Credit where it’s due: Susan Rice uttered the phrase “accountability agenda” with a straight face. It takes enviable self-control for a former member of the Biden administration to dangle “accountability” over anyone’s head without blowing the take.
But Rice wasn’t just talking about the run of the mill “lawfare” and political retribution that her party zealously pursued against their opponents for four years. If Democrats take Congress in the mid-terms this fall, she says, they’re coming for the private sector – companies that dropped the unconstitutional DEI programs and stifling corporate governance regimes she and her allies imposed.
On the podcast of former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the Obama insider and erstwhile Ambassador to the U.N. sounded positively Old Testament: “This is not going to be an instance of forgive and forget. The damage that these people are doing is too severe to the American people and our national interest.”
“If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back into power, are going to… play by the old rules, and… say, ‘Oh, never mind. We’ll forgive you for all the people you fired, all the policies and principles you’ve violated, all… the laws you’ve skirted.’ I think they’ve got another thing coming,” Rice added.
It’s unclear what “old rules” Rice was referencing. Are they the “old rules” that were in place before Biden’s term – like not debanking, deplatforming, debarring and even prosecuting your political opponents? Neither of her old bosses exactly took a laissez-faire approach to the private sector, either. But it sure sounds like sinful CEOs can expect plagues of inclusiveness consultants and carbon auditors.
It’s that word “accountability” that gives pause.
Who’s been held to account for trying to hide Biden’s condition while in office? For trying to cling to power at the expense of what people like Rice ritually invoke as “our democracy?” For either failing to detect or attempting to conceal his cancer?
Just recently The Washington Post reported, “Longtime friends and allies of Joe Biden say they are worried about the toll an aggressive form of prostate cancer is taking on the former president and his health. But Biden and his aides say he is doing well, making progress on ongoing projects and maintaining public appearances.”
That’s sad news, and treatment must be hard on an 83-year-old body. But as Jim Geraghty observed in National Review, “if Biden had remained in the race and his inner circle had somehow managed to hide the effects of his advanced age from the public and gotten him reelected, we almost certainly would be living under Acting President Kamala Harris by now.”
Accountability certainly hasn’t surfaced for the public health bureaucracy’s mismanagement and dishonesty about the COVID pandemic. Six years on, Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) is still uncovering the deceitfulness and arrogance of Dr. Fauci and his cronies. Those responsible for the generational damage to our kids caused by extended school closures have yet to suffer any consequences. There’s been no reckoning for the censorship apparatus the Biden administration erected to suppress speech questioning COVID’s origins and the government’s response.
As PPT has extensively documented, scientific integrity took a beating during the Biden years – from citing “indigenous knowledge” to cancel oil and gas leases to unprovable statements championing gender-transition treatments for children. Time and again, politics and ideology were put before prudence, transparency, and truth.
No, nobody can argue “accountability” was a watchword of the Biden administration. Or, for that matter, the previous one Rice served.
The Trump EPA just rescinded the agency’s 2009 endangerment finding, under which the Obama administration declared carbon – an essential component of all life on earth – an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act. PPT obtained documents showing the regulatory power-grab was based on predetermined political machinations, not science. Nobody from the Obama EPA will ever answer for the unprecedented impositions on the lives and livelihoods of the American public engendered by that bureaucratic coup.
Don’t look for accountability in anything that came from the finding. Not for the billions given to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in the name of “climate justice.” Not for the $27 billion Biden’s EPA gave to insiders in the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the Greendoggle of “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” fame. Some of the recipients had helped develop the plan, and the vetting of applications was haphazard at best. As PPT has shown many times, the revolving door between the climate industry and the Biden administration spun on overdrive for four years, ethics be damned.
So for Rice to thunder about “accountability” is rich. As is his wont, President Donald Trump has demanded Netflix fire her from its board. Call it a reverse preview of the future Rice says she wants. Maybe she’ll get it. Maybe she won’t. But “accountability” has nothing to do with it.
Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Public/Jessica Rodriguez Rivas)
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