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As Political Decorum Declines, Biden’s Verbal Jujitsu Strategy Emerges

Taking his message of unity Wednesday to Wisconsin, a state key to his likely 2024 reelection bid, U.S. President Joe Biden doubled down on his criticisms of Republicans, calling out by name those who had called him a “liar” during his State of the Union address Tuesday evening.

“Many of you have seen, we’ve had a spirited debate last night with my Republican friends,” he said, referring to the boos and jeers befalling upon him as he asserted that Republicans aim to sunset Social Security and Medicare, social programs cherished by supporters of both major parties.

“Marjorie Taylor-Greene and others stood up and said, ‘Liar, liar,’” Biden said, referring to the Republican representative from Georgia who heckled him repeatedly. He then laid out names of Republican lawmakers, including Florida Senator Rick Scott, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and Utah Senator Mike Lee, and the instances in which they suggested cutting government spending on the programs that tens of millions of Americans depend on.

“Sounds pretty clear to me. How about you?” Biden, a Democrat, quipped before repeating what he concluded in his remarks following the outbursts — that Republicans now agree to protect Social Security and Medicare

“It looks like we negotiated a deal last night,” he joked.

The verbal jujitsu skills displayed amid Republican attacks and the decline in congressional decorum is a preview of the way Biden will conduct his expected reelection campaign in 2024, observers say.

“I do think President Biden was challenging or even ‘baiting’ Republicans to respond to him,” said John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on Congress and elections. “House leadership had warned members to not take the bait, but the dynamic spiraled. The members who shouted out that the president was lying probably did not help their cause.” 

Decades in ‘the business’

With 50 years of political experience under his belt, Biden, now 80 years old, appeared to relish the exchange, grinning as he swiped back at Republicans. “We’ll, I’m glad to see — I tell you, I enjoy conversion,” he said.

“It’s hard to say if the president was expecting that reaction, but he was certainly prepared for it. He’s been in this business for a long time,” said Jeff Bennett, professor and chair of communication studies at Vanderbilt University. “The president was arguing that he’s a reasonable person who is willing to reach across the aisle to get things done. And then the hecklers ended up providing the visual evidence he needed to support that claim.”

The heckling opponents appeared unruly and disrespectful of what is supposed to be an orderly American tradition that began with President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, observers noted.

“Ceremonial occasions aren’t debate occasions, which is why congressional outbursts seem so out of place and indecorous,” Jennifer Mercieca, who teaches presidential rhetoric at Texas A&M University, told VOA. “Those outbursts aren’t what the Greeks called ‘kairotic’ — the right time and place. it’s not the right time nor the right place for debate.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre contrasted lawmakers who behaved in a way that “Americans don’t want” with a president who “was very clear in how he sees the next two years.”

“He called out members on live television, in front of millions of Americans, and effectively put them on the defense,” she said in a briefing to reporters Wednesday.

Republicans are certainly defensive.

“We’ve made it clear from the beginning, we are going to honor our debt, we are going to protect our seniors. And furthermore, we’re going to take care of our military personnel,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee told VOA. “And so for him to stand in the dais at the podium, and to make those accusations and really scare the American people was untruthful.”

Biden’s tone was “accusatory,” Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the Trump administration, told VOA. “It really wasn’t bipartisan at all.”

Decorum in decline

As Republicans heckled throughout the speech, including shouting calls to “secure the border,” many are noticing that these disruptions are now considered acceptable in American politics.

It’s a far cry from the condemnation lobbed by members of both parties when Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelled “You lie!” during President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech to a joint session of Congress. Booed by his colleagues, Wilson, a Republican, later issued an apology to the president, a Democrat.

“Then, it was a single voice, and it was shocking,” Fortier noted. “Last night, it became almost a team back and forth, somewhat reminiscent of Prime Minister’s Question Time, with many voices calling back at the president,” he said, referring to the animated British parliamentary tradition when members of the House of Commons grill the prime minister, often in an unruly manner.

Biden will likely aim to disarm combative congressional Republicans with the same strategy of boxing them in a corner as he is set to again clash with lawmakers demanding spending cuts before agreeing to pass a debt ceiling hike to avoid the country from defaulting in a few months.

“I can’t imagine that’s how negotiations to the debt ceiling will play out, but this moment will be an important one in the coming months,” Bennett said. “This is all part of his strategy to show that he is a uniter who is willing to reach across the aisle to do the business of the American people.”

Bringing the parties together will not be easy. New polling from Ipsos shows that 70% of Americans believe the country is “far apart” on issues of government budget and debt. Eighty-one percent believe the country is far apart on the abortion issue, and 78% believe the country is far apart on immigration stances.
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Ex-Twitter Execs Deny Pressure to Block Hunter Biden Story

Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden, from the social media platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, but adamantly denied Republican assertions they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story.

“The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, testified to Congress. “It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.”

He added, “Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”

The three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company’s decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article in October 2020 about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.

Emboldened by Twitter’s new leadership in billionaire Elon Musk — whom they see as more sympathetic to conservatives than the company’s previous leadership — Republicans used the hearing to push a long-standing and unproven theory that social media companies including Twitter are biased against them.

Committee Chairman Representative James Comer said the hearing is the panel’s “first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process.”

Alleged political bias

The hearing continues a yearslong trend of Republican leaders calling tech company leaders to testify about alleged political bias. Democrats, meanwhile, have pressed the companies on the spread of hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.

The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed were Roth, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, and James Baker, the company’s former deputy general counsel.

Democrats brought a witness of their own, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee with Twitter’s content moderation team. She testified last year to the House committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol riot about Twitter’s preferential treatment of Donald Trump until it banned the then-president from the site two years ago.

‘A bizarre political stunt’

The White House criticized congressional Republicans for staging “a bizarre political stunt,” hours after Biden’s State of the Union address where he detailed bipartisan progress in his first two years in office.

“This appears to be the latest effort by the House Republican majority’s most extreme MAGA members to question and relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement Wednesday. “This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on.”

The New York Post reported weeks before the 2020 presidential election that it had received from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive from a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days.

“You exercised an amazing amount of clout and power over the entire American electorate by even holding (this story) hostage for 24 hours and then reversing your policy,” Representative Andy Biggs said to the panel of witnesses.

Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.”

The newspaper story was greeted at the time with skepticism because of questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement, and because top officials in the Trump administration had already warned that Russia was working to denigrate Joe Biden before the White House election.

The Kremlin interfered in the 2016 race by hacking Democratic emails that were subsequently leaked, and fears that Russia would meddle again in the 2020 race were widespread across Washington.

Musk releases ‘Twitter files’

Just last week, lawyers for the younger Biden asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate people who say they accessed his personal data. But they did not acknowledge that the data came from a laptop Hunter Biden is purported to have dropped off at a computer repair shop.

The issue was also reignited recently after Musk took over Twitter as CEO and began to release a slew of company information to independent journalists, what he has called the “Twitter Files.”

The documents and data largely show internal debates among employees over the decision to temporarily censor links to the Hunter Biden story. The tweet threads lacked substantial evidence of a targeted influence campaign from Democrats or the FBI, which has denied any involvement in Twitter’s decision-making.

Witness often targeted

One of Wednesday’s witnesses, Baker, has been a frequent target of Republican scrutiny.

Baker was the FBI’s general counsel during the opening of two of the bureau’s most consequential investigations in history: the Hillary Clinton investigation and a separate inquiry into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Republicans have long criticized the FBI’s handling of both investigations.

Baker denied any wrongdoing during his two years at Twitter and said that despite disagreeing with the decision to block links to the Post story, “I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment.”

There has been no evidence that Twitter’s platform is biased against conservatives; studies have found the opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular. But the issue continues to preoccupy Republican members of Congress.

And some experts said questions around government influence on Big Tech’s content moderation are legitimate.
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Biden Focuses on Economy, Touts Accomplishments in 2nd State of the Union

U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday the “story of America is a story of progress and resilience” as he gave his second State of the Union address with a focus on his domestic economic policy, including an appeal to his Republican opponents to work together.

“Two years ago, COVID had shut down our businesses, closed our schools and robbed us of so much,” Biden told a joint session of Congress.

“Today, COVID no longer controls our lives,” he said.

“And two years ago, our democracy faced its greatest threat since the Civil War. Today, though bruised, our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken.”

Facing a Congress in which Republicans now have a majority in the House of Representatives, Biden cited legislation that Republican and Democratic lawmakers came together to pass, including a massive infrastructure bill, aid for Ukraine and protecting same-sex marriage rights.

“To my Republican friends, if we could work together in the last Congress, there is no reason we can’t work together and find consensus in this new Congress as well,” Biden said.

Biden said that to maintain the world’s strongest economy, the United States needs the best infrastructure, and he said new standards will require federal infrastructure projects to use only construction materials made in America.

“Lumber, glass, drywall, fiber-optic cable,” he said. “And on my watch, American roads, American bridges and American highways are going to be made with American products as well.”

Overall, Biden said, his economic focus is on “investing in places and people that have been forgotten.”

The president also argued for raising the debt ceiling, which is the maximum amount the U.S. Treasury can borrow to pay the nation’s bills. The U.S. hit its debt limit of $31.4 trillion in January. Congress now has until midyear to raise the limit before the U.S. defaults on its loans.

Biden said Congress has previously paid the country’s bills “to prevent an economic disaster.” He called on lawmakers to commit to making sure the credit of the United States will never be questioned.

Kevin McCarthy, the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, has said the Republican Party will continue to oppose what they see as excessive spending.

“Biden’s challenge in the State of the Union is to make the global case while also presenting himself as a leader who understands and is prepared to meet the day-to-day economic challenges facing Americans here at home,” political scientist Andrew Seligsohn said in a note to VOA.

Foreign policy

Biden said in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “murderous assault” on Ukraine, the United States has united NATO and built a global coalition.

“We stood against Putin’s aggression. We stood with the Ukrainian people,” he said.

With Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova in attendance, Biden said the United States is united in its support for Ukraine and will “stand with you as long as it takes.”

With U.S.-China relations hitting a new low last week when the United States shot down what it said was a Chinese spy balloon that traversed the country for a week, Biden said he wants to work with China in ways that can advance U.S. interests and benefit the world.

“But make no mistake about it: as we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country,” he said.

Patrick Cronin, Asia-Pacific security chair at the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, told Lin Feng of VOA’s Mandarin Service ahead of the speech that Biden needs to show he “is forging ahead with policies that strengthen the security of America and its allies. His words about China should highlight Beijing’s deeds, not words, but without adjectives. Let facts speak for themselves.”

Gun control, immigration

Biden used part of his address to urge Congress to support immigration reforms, including providing equipment and officers for border security, a pathway to citizenship for certain immigrants who came to the country as children and for farm workers and essential workers.

He also advocated for a ban on assault rifles, and for police reforms.

The Congressional Black Caucus invited the parents of slain Memphis resident Tyre Nichols to the address.

Nichols, 29, was killed by five African American police officers in January. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have used the tragedy to urge Congress to revisit the stalled police reform act that Democrats proposed after the 2020 killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd.

“What happened to Tyre in Memphis happens too often,” Biden said. “We have to do better.”
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