Biden's Final Flip-Flop

The president's decision to drop out after insisting he never would continued a pattern established by a long career of politically convenient reversals.

"The president has said it several times," Quentin Fulks, Biden's principal deputy campaign manager, told reporters last Thursday. "He's staying in this race….He is and will be the Democratic nominee."

Sunday morning on Face the Nation, campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond reiterated that Biden had no intention of dropping out. "I want to be crystal clear," Richmond said. "He's made a decision, and that decision is to accept the nomination and run for reelection, win reelection."

Hours later, Biden announced that he is not running for reelection after all. Although he had said it would require divine intervention to stop him from running, intervention by leading Democrats who argued that he could not hope to overcome voters' doubts about his cognitive condition proved sufficient.

That dramatic reversal continued a pattern established by Biden's long career in politics. Again and again, Biden has changed his mind about momentous matters, abandoning positions he had confidently and sometimes passionately defended without satisfactorily explaining the reasons for the turnaround. Often he has downplayed the extent of the shift or even pretended it never happened.

Reason's Matt Welch has aptly described Biden as a "rusty weather vane" who eventually "creak[s] in the direction of the prevailing political winds." But unlike a weather vane, Biden is a human being with the capacity for rational reflection and introspection—qualities he has rarely displayed when contradicting his prior opinions.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden presented himself as a drug policy reformer. But for most of his 36 years as a Delaware senator, he was one of the most vociferous drug warriors in Congress, eager to show that Democrats could be even tougher than Republicans. He played a leading role in the top anti-drug hits of the 1980s and '90s, demanding punishment of the drug users he blamed for the black market created by prohibition, bragging about his efforts to subsidize prisons and put more cops on the street, and backing mandatory minimum sentences that sent drug offenders to prison for years or decades based on nothing more than the weight of the substances they possessed, sold, or helped distribute.

Biden's enthusiasm for punishment included a federal sentencing scheme that treated smoked cocaine as if it were 100 times worse than the snorted kind and prescribed a minimum five-year sentence for possessing as little as five grams of crack—less than the weight of two sugar packets. "If you have a piece of crack cocaine no bigger than this quarter that I am holding in my hand," he said in 1991, "you go to jail for five years. You get no probation. You get nothing other than five years in jail. The judge does not have a choice." Far from recognizing the insanity of that penalty, Biden complained that the Justice Department under Richard Thornburgh, George H.W. Bush's attorney general, was not pursuing it often enough.

Running for president in 2020, Biden implied that he had seen the error of his old punitive instincts. He went from insisting that the government "hold every drug user accountable" to promising that he would "decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions" (neither of which actually happened). He went from pushing ever-harsher drug penalties to promising that he would "eliminate mandatory minimums" (which likewise did not happen). He also promised to "end, once and for all, the federal crack and powder cocaine disparity" (ditto).

Even if Biden had a problem with follow-through, these were all positive changes. But Biden—who as late as 2015 was still publicly proud of the incarceration-expanding Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (or, as he preferred to call it, "the 1994 Biden Crime Bill")—never really explained his conversion, leaving the impression that he was simply responding to changes in public opinion, especially within the Democratic Party.

"I haven't always been right on criminal justice," Biden conceded in a 2019 speech. In particular, he said, the penal distinction between smoked and snorted cocaine, which had a glaringly disproportionate impact on black defendants that critics were noting by the late 1980s, "was a big mistake when it was made." Although "we thought we were told by the experts that crack…was somehow fundamentally different," he explained, "it's not different." That misconception, he added, "trapped an entire generation." Even while admitting error, Biden sought to blame bad advice from "the experts," or at least his own possibly mistaken impression of what they were saying.

Biden's views on gun control evolved in the opposite direction. In 1986, he supported the Firearm Owners' Protection Act, which was backed by the National Rifle Association. That law, which passed both houses of Congress by overwhelming margins, included several provisions that were welcomed by gun rights supporters, along with new firearm restrictions.

"I believe the compromises that are now a part of this bill have resulted in a balanced piece of legislation that protects the rights of private gun owners while not infringing on law enforcement's ability to deal with those who misuse guns or violate laws," Biden said in July 1985. "During my twelve and a half years as a member of this body, I have never believed that additional gun control or federal registration of guns would reduce crime. I am convinced that a criminal who wants a firearm can get one through illegal, nontraceable, unregistered sources, with or without gun control."

Nowadays, Biden is an enthusiastic advocate of "additional gun control," including "universal" background checks for gun buyers, a crackdown on homemade firearms, "red flag" laws, and a federal ban on so-called assault weapons. Biden favors that last policy even while conceding that such legislation leaves murderers with alternatives that are "just as deadly." In other words, the distinction he perceives between "assault weapons" and other guns is just as illusory as the distinction he once perceived between crack and cocaine powder.

In 2019, when asked about the contradiction between such positions and Biden's stance circa 1986, Biden campaign spokesman Bill Russo pretended there was nothing to reconcile. "Cherry-picking an out-of-context quote from 1986 doesn't even begin to address Joe Biden's unparalleled record on gun safety," Russo insisted.

Biden was similarly shifty in discussing his stance on the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. When President George W. Bush reacted to Al Qaeda's 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by targeting a country that had nothing to do with them, Biden did not just vote to authorize the use of military force against Iraq. He steadfastly defended the administration's strategy, warning his colleagues that "failure to overwhelmingly support" the resolution was "likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur."

Biden later claimed he never thought Bush actually would go to war, seeing the authorization as a way to pressure Saddam Hussein into cooperating with international arms inspectors. "Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment," he told NPR in 2019. But that was not true. Although he occasionally criticized Bush for acting too hastily and with insufficient international backing, Biden repeatedly voiced support for the war. He did not publicly acknowledge that his vote to authorize it was a mistake until November 2005, more than two years after the U.S. invasion.

On abortion, Biden in recent years has steadfastly defended Roe v. Wade, castigated the Supreme Court for overturning it, and supported federal legislation that would guarantee access to the procedure. At the same time, he has said he personally opposes abortion, consistent with his Catholic faith. And while he said it would be wrong to impose his religious beliefs on others, he has not always felt that way.

"I don't think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body," Biden said the year after Roe was decided, during his first term as a senator. "When it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I'm about as liberal as your grandmother. I don't like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far."

In 1977, Biden opposed legislation that would have allowed Medicaid coverage of abortions for pregnancies arising from rape or incest. Five years later, he supported a bill declaring that "the Constitution does not secure the right to an abortion." In 1994, he assured a constituent that he continued to oppose public subsidies for abortion. "I do not view abortion as a choice and a right," he told the Texas Monthly in 2006, during his last term as a senator. He added that abortion is "always a tragedy," that it "should be rare and safe," and that "we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions."

In a Meet the Press interview the following year, Biden said he supported a ban on late-term abortions, which Roe precluded in situations where an abortion was deemed "necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother." He said he had changed his mind on the merits of Roe, concluding that it is "the only means by which, in this heterogeneous society of ours, we can reach some general accommodation on what is a religiously charged and a publicly charged debate."

During a vice presidential debate in 2012, Biden agreed that "life begins at conception" but said he refused to impose that view on others. In June 2019, Biden abandoned his opposition to public funding of abortions, saying "circumstances have changed." He was referring to state abortion bans and the possibility that Roe would be overturned. But circumstances also had changed within the Democratic Party, making even mild objections to abortion politically untenable. The following year, Biden said he was "proud to stand" with abortion rights groups, vowing to "protect women's constitutional right to choose."

The death penalty is another area where you might expect Biden would be influenced by religiously inspired pro-life sentiments. Yet back in 1994, he touted his crime bill's dramatic expansion of the circumstances in which defendants could be executed. He proudly declared that "the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties."

According to Gallup, support for the death penalty among Democrats has fallen substantially since then, dipping below 40 percent by 2017. Biden's views changed accordingly. During his 2020 campaign, he promised to "eliminate the death penalty" because "we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time." He said he would support "legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level" and "incentivize states to follow the federal government's example." As with many of his criminal justice promises, nothing came of that. But Biden, who thought promising more executions made political sense in 1994, around the time that the violent crime rate began a steep decline, clearly recognized that "circumstances have changed."

Likewise with gay marriage, an issue on which public opinion also has changed dramatically during the last few decades. As a senator in 1996, Biden supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which said no state would be required to recognize same-sex unions recorded in another state. By 2012, when he was vice president, Biden had come around on the issue. "I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties," he said on Meet the Press in May 2012. "And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction beyond that."

At that point, half of Americans agreed, but they did not yet clearly include President Barack Obama. Within days of Biden's comments, Obama finally took the plunge. This is one case where Biden was, if not exactly ahead of public opinion, more courageous than other leading Democrats.

On immigration, by contrast, Biden has gone back and forth. In the 1990s, he supported a crackdown on illegal immigration, including a border fence and expedited removals, that resembled tactics he later deplored. As of 2006, he was still advocating more border barriers, saying employers who hire unauthorized residents should go to prison, opposing driver's licenses for people who can't prove their citizenship, and condemning "sanctuary cities" that refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement.

During his 2020 campaign, Biden promised a change from Donald Trump's immigration policies that would "restore our moral leadership." Among other things, he said he would "immediately end the horrific practice of separating families at our border," "terminate the travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries," "raise our target for refugee admissions," and "reverse Trump's detrimental asylum policies." But as president, The Hill noted last month, Biden adopted "hard-line policies that borrow elements from those used by his predecessor."

Those policies included an executive order imposing broad, prohibitive restrictions on asylum applicants. "The policies announced today are near replicas of Trump-era asylum bans," the National Immigrant Justice Center complained. "Only now, they come from an administration that vowed to protect the right to seek protection and support immigrant communities." It is probably not coincidental that Biden's reversion to Trump-style policies coincided with a surge in public support for immigration restrictions.

Biden also took a zig-zag path on the issue of mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. As president, he said in June 2020, "I would insist that everybody out in public be wearing that mask." Biden reiterated that promise at the Democratic National Convention two months later. "If I'm your president," he said, "on day one we'll have a national mask mandate." But he changed his mind the following month, conceding that "I cannot mandate people wearing masks."

In the end, Biden settled for an executive order requiring masks on federal property and in interstate travel, including airlines. The latter policy, which was implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, provoked legal challenges that were ultimately rendered moot after the mandate was lifted.

A charitable view of Biden's reversals is that he changed his mind in light of new evidence. But that explanation is hard to buy in many of these cases, especially when his old and new positions hinged on matters of principle or when he tried to rewrite history by minimizing or denying the change in his views. Biden's shifts were always politically convenient, which made him reliably unreliable.