by Joseph Klein
"Progressives" cement their Deep State.
The Biden-Harris Transition website identifies the members of the transition’s government agency teams who are responsible, according to the website, for “ensuring a smooth transfer of power, and preparing for President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris and their cabinet to hit the ground running on Day One.” The list is full of leftist progressives as team leaders and members, presaging the left’s influence in cementing its own deep state to steer the Biden-Harris policy agenda its way.
The transition team leader assigned to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for example, is Ur Jaddou. After serving as chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under then-President Barack Obama, Jaddou became the director of DHS Watch at America’s Voice. This left-wing pro-amnesty group calls for reforms to “put 11 million undocumented Americans on a path to full citizenship.” Biden is already on record supporting this sweeping amnesty program.
Jaddou was sharply critical of the Trump administration’s decision to deploy some agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to protect a federal court building in Portland Oregon from the rampaging mobs seeking to destroy it. Jaddou was upset by what she falsely claimed was CBP’s attacks on “peaceful protesters.“ Jaddou demanded that unless and until “Trump’s CBP” stops such attacks and there is “real reform and meaningful accountability, Congress should not appropriate any additional money to CBP or allow CBP to move its money around.”
In other words, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security transition team leader wants a radically transformed DHS where the use of DHS resources to secure federal property on American soil from mob violence is out of bounds.
According to Nick Miroff, who covers immigration enforcement and the DHS for the Washington Post, Jaddou “is viewed as a frontrunner for USCIS director.” If so, Jaddou can be expected to bring with her other members of her transition agency team who think like her. One example is Blas Nunez-Neto, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation with previous experience advising the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. Nunez-Neto advocates expanding the discredited catch and release program.
The Biden transition agency team leader for the Environmental Protection Agency is Patrice Simms, who served in the Obama administration and now works for the left-wing environmentalist group Earthjustice. Earthjustice is committed to ending the nation’s use of fossil fuels “and bringing about a swift and just transition to zero carbon emissions and 100% clean energy.” Simms boasted that “Earthjustice has filed more than 110 lawsuits against the Trump administration’s efforts to gut environmental safeguards, and we are winning many of those fights long before they ever reach the Supreme Court.”
Climate activists are interspersed throughout various transition agency teams, beyond just the agencies most involved in environment-related issues such as the EPA, the Energy Department, Interior Department, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “Unlike past transitions, officials with significant climate or clean energy experience also pop up in departments like State, Defense, Treasury and Justice,” E&E News observed. “They're even handling the transition at agencies that, so far, have been on the periphery of climate policy, like the Small Business Administration and the Federal Reserve.”
The Biden transition agency team leader for the National Security Council is Jeff Prescott, a former senior director for Iran on the National Security Council in the Obama administration. Prescott also served as then-Vice President Joe Biden's deputy national security advisor. Prescott has since worked for National Security Action, an anti-Trump network made up, according to its website, of “former senior officials and policy experts, academics, and civil society leaders who are dedicated to a progressive vision of American global leadership.” Some of them were responsible for pushing forward the Obama administration’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, which they continue to defend.
Prescott shares the climate change alarmism of Patrice Simms’ Earthjustice. He wrote an article last year, for example, claiming that President Trump’s stance on climate change “is putting not just the United States, but the entire planet on the brink of meltdown.” Prescott's willingness to coddle the Iranian regime could put the planet on the brink of nuclear meltdown.
Kelly Magsamen is one of the members on the Biden transition agency team for the National Security Council led by Prescott. She is the leftist Center for American Progress’s Vice President for National Security and International Policy. Magsamen has criticized President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against the Iranian regime. She claimed that Trump “recklessly escalated tensions in the Middle East by ordering a strike on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani.” The removal of Iran’s terrorist mastermind with American blood on his hands, who was putting into motion a plan to kill more Americans in Iraq until Trump stopped him, did not trigger a new war in the Middle East as Magsamen had feared.
Magsamen claimed that Trump’s approach to dealing with North Korea had exacerbated tensions. Precisely the opposite is true. Following President Trump’s outreach to Kim Jong Un, the North Korean regime has suspended its testing of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Magsamen also criticized one of Trump’s most significant achievements on trade, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), because it “doesn’t go far enough on labor or environmental standards to make a real difference for working Americans.” Even Biden had to admit that USMCA was an improvement over NAFTA.
The Biden transition agency team leader for the intelligence community is Stephanie O’Sullivan. This former principal deputy director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in the Obama administration submitted an unmasking request for intelligence about Michael Flynn. Bob Litt, who served as general counsel for ODNI during the Obama administration and is now on the O’Sullivan-led intelligence transition team for Biden, reportedly discussed the idea of using the archaic Logan Act against Flynn as part of the Obama administration's shameless persecution of Flynn.
The Biden transition agency team leader for the Department of Education is Linda Darling-Hammond, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s choice to serve as president of the State Board of Education. She has opposed merit pay for teachers, which makes her a friend of teachers’ unions. Darling-Hammond has “strong ties with the labor and the social justice communities,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Four members of her team are from national teachers’ unions. Emma Vadehra, a member of the Department of Education transition team, works for the Century Foundation, which lists as one of its top priorities for 2021 the expansion of high-quality free and debt-free college options financed by the federal government. It also advocates some form of student loan cancellation.
Gary Gensler is the Biden transition agency team leader for the Federal Reserve, Banking and Securities Regulators group of agencies. Gensler, who is currently a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2009 to 2014. His appointment to lead this transition agency team “will likely calm the nerves of progressives who want Biden to take a hard line with the finance industry,” according to Politico.
As these examples demonstrate, leftist progressives populating Biden’s various government transition teams are poised to strongly influence the direction of key federal government agencies’ hiring decisions and policy priorities under a Biden-Harris administration. But they will never be satisfied until they secure complete control. It’s all about demanding payback from Joe Biden for supporting him in the election.
For example, various progressive climate change activist groups held a rally outside the Democratic National Committee building in Washington D.C. last Thursday, including the US Climate Action Network, the Sunrise Movement, the Climate Justice Alliance and the Indigenous Environmental Network. They were furious with Biden’s selection of Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond to serve as his senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement because Richmond was considered too cozy with the fossil fuel industry.
“We don’t feel like we want to be in a confrontational pose, but if we need to, we will be,” said Keya Chatterjee, executive director of the US Climate Action Network. “Right now is the moment where a lot of decisions are being made about whether or not the right personnel are going to be in place to actually be ambitious in a green recovery and get done everything that they ran on.” (Emphasis added)
Democratic-Socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and her fellow Squad members also took part in the rally and addressed their adoring fans. “We're going to secure the basic tenets of a Green New Deal, a multi-trillion jobs program for climate, for environmental, racial, gender and class justice,” AOC declared. She urged continued pressure to make sure that Biden keeps his promises and “we have environmental justice front and center.”
New York Congressman-elect Jamaal Bowman, a Democratic-Socialist, was even more explicit. "Black and Brown communities organized across the country to make sure Joe Biden won the White House, and he did that, but now it's time for payback,” Bowman said. (Emphasis added)
Climate change activists will expect a Biden-Harris administration to bow to their demands for “environmental justice” in return for the votes of “environmental justice communities” that they claim made Biden’s victory possible. Black Lives Matter movement activists will expect their demands for “racial justice” to be met in return for what they claim was their delivery of the election for Biden. And the same is true for the leftist progressives who demand as payback for their support that Biden-Harris embrace their policy agendas to achieve gender, class, LGBTQIA+ and intersectional “justice.”
More than 40 progressive groups, under the auspices of the Progressive Change Institute, have submitted to the Biden transition team 400 names of individuals the groups want considered for key government positions in a Biden-Harris administration. "This is a roadmap for how Biden can get a bold agenda done, even with Republican obstruction in the Senate," said Stephanie Taylor, founder and Board President of the Progressive Change Institute. "And the way you do that is through the right personnel in place."
According to Taylor, the plan is to place these individuals in agencies across the executive branch, such as the Office of Management and Budget, the Export Import Bank and the IRS, where they can advance the Green New Deal and other progressive initiatives “without requiring any act of Congress."
In short, progressive leftists are plotting to cement their own version of the deep state inside the executive branch to end run Congress, no matter what happens in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. Only constitutionalist justices and judges can stop them.
Joseph Klein
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/bidens-transition-government-agency-teams-tilt-joseph-klein/
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