Jason Chaffetz: Biden administration — here’s what to expect

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Americans should prepare for a severe case of whiplash as President Joe Biden’s administration takes office. With power changing hands, political expediency will drive Democrats to embrace positions they spent four years castigating. Meanwhile, we'll see a sea change in the way media cover the president.

 With Democrats now in control of the House, the Senate and the presidency, we can almost certainly expect the Democrats' almost religious devotion to resistance and protest to wane, while their renewed commitment to law and order will manifest itself in efforts to control speech and suppress dissent.

 Where resistance was portrayed by the media during the Trump administration as a virtue, it will now once again be known as "obstruction." The Democrats will revert back calling Republicans "the party of no" as the Democrats did during the Obama administration — a characterization almost never applied to Democrats during Trump's term.

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 Instead of White House news conferences that play out like cross-examinations, we'll get well-choreographed photo ops with little candor from a president who will rarely take direct questions or stop to answer questions on his way to his motorcade or Marine One, the way President Trump did.

And don’t expect the bulk of the White House press corps to hound Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris the way they pursued Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

And speaking of a compliant media, we can expect the Biden administration to follow in the steps of the Obama administration to leverage the mainstream media's unsavory devotion to the Democratic Party and deliberately mislead the public.

We saw how it worked with President Obama's Iran nuclear deal. Obama Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes bragged about how easily the administration had created a national "echo chamber" to sell a false narrative about the deal to a fawning press corps.

Obvious policy reversals can also be expected from the Biden administration. Instead of lockdowns and restrictions to combat the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden team will now embrace stimulus payments and grand reopenings of parts of the economy. 

Instead of criticizing and dismissing the Trump administration's successful fast-tracking of a coronavirus vaccine, the Biden administration will take credit for the resulting success, with applause from its media enablers.

As with any Democratic administration, we can expect to see government grow, spending explode, and taxes increase. These changes are predictable. But other changes may be less obvious, like the sudden allegiance of many federal employees who spent four years sabotaging their commander in chief. 

Anticipating a president who will fulfill their dreams of heavy-handed regulation, ever-growing budgets, and unrestrained surveillance power, the federal bureaucracy will welcome further weaponization of its powers to retaliate against Trump supporters.

Perhaps the most predictable battle is the coming filibuster fight, a procedural change necessary for Senate Democrats to impose their most unpopular agenda items on a sharply divided electorate. Look for heavy pressure to be applied against holdout Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who is on the record opposing his party's efforts to drop the support threshold from 60 votes to a simple majority in the 100-member Senate for most major legislation.

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Should Democrats somehow convince recalcitrant senators to go along with dropping the filibuster, we can expect a no-holds-barred stampede to preserve Democratic Party power.
Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood will top the list. This will be followed by massive new entitlement programs for health care and student loans — designed to be irreversible, of course.

 With democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont heading up the Senate Budget Committee, there will be no limits to the amount of money Democrats will feel entitled to take from wage earners.

 And don’t forget House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s longstanding effort to federalize elections, removing the constitutional imperative for local control. The San Francisco Democrat would rather have Washington dictate election processes.

Given the success of Democratic efforts to obscure and prevent ballot authentication in the 2020 election cycle, we'll see them prioritize the federal codification of election procedures that explicitly prevent the validation of the vote in future elections.

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I find a glimmer of hope in Biden’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland as attorney general. Garland is a serious choice. I remain hopeful that he will permit ongoing investigations to reach their appropriate conclusions without interference.

Thanks to President Trump, far fewer Americans willingly accept carefully constructed fake media narratives at face value. I remain hopeful that Americans will seek out truth from reliable news sources, reject efforts to hamper their freedom of speech and assembly, and lean on their state legislatures to push back hard against incursions of state and local authority.

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