By Victoria Valenzuela, courtesy of URL Media
From Palestine to the death penalty to student loans, Biden has one last chance to make good on his campaign promises before leaving office
When President Joe Biden announced that he would not be seeking reelection, activists for Palestinian liberation saw it as a victory after putting pressure on him for supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Gallup polls show that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions, contributing to Biden’s unpopularity, especially among young voters. Now, before he leaves office, activists are calling for Biden to broker a permanent ceasefire and issue an executive order to stop arms deals with Israel.
But Palestine isn’t the only issue. From the death penalty to student loans, activists around the country hope to pressure Biden to enact specific policy changes before he leaves office next year, including election promises on which he has yet to follow through. According to the Poynter Institute’s Biden Promise Tracker, Biden has only fulfilled about 28% of his campaign promises and stalled on about 32%.
Given his current position as a lame duck, activists are encouraging him to use his remaining few months in office to take action in various areas, including issues Biden vowed to address—but failed to deliver on—during his presidency.
A lasting ceasefire in Palestine
Days after Oct. 7 last year, Biden flew to Israel and pledged military support, and has since sent the state $6.5 billion in military assistance. As of Aug. 15, Israel has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, including more than 16,000 children, and but the death toll could be much higher.
In February, Biden claimed he was pushing for a pause in Israel’s war on Gaza to allow for aid blocked by Israel to reach Palestinians. However, he has made little progress in achieving a lasting ceasefire deal, said Nour Jaghama, a Palestine campaign organizer with the feminist anti-war group CODEPINK.
“To me, it was just kind of to save face a bit, not actually backing that with any significant action to reach the ceasefire deal,” Jaghama said. “He needs to stop arm sales to Israel and, within that, broker a successful ceasefire plan before he leaves office.”
There have been some contradictions within the administration itself. Multiple staffers with the Biden administration have stepped down from their positions, refusing to be complicit in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Jaghama said that it “shows the extent as to how wrong what is happening in Gaza is, if people are willing to go against the president of the U.S. in such a public way.”
“It’s because the U.S. continues to fund and arm Israel that a ceasefire campaign is really being hindered here,” Jaghama said. “Even though [Biden’s] reputation will ultimately be cemented as a pioneer of genocide, I think a ceasefire is one thing he can do to save a little bit of face.”
End the death penalty
Biden made history as the first president to openly oppose the death penalty, pledging to end it during his presidential campaign and to incentivize the remaining 27 states that still allow executions to do the same. However, he has fallen short on this promise.
The death penalty has been known to disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic people, especially in cases where the victim is white. People have also been sentenced to death despite evidence of innocence—there have been 200 death row exonerations since 1973. A Gallup poll conducted in 2023 found that a record-high 50% of Americans believe that the death penalty is applied unfairly.
While the Biden administration imposed a moratorium on federal executions, it has also pushed for death sentences against the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue and Buffalo supermarket mass shooters, as well as against the Boston Marathon bomber, whose death sentence had previously been overturned.
Now, nearly 300 grassroots organizations are calling on Biden to close the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, where executions are carried out, and to clear out the federal death row before the end of his presidency.
“That’s a very symbolic action that was within the power of the president,” said Abe Bonowitz, the co-founder and executive director of Death Penalty Action.
The upcoming election underscores the high stakes. During his last three months as president, President Donald Trump executed 13 people on federal death row, the most executions under a president since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s, who executed 16 people over four presidential terms. Activists say it is important for Biden to commute all death sentences so that Trump has no one to execute if he returns to office.
Cannabis reform
Advocates are also pushing for pardons of those serving sentences for cannabis at the federal level. While recreational cannabis is legal in nearly half the country, there are still thousands of people federally convicted for cannabis-related offenses. As he campaigned for president, Biden took the stance that nobody should be incarcerated for cannabis and supported record expungement.
“Sending people to prison for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for conduct that many states no longer prohibit,” Biden said in a White House statement in October 2022.
That year, he announced the pardons of about 13,000 people with prior federal offenses for simple marijuana possession. However, commutations—which reduce sentences and could release people currently in prison—were only granted to those on house arrest. Biden has not issued commutations to get anybody out of prison.
While cannabis is a booming market worth tens of billions of dollars, many people, disproportionately Black and Latinx, remain incarcerated for cannabis-related offenses.
“[Biden] acknowledged that this is a problem, that this is a racial justice issue, but he, in our opinion, definitely hasn’t actualized those promises,” said Sarah Gersten, executive director of the Last Prisoner Project, a national nonprofit working at the intersection of drug policy and criminal justice reform.
Gersten said her group sent a letter with the names of more than 150 of its clients serving time in federal prison for cannabis to the Biden administration for clemency, in addition to advocating for the release of the remaining thousands. They are also calling on Biden to instruct the Department of Justice to not convict people for cannabis offenses and push Congress to legalize cannabis at the federal level.
“If Biden really meant what he said, he would want those people to be released,” Gersten said.
Gender equality and the Equal Rights Amendment
For nearly 101 years, activists have been urging for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would guarantee gender equality under the U.S. Constitution and make sex discrimination unconstitutional.
The amendment was first introduced to Congress in 1923, three years after women won the right to vote, and passed both chambers of Congress in 1972. However, after the ERA was ratified by the 38th and final required state in 2020, Trump blocked its passage with an executive order.
“Without the Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution, we can never have true equality in this country,” said Zakiya Thomas, president and chief operating officer of the ERA Coalition.
Biden has publicly supported the ERA since he first ran for office at age 29. As president, Biden released two official statements that called for its passage. But Thomas said Biden can pass the ERA himself through executive action.
“The truth is, if he wanted to, he could do it,” Thomas said. “Just like Donald Trump wanted to block the equal rights note for being in the Constitution, he could put it in there himself.”
Thomas said there is an urgent need to pass the ERA, especially with the dissolution of affirmative action, which helped women and people of color in particular, and with Roe v. Wade overturned. She also said it is essential to ensure that “we enshrine our equality and protections for all generations, current and in the future.”
Student Debt
While campaigning for president, Biden promised to cancel student loans. He later proposed the largest student debt relief package in U.S. history when he unveiled a program that would have provided $20,000 in student debt relief for eligible federal student loan borrowers. The program was struck down by the Supreme Court a year later.
After the Supreme Court decision, Biden announced that he would explore his alternative authorities under the Higher Education Act to provide debt relief, and advocates expect to see a finalized package announced in the coming months. Since Biden has taken office, the administration has approved $168 billion in relief for almost 5 million people. Student loan debt disproportionately impacts Black and brown families, especially women.
“We have seen the student debt crisis really become an intergenerational economic, racial, and gender justice issue,” said Aissa Canchola Bañez, the policy director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.
“The cost of college over the last several decades has significantly increased, skyrocketed, and families are having to shoulder most of the costs of affording a higher education than ever before.”
Additionally, Canchola Bañez said that Biden has taken steps to ensure that public servants like teachers, nurses, social workers, and first responders are able to get the debt relief that they are entitled to after 10 years of service. In July, he announced 35,000 beneficiaries of the public service loan forgiveness program, compared to the 7,000 people who benefited from the program throughout its history.
Still, advocates such as those with the Student Borrower Protection Center are pressing for the Biden administration to explore every legal authority available to cancel student debt for the millions of people still waiting for relief. Over the last year, the administration has been working on finalizing its student loan debt rules that would bring this relief to 30 million people.
“We are very excited to kind of see what these final student loan debt relief rules are going to look like,” Canchola Bañez said. “That’s very much still like a promise that he is actively working to keep.”
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