Democrats and their new talking point propaganda campaign to get Joe Biden to step away from the office are saying he can leave knowing he was as consequential a president as LBJ.
Fact check – Lie.
Now, you don’t need to read anymore to know that’s just not true, but I will give you some facts. They spin, and their proclamations are all lies.
Johnson had political achievements that are still with us today, some for the better and some for the worse. I’m conservative, and I don’t like most of what he did.
But other than that, Johnson created the welfare state. He expanded Social Security and created Medicare and Medicaid. The Bilingual Act allowed American children of immigrants with limited English skills to learn our language and assimilate into society. The Food Stamp Act made the program permanent. Federal funding was established for arts and humanities. Public broadcasting was created. There are consumer protection laws still on the books today. A set of environmental protection laws, most famously the Clean Air Act, were enacted. Housing aid bills were passed and became law, and a federal minimum wage was established.
And they all were passed by Congress with bipartisan votes. Remember, Lyndon Johnson was the “Master of the Senate.” I am not even sure President Biden is the “master of my (his) domain.”
If you’re conservative, you have at best mixed feelings about these and likely oppose most of them outright. Our debt problem was created by Johnson’s Great Society. But for better or worse, his legacy continues.
LBJ also significantly expanded our involvement in Vietnam. His Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, wrote in his memoirs that he sent young Americans to the war knowing that there was no plan for success. The defeat in Vietnam happened later, but it was caused by Johnson.
I do not want to pretend that there was nothing good about the Great Society. Think Civil Rights Act. However, many stalwart Democrats became disillusioned by the massive government expansion and eventually left their party to become conservative Republicans who voted and worked for Ronald Reagan.
That’s undeniably LBJ’s greatest success after the Civil Rights Act.
Now let’s compare these with Biden.
There have been four major bills that became law under Biden with large bipartisan majorities: the TikTok ban, the CHIPS Act, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (gun control). They have one thing in common: All were led by Congress, and the White House stayed out of all of them. None were Biden’s agenda.
The things that Biden campaigned on and worked to get passed, most famously the American Rescue Plan and Build Back Better, passed on partisan lines, and all were just throwing goodies at their constituents. None is big enough to make a legacy. Those who lived through them will remember what a bad president Biden was, and in the grand scheme of things, future generations will not know about any of them.
There is one LBJ legacy that any right-thinking person should support: The Civil Rights Act, which expanded voting to all Americans and prevented discrimination. I know about all the arguments against the Civil Rights Act, which center around concerns about property rights. However, the expansion of voting rights to black Americans is non-negotiable, and it’s a shame that it took so long.
The Democrats claim that voting rights are under threat. (Newsflash: They lie.) Biden even said that black Americans were living under Jim Crow 2.0 and compared Mitt Romney to Bull Connor. (Newsflash: He lied.) And to save voting rights, Biden tried to pass another voting rights bill through Congress. It was dead on arrival. So, if you buy into their logic, we might become an authoritarian country, and did Biden fail to prevent it?
Simply put, if you’re a Democrat, you believe that voting rights are LBJ’s greatest legacy—and you’d be right. You also believe that protecting voting rights was Biden’s foremost imperative. Yet Biden failed to live up to this demand. And they claim that he’s as consequential as LBJ? Do they even hear themselves?
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
