Media praise Xavier Becerra, a partisan warrior who constantly sued Trump

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Xavier Becerra on suing to stop cuts to health subsidies

California attorney general explains why he is leading the charge to block the Trump administration from cutting off cost-sharing subsidies.

Joe Biden’s pick to run the federal health department is getting a whole lot of good press, coupled with harsh criticism from media conservatives.

And that reflects a fundamental difference in how each side views the world.

The clash goes beyond the usual ideological divide in which a Democratic president’s nominees are routinely assailed by the right, the mirror image of how the press covered most Trump appointees who were despised and distrusted by the left.

And in this case, the debate is enveloped by identity politics and the conflicting pressures on Biden to assemble a racially balanced Cabinet, even as he’s only picked about half its members.

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The media attitude was reflected at a presser last Friday when CNN’s Arlette Saenz asked if Biden would specifically commit to naming people of color to run the Pentagon and Justice Department. Biden said that he’d have an extremely diverse Cabinet overall--and this week chose retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, an African-American, as his Defense secretary.

His other major pick would be the first Hispanic to run the Health and Human Services Department. Xavier Becerra was a surprising choice yesterday because as a former congressman who is now California’s attorney general, he has no medical expertise or public health experience.

But what’s striking is that his partisanship is being hailed as a virtue. Here’s the lead from Politico:

“California Attorney General Xavier Becerra was the chief legal nemesis of the Department of Health and Human Services for most of the Trump presidency.

Now the man who challenged President Donald Trump’s efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act, stop legal immigrants from using health programs, detain migrant children and curb access to abortion is President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to run the agency he antagonized.”

The New York Times strikes a similar note: “Becerra leaped into the fray as California’s lead attack dog in the Trump resistance, filing roughly 100 lawsuits against the administration on everything from climate change to the Affordable Care Act.”

Constantly suing Trump, you see, becomes a job credential. 

Now imagine the tone of the coverage if Trump had hired for HHS an attorney general from, say, Texas whose main claim to fame was that he was constantly suing Obama to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Perhaps the nominee would have been seen as a tad more controversial?

The stories on Becerra admit his lack of health care experience, but try to compensate, as the Times did, by saying supporters view him as “perfectly suited to a job that required not only an ability to lead a large organization but also an intimate knowledge of how badly many Americans, particularly essential workers, have suffered under the current administration’s policies on health insurance and the pandemic.”

With a very different perspective, conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat highlights the contrast between Biden’s campaign rhetoric and this appointment: 

“For a campaign that placed so much emphasis on the idea that disinterested expertise and capital-S Science should guide the coronavirus response, Becerra is a peculiar choice: a partisan politician from a deep-blue state whose health care experience is mostly in legal battles with the Trump White House over Obamacare, rather than in health policy or medicine itself.”

Even Trump, he notes, picked a doctor and a physician to run HHS (though the first secretary, Tom Price, was pushed out over ethics issues).

But the choice isn’t strange “if you anticipate using your cabinet agencies the way the Obama White House did in its otherwise-gridlocked second term — as aggressive instruments of partisan policymaking, especially on culture-war issues.”

And here are a few facts that didn’t make it into most mainstream accounts:

“Becerra is the pick you make if you intend to pursue a lot of them, since that’s where his qualifications lie — as a partisan warrior on issues like guns and immigration and as an abortion-rights maximalist who has used his attorney general’s office to sue the Little Sisters of the Poor after a Supreme Court decision in their favor and to pursue felony convictions against the pro-life filmmakers who made undercover videos of Planned Parenthood executives talking about the sale of fetal body parts.”

The Trumpian equivalent of suing Little Sisters of the Poor (over contraception) would be a nominee who had been hurling lawsuits at NARAL and the liberal Nuns on the Bus.

While praising or pummeling such nominees is a time-honored Beltway tradition, I have a spoiler: Cabinet officials don’t have that much power. They are hired guns who carry out a president’s policies, some better than others. They are installed to be managers (HHS has a sprawling bureaucracy) and salesmen (the main challenge for former Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius was to sell ObamaCare on television). Past secretaries included ex-governors Tommy Thompson and Mike Leavitt, university chancellor Donna Shalala and congresswoman Margaret Heckler.

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While people like Becerra can argue for his views internally--he’s a supporter of Medicare for All--they have to follow the boss’s orders, or they can be quickly cashiered.

Meanwhile, the main media controversy surrounding Austin, a four-star former battlefield commander, is that as a retired general he’d need a congressional waiver (just as Jim Mattis did). But that’s a process story: the principle of civilian control of the military isn’t exactly threatened when the president can fire his Pentagon chief at a moment’s notice, which was Mattis’ fate.

Becerra may be getting mostly favorable headlines now, but if he’s confirmed, he’ll have his hands full coping with the surging pandemic. Yet the real responsibility will rest with the man who picked him.