President Joe Biden just unveiled a policy that will enable up to 500,000 undocumented residents who are married to US Citizens to avoid deportation and have a path to citizenship. It is one of the largest expansions of immigrant protections in recent years.
In July, 2023 President Joe Biden’s Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of an over-the-counter birth control pill marketed as Opill in the US. As of the end of March, 2024, it is available at CVS and Walgreens.
President Joe Biden’s massive American Rescue Plan has produced many results throughout the nation, and one of those is the dramatic effect it has had in reducing child poverty. Once again, President Biden is demonstrating that government can work for the good of the people.
Celebrating Earth Day, 2024, President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency awarded $7 billion to applicants for deployment of solar to “deploy residential and community solar, integrated storage and cover related upgrades in underserved and disinvested communities throughout the country.“
President Joe Biden signed a $460 billion funding measure that includes important criminal justice reform programs, including the Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program, and Second Chance Act, designed to improve outcomes for people returning from incarceration.
President Joe Biden continues to deliver loan justice for defrauded students. This time, it is The Art Institutes, a private art school system that shut down last year. President Biden said, in a statement, “This institution falsified data, knowingly misled students, and cheated borrowers into taking on mountains of debt without leading to promising career prospects at the end of their studies.” The relief averages around $19,000 per borrower. This latest round of student loan forgiveness brings the total approved by the Biden Administration to almost $160 billion for nearly 4.6 million borrowers, an average of nearly $35,000 per student.
True to his word, President Joe Biden is moving the DEA to take cannabis off of the most restricted drug list — Schedule 1 — and moving it to Schedule III. This move would make it easier to research the effects of cannabis, and would federally recognize and decriminalize its medical use. It will also clear federal resources to deal with actual serious drugs like fentanyl. Should cannabis be legal? Of course. But, this is the biggest federal step in that direction in over 50 years.
Today is May Day, also known as International Workers Day! On January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden asked for the resignation of Peter Robb. When Robb refused, he fired him. Robb was famously anti-union and was appointed by the previous president. His anti-union bonafides go all the way back to litigating against the Air Traffic Controllers under President Reagan, in what was the opening salvo in the war against unions that has gone on for since 1981. As already detailed here, the Biden Administration has made it a priority to reverse that trend.
Fulfilling a campaign promise, earlier this month, President Joe Biden reversed regulations implemented by the previous administration that had made it more difficult from victims to bring complaints for sexual assault. The new protections broaden the narrowed definition of what constitutes sexual harassment, and finally broaden Title IX to cover gay, transgender, and pregnant people.
President Joe Biden continues to forgive loans whose programs have taken advantage of borrowers by their unfair terms. The recipients of these forgiveness programs are lower income borrowers, people who have made at least 10 years of payments if they originally took out $12,000 or less in loans to pay for college, public servants like teachers and government employees, and over 65,000 people who met the terms of their loans, only to find themselves still in debt. After the Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s forgiveness of $400 billion in loans, the Biden administration continues to attack the problem piecemeal. Thus far, Biden has forgiven over 4.3 million student borrowers and a total debt of $153 billion, and counting.
On April 19, 2024, President Joe Biden struck a blow for conservation, Alaska’s indigenous populations, and endangered species in taking this action, which also included the rejection of an application for a 210 mile road through the Alaskan wilderness. In a statement, President Biden said that Alaska’s “majestic and rugged lands and waters are among the most remarkable and healthy landscapes in the world,” are critical to Alaska Native communities, and “demand our protection.” The Tanana Chiefs Conference, an Alaska Native nonprofit corporation, said the administration’s “choice to reject the Ambler Road Project is a monumental step forward in the fight for Indigenous rights and environmental justice.”
The new regulations, issued by the EPA under the direction of President Joe Biden, will primarily affect people living near industrial sites. Those people are disproportionately poor and people of color. The new rule would, among other things, cut toxic pollutants by 6,200 tons annually and reduce emissions of ethylene oxide and chloroprene by 80 percent. Biden again demonstrates that he is making government work for all Americans, in that these regulations will largely benefit communities in Louisiana, Texas, other locations on the Gulf Coast, West Virginia, and the Ohio River Valley, predominantly red states Biden is aware will not be voting for him in November. A more detailed list of the regulations is in this EPA Press Release.
In March, 2021, one of the first major pieces of legislationenacted by President Joe Biden was the American Rescue Plan. One of the major aspects of this mammoth stimulus package was its focus on public education. 3 years later, the Plan has had signficant positive impact on America’s public education system, K-12 and at the collegiate level. Here’s a list, courtesy of Wikipedia, of some of the education oriented provisions of the American Rescue Plan:
President Joe Biden is putting an additional $225 million into funding repairs, upgrades, and replacements of manufacturing homes. It is also freeing up capital for FHA backed loans and restricting the right of landlords to add non-rent fees to beneficiaries of affordable housing programs.
Among the many pro-environment tax incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden made sure to include a 15% minimum corporate tax on some of the largest corporations in the US, some of whom have previously found a way to pay no corporate taxes at all. Here’s an analysis of some of the most relevant provisions.
Under President Biden, we are seeing the lowest Black unemployment rate on record and the fastest creation of Black-owned small businesses in over 25 years. Hispanics are nearing record low unemployment rates, as are Americans with disabilities.
Throughout his presidency, President Joe Biden, with the help of Vice President Kamala Harris, has been incredibly active through executive orders in battling the loss of Roe v. Wade and the statewide iniatives designed to deny women health care, including abortions, access to contraception, safeguarding patient privacy, and sensitive health information. Initiatives include protecting the right to travel, providing services to veterans, current service members, and emergency abortion care.
From NBC News, “The new fourth-quarter numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime, and a 4% decline in reported property crime. That’s based on data from around 13,000 law enforcement agencies, policing about 82% of the U.S. population, that provided the FBI with data through December.”
Last September, President Joe Biden joined United Auto Workers on the picket line in Michigan, the first for any US president. The strike was against the Big 3 auto manufacturers. Not only did that strike result in at least a 25% pay raise for striking auto workers, including an immediate 11% raise, it also “inspired” major global auto makers that weren’t targets of the strike, including Nissan, Hyundai, and Honda to raise wages to their American workers across the board.
Not only did President Joe Biden choose an indigenous woman to run a major governmental department and sit in the Cabinet, but the choice was the Department of Interior, which deals with our protected lands and natural resources, covers the Bureau of Indian Affairs, among other very important matters for all Americans, including our indigenous populations. Deb Haaland has been an environmental warrior, and an advocate of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the US.
Among President Joe Biden’s campaign promises was to fight back against the monopolistic practices of the major power brokers in this country. He has delivered and continues to work towards fulfilling these promises. He has done so with executive actions, Federal litigation, and the NLRB. He has prepared an aggressive agenda for 2024, so let’s keep watching to see how that goes.
President Joe Biden, through executive actions, has thus far cancelled $138 billion in student loan debt. This affects 3.7 million borrowers. Included are:
President Joe Biden signed the Violence Against Women Act of 2022, reauthorizing it until 2027. The previous administration had allowed the Act to lapse. This new version of VAWA provides unprecedented support for survivors of sexual violence in Native Alaskan and tribal communities, giving them jurisdiction to prosecute non-tribal offenders who sexually assault tribal members.
Finally, a president takes executive action relating to the failed drug war. President Joe Biden does it twice. Thousands of people are affected by the order. Also, Biden has been lobbying state governors and his regulators are making noises about reviewing cannabis’ Schedule 1 classification, with an eye toward rescheduling it as a Schedule 3 drug. Baby steps, to be sure, but finally a move in the right direction.
In the brutal Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, not only did the Supreme Court overrule Roe v. Wade, Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion stated his willingness to review previous cases protecting same sex and interracial marriage! Because of this, Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed the Respect For Marriage Act, which enshrines rights for same sex and interracial marriages into law, and requires all 50 states and territories to recognize such marriages as valid.
The Biden White House has prioritized judiciary reform. President Joe Biden may outpace the three previous administrations, while placing more than 100 new judges, many of whom are women and/or people of color, on the bench at the appellate level and, Biden has placed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black female on the Supreme Court.
Ripped from today’s (well, now yesterday’s) headlines. President Joe Biden has been pushing the elimination of lead pipes from our nation’s infrastructure since he took office, and continues that effort today, with the allocation of an additional $5.8 billion for this effort. This funding comes from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
