By Tim Donner

Snip

The Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for the precarious position in which they find themselves. They have dramatically – and, perhaps, deliberately – misread the mandate handed them by the voters of 2020. What exactly was that mandate? Well, in essence, Joe Biden could have just taken the oath of office, headed straight to the Wilmington White House, and then said and done nothing beyond the bare minimum – that by itself would have fulfilled the lone mandate which most can agree was granted to this 46th president. The man sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office would no longer be Donald Trump. Mission accomplished

Proof that the mandate was limited to the removal of Trump came in congressional elections. If the voters were demanding the type of change Democrats are now trying to make law, they would have at least achieved a majority in the Senate, which they failed to do even though the GOP had to defend a supermajority of the seats in play. And if a desire for systemic change was sweeping the land, Democrats would not have actually lost seats in the House, which they did, clinging to a tenuous majority, and making Biden the first president in decades to secure the presidency while his party lost seats in the lower chamber.

To argue with a straight face that Biden’s mandate extends to the radical transformation of society implicit in the Democrats’ multi-trillion-dollar assault on the taxpayers is to openly admit that you don’t care one whit about what the voters want. Instead, you are essentially advertising your engagement in the worst type of carpe diem, seizing the day and the opportunity granted you not to fulfill the voters’ desires, but to actualize and force feed your own outsized utopian dreams on a society that did not vote for them. Democrats are, perhaps rightly, acting as if this attempt to transform the social compact is their last, best hope of enforcing what they could never achieve at the ballot box. One can only imagine the fresh round of coercion implicit in this scheme’s new governmental controls extending from the womb to the casket. And as to cost, Biden has made a claim that has become a laugh line, only he delivered it with a straight face: The actual, final “cost” of the $3.5 trillion boondoggle will be “zero.”