WASHINGTON — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has scrambled the global foreign policy landscape. But it has also upended President Biden’s domestic agenda back home, diverting the attention of the White House and contributing to rising prices that have become a top concern of Americans just months before congressional elections.Three months after Mr. Biden vowed in a sprawling, two-hour news conference to continue fighting for college tuition, child care, early education, prescription drugs and the environment, the president’s domestic agenda has drastically shriveled.The fighting in Ukraine has disrupted global oil markets, sending gas prices and inflation in the United States soaring and — for the moment — pushing aside longer-term issues that Mr. Biden had long hoped would become the centerpiece of his legacy.Mr. Biden, who spent months in congressional negotiations last year, now spends more of his time responding to the global crisis caused by Russia. Last month, he flew to Europe for four days of emergency meetings with allies. The president is expected to attend two more European summits in May and June.Asked about the administration’s legislative goals in an interview this week, Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, said the targets for the next several months included a bill to support American innovation and the semiconductor industry, and funding requests to battle the coronavirus and continue sending weapons to Ukraine.“We’ve got a bunch of agenda items like that,” Mr. Klain said on a podcast hosted by Chuck Todd of NBC News, conceding, “The calendar has only so many months left in this year.”Mr. Klain and others in the West Wing insist the president has not given up on larger ambitions. White House officials quietly continue to talk with lawmakers about some parts of what they used to call the president’s “Build Back Better” social policy agenda, which they still hope to pass with just a bare majority in the Senate using a legislative maneuver called reconciliation.“The president also continues to work with a wide range of lawmakers,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement, “on a reconciliation plan that would cut the costs of prescription drugs, energy and child care while lowering the deficit even more and fighting inflation for the long haul, as well as a landmark bill to strengthen our competitiveness with regard to China.”But Mr. Biden — who no longer uses the phrase “Build Back Better” because members of his own party distanced themselves from it when the legislation bogged down in bickering — has done little in recent weeks to revive parts of the $2.2 trillion bill that he fought for last year.On Thursday, during a visit to a historically black college in North Carolina, Mr. Biden ended a speech with a hopeful riff in which he said politicians in the United States had come together in unison to invest in middle-class families, colleges and clean technologies.“Let’s keep building a better America because that’s who we are,” Mr. Biden said, almost pleadingly. “And we can do this.”But polling suggests the sentiment is at odds with the reality of the country Mr. Biden governs and the Washington establishment he presides over, where politics have become more divisive, the country is less unified about the right direction, and the world is distracted by Russia’s brutal attempt to take over a neighbor.ImageThe Babushkin Sad Hotel, or Granny’s Garden, was destroyed on Monday near Mriia, Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has scrambled the global foreign policy landscape for the Biden administration.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York TimesA poll by Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service on civility in America released in February found the country deeply divided, with most people concerned about the rising cost of goods. In a Monmouth University poll last month, voters used the words “divided,” “mess” and “chaos” to describe the American political system.Mr. Biden’s aides frequently lean on the cliché that they can “walk and chew gum at the same time” to suggest that the president and his team can pursue his domestic agenda while navigating the crisis in Ukraine.They point in particular to Mr. Biden’s $5.8 trillion budget, which he released at the end of March. But while he proposed an increase in domestic spending of close to 7 percent, the president’s plan puts far less emphasis on the kind of big, ambitious social programs that have stalled amid opposition from moderate Democrats and almost all Republicans.The annual budget was in some ways the clearest indication of how far the president has pulled back in the midst of the Russian invasion, rising inflation and political stalemate in Washington.It By: Michael D. Shear
Title: The War in Ukraine Is Upending Biden’s Agenda at Home
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/politics/biden-ukraine-domestic-agenda.html
Published Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2022 22:27:01 +0000
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