, he took whatever position on a given issue that worked to achieve those ends.
To become president, Biden abandoned his centrist views and agreed to support every wacky leftist fiscal, economic, environmental and cultural proposal.
And to keep the office he will happily march lockstep with radical Democrats down the road to perdition.
During the 2024 presidential season the best debate would be between Sen. Joe Biden and President Joe Biden.
As for the outcome, this writer's guess is both would surely lose.
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.