March 19th is when the swallows are due to return to San Juan Capistrano. Each year in mid-March, the birds that no one really cares about make their return migration to Southern California from their winter in Argentina. You can cite climate change, you can make all sorts of dire predictions, you can lie and make stuff up, but the bottom line is the birds come back. They leave in the fall, and they come back in the spring. No amount of rhetoric or force can stop that from happening. Thus is also the way of the Democratic Party discussing the myth that Republicans wish to cut Social Security and/or Medicare. As day follows night, you know you’ve entered into the next electoral season when Republicans are accused of wanting to cut or eliminate entitlement programs. You can push back, argue, claim it’s not true, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Cuts to entitlements are the oldest arrow in the Democratic campaign quiver, and they use it every single time.

To be fair, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in 2012 did want to make some tweaks to the programs, because quite simply, they’re on an unsustainable path. They still are. At the very minimum, there has to be revision to the retirement age to gradually reflect the actuarial tables and move it eventually in phases to 70. That’s not a cut, by the way. That’s a delay of when benefits begin. There’s no one in either party right now talking about making true cuts.

The debt is over $31 trillion dollars, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Neither party has clean hands here, and for that matter, Xi Jinping’s contribution to the world’s viral population certainly can be counted among the primary factors of why we’re so far in the hole and getting worse. But no one is talking about making cuts, save one entity – the Social Security Administration. They say if nothing is done, at this continued spending clip, there will be no more money by 2034, and there will be cuts in the way Daniel Day Lewis promised There Will Be Blood.

So now we get back to Joe Biden’s SOTU/campaign kickoff speech (there really isn’t much difference between what the two would sound like). The President made this claim amid much rancor from the Republicans in the chamber.

He followed it up Wednesday at a union rally in Wisconsin by saying this about something he apparently knows a lot about – the express inner desire of Republicans.

Here’s the problem with what he said Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon. It’s the same problem Democrats have every time they’ve said it in the past during an election season. It’s the same problem Democrats will have every time in future elections they predict Republicans’ plans. It’s not true.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, while publicly negotiating for the ability to negotiate privately with Biden and the Democrats on spending cuts in other areas in return for extending the debt ceiling, made this guarantee.

Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential frontrunner, being that no one else has entered the race, yet, said this in January.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, put an even finer point on the issue in an interview with Dana Perino on Fox.

The fun part about that McConnell clip? It sounds like it could have been conducted this week. That was from 2018. This charge from Democrats is not only untrue, it’s not even a novel accusation. It’s as tired a canard as saying Republicans want dirty air and dirty water. Even if McConnell ran the majority of the Senate, he’d need 60 votes to make something cuts like that happen, and the votes just aren’t there to do anything except minor tweaking around the edges.

Biden’s evidence to make the fake claim, at least this time, comes from a white paper offered up last year by Florida Senator Rick Scott, who proposed a host of big ideas meant as a trial balloon for a hypothetical Scott for President in ’24 campaign. One of his suggestions was to insert a sunset provision on all federal spending programs, including entitlements. Senate Republicans didn’t dig it. House Republicans didn’t dig it. Rick Scott himself has now somewhat abandoned it, and the Scott for president ambitions for that matter, at least for now. He’s more content seeking reelection to the Senate. Scott also made a feeble effort to dethrone McConnell as Senate Republican leader, and that went even less well than the Never Kevin House Republicans trying to deny McCarthy the speakership. Yet Biden continues to believe that Scott and his white paper are where the majority of the Republican Party are on entitlement reforms. The funny part? There actually is a Washington politician who agrees with Scott’s proposition, and has for a very long time.

Joe Biden was a senator from Delaware once upon a time. He had an ego sufficient enough to throw his weight around and bluster on all the big issues of the day. He even went so far as to go onto the Senate floor and boast about how passionately he fought for this or that, including sunsetting all federal spending programs, including Social Security and Medicare.

Not one, not twice, not three times, but four, count ‘em, four times, according to Joe, he tried unsuccessfully to cut the uncuttable, untouchable third rails of American largesse. Zach Parkinson of the Republican National Committee also reminds us that he bragged about doing as much in print, too, at the time.

In a December 15th, 1975 piece in U.S. News & World Report by Howard Flieger called “A Four-Year Hitch”, Biden was quoted as one of the main sponsors of a bill to rein in out of control government spending programs that begin innocently enough but become never-ending boondoggles by introducing sunset provisions on all existing federal spending programs.

Specifically, Flieger writes,

So not only is Joe Biden gaslighting about the intentions of Republicans, whether it’s something they should be doing or not, he’s actually arguing against a position he proudly championed when he was in a position to do something about it. At the very least, he’s a complete and total hypocrite. Fortunately for Biden, his memory is Swiss cheese and he’s surrounded himself with enough people to insulate him from questions on it. He’s also got a Washington media corps that is predisposed to prop him up instead of holding him accountable to the Biden platform of old.

If the President and the Democrats want to know what actually is energizing and motivating Republican voters, it’s crime, wokeness infecting education, inflation/economic issues, immigration/border crisis, and the growing threat from the Chinese Communist Party. Cutting entitlements doesn’t make the top 5 of issues Republicans care about. I’m not sure it cracks the top 10. Every one of those issues is a nightmare for Joe Biden and the Democrats, however, and they really can’t run a national campaign in 2024 defending their performance on any of them. Instead, they’re signaling that Biden will revert back to the football equivalent of the off-tackle play, accusing Republicans of cutting Social Security and Medicare, and hope to get three yards and a cloud of dust.