RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yesterday afternoon, I received an email from a family member who is coming to visit me in July. He was asking whether the United States still requires travelers from outside the country — including U.S. citizens — to provide proof of a negative Covid test before they may enter the country. I was halfway to saying that no, all that is over, when a little red flag went up in my head and prompted me to check the State Department’s website, where I learned that, actually, the United States does still insist upon this, and that it does so without exception.

The Biden administration’s position on Covid-19 is now perfectly absurd. It is evidently the official position of the federal government that the Covid-19 virus represents a sufficiently serious threat to Americans to justify testing fully vaccinated tourists before they may fly to the United States, but that the Covid-19 virus does not represent enough of a crisis to justify maintaining the Title 42 rules that govern how illegal immigrants are treated when they unlawfully cross the southern border. Speaking before Congress earlier this month, an attorney at the Justice Department, Jean Lin, insisted that Title 42 ought to “terminate as soon as practicable” on the grounds that it is an emergency health measure, not a permanent policy, and that it “is disrupting the processing of immigration laws that Congress enacted.” Legally, Lin is correct, but for her objection to have any force, the same rule must be applied to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Covid-testing regime, which is also the product of an emergency health measure and which also disrupts the processing of immigration laws that Congress enacted. Ultimately, the Biden administration needs to decide: Do we have a crisis on our hands, or not? If we do not have a crisis on our hands, then all of our crisis measures ought to be rescinded forthwith. If we do have a crisis on our hands, then those measures ought to be maintained. Whichever course he picks, it must be consistent.

On student loans, the administration is equally incoherent. When President Biden is asked to justify his continuation of the “pause” in the collection of debt (“pause” is a curious word to use to describe a policy that has lasted longer than an entire Congress), he explains that there’s a pandemic raging, don’t you know, and that, anyhow, if he doesn’t keep extending the policy, “millions of student loan borrowers” will “face significant economic hardship, and delinquencies and defaults could threaten Americans’ financial stability.” Elsewhere, however, the economic picture Biden paints is rather rosy. “Our economy has gone from being on the mend to being on the move,” the president proposed last week. “And now, we’re outpacing the world.” This, Biden says, is the result of the “historic infrastructure investments, creating record job growth, and rebuilding our economy.” Apparently, we are expected to believe that the Biden-led, record-job-creating, on-the-move American economy is strong enough to be the envy of “the world,” but also so weak that to ask college graduates (whose unemployment rate is 2 percent) to resume paying back their loans would bring the whole thing crashing down. Convenient!

Keen-eyed Americans have recently taken to asking why President Biden behaves so weirdly when wearing his mask. Why, for example, does he wear it so fastidiously while walking alone down the stairs from Air Force One, only to take it off when approaching other people? The answer is that President Biden no longer has any idea what he is supposed to be doing with Covid, and that nor, really, does anyone else. Covid is now a political football. If the Biden administration wants something, Covid demands it; if it doesn’t want something, the end of Covid-19 justifies its rescission. What is bad about the economy is because of Covid; what is good about the economy is despite Covid; and, sometimes, somehow, the economy is both good and bad at the same time. Above all else, Biden is weary — of Covid, of talking about Covid, of having to make decisions about Covid.

On the surface, the president’s decisions seem inexplicable. Dig a little deeper, though, and you will discover that they are the product of a near-perfect marriage between the usual bureaucratic inertia and Joe Biden’s crippling fear of his own party. Even now, more than a year since he became president, his instinct is to leave everything be until it is killed by a court, crushed by public pressure, or taken up as a cause by the progressive movement. Testing tourists for Covid-19 has not been looked at by the courts, is beyond most citizens’ notice, and is favored by progressives, so it stays. Title 42 is popular with most voters and unpopular with progressives, so it stayed for a while, was then killed, and is currently tied up in litigation. Student-loan deferment is popular with progressives, does not register as a top concern for the electorate (unlike “cancellation,” which would), and is unlikely to be referred to the judicial branch, so it continues.

That’s politics, I suppose. But it’s sure as hell not leadership.