President Joe Biden has created a mess for himself, and he would like Americans to pay for it with their personal freedom.
The Biden administration had what it thought was an easy political score in Afghanistan: Many Americans, including Republicans, supported a withdrawal. The troop presence was already down and the Trump administration had already begun plans to get the rest home.
All Biden had to do was tap it in.
But he botched it spectacularly, leaving unknown numbers of Americans trapped under the rule of the Taliban — the same people we had to overthrow in 2001 after they harbored the radicals responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Naturally, Biden needed to distract Americans from his epic Afghanistan failure in the lead-up to the 9/11 anniversary — and he sure did the trick, announcing this week that the federal government would try to force American businesses with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccines, impose regular testing or suffer fines and other consequences.
The problem is that there is no way this won’t blow up in his face. Americans aren’t going to have this sort of top-down authoritarian tyranny, as even the establishment media is being forced to concede.
According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week, approximately 72 percent of unvaccinated American workers would rather quit their jobs than be forced by the government (through their employer) to get the shot.
This comes as more Americans, including young Republicans and independents, are getting the vaccine and as Joe Biden’s approval ratings have tanked following his incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The political math seemed to make sense, didn’t it?
Rising trust and support for vaccines. Backlash bubbling up over a botched foreign policy decision, which most Americans normally don’t even care about unless it affects them directly. (It did in this case, because our people are still stuck there.)
But Biden is an incompetent politician whose ability to muck things up has been noted by prominent Democrats, from former President Barack Obama to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
He didn’t consider the distinct possibility that Americans wouldn’t like being told what to do by their politicians, especially on an issue that those same politicians have politicized irreparably.
How are Americans supposed to support a mandate of the same vaccine Vice President Kamala Harris said on national television that she wouldn’t take if told to by then-President Donald Trump?
Can Americans trust Joe Biden, who said that he would not mandate vaccines and then moved to mandate vaccines within a span of months, with nothing having changed except his political fortunes?
There is much evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing hospitalization and death. Side effects seem to be rare.
The more vulnerable Americans are, the more worthwhile it is to guard against serious illness from the virus while bearing the risk of potential vaccine side effects.
But individuals can judge this for themselves, with the help of medical professionals.
Many people believe the right choice is to get vaccinated. But Americans get to make that decision for themselves, because this is a free country. Our citizens are born with the agency to make decisions and bear the consequences.
This potential mandate by the Biden administration is constitutionally and morally unjustifiable. It is also foolish politically.
Under the Constitutional provision that says "if the states don't do what I want, I can just force them to do so regardless of my enumerated powers" https://t.co/5kKbyuQb80
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 9, 2021
Americans, especially with the protection of their state and local officials, are not going to stand for this.
As it turns out, solving government-made crises with sweeping authoritarian government solutions tends to breed distrust in the government and create more crises — in this case, of the legal or economic variety.
Our left-wing establishment media class has bred distrust in this vaccine with their dishonest attacks on the Trump administration. Now they wish to cover for that with a comprehensive usurpation of personal liberty.
Americans shouldn’t have to suffer in their rights over this. But Biden and his Democratic enablers must suffer politically come referendum time in the swamp.