Sen. Bernie Sanders maintained on Sunday his confidence in President-elect Biden to uphold the progressive policies their two teams agreed to prior to the election, insisting that his “far-left agenda” is in fact something “the majority of American people support,” Fox News informed.
“I sometimes find it amusing when our opponents talk about the far left agenda,” Sanders said over the weekend. “The truth is that when you talk about raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, when you’re talking about expanding health care to all people as a human right, when you talk about effectively taking on climate change, when you talk about making public colleges and universities tuition free, these are not far-left ideas.
“These are commonsense ideas that the majority of the American people support,” Sanders asserted. “And we’re going to fight to make sure that they are implemented.”
The independent Vermont senator made the comments on CNN’s “State of the Union” after host Jake Tapper noted that a number of Democrats have blamed progressive policies for their spate of losses in the 2020 election — a notion Sanders dismissed last week as “dead wrong.”
In the week since the election, Moderates have pointed fingers at their colleagues who embraced the “defund the police movement” and for not pushing back harder against socialism.
Progressives have argued that those liberal policies help to galvanize the party’s core base and are popular among the general electorate — a sentiment that Sanders publicly echoed. On Sunday, however, the self-declared democratic socialist appeared to change his tune on the issue, telling Tapper that “nobody I know who’s running for office” actually wants to defund the police.
“Nobody I know who’s running for office talks about defunding the police,” he said. “What we talk about is making police officers accountable, making sure that police departments do what they can do best, figuring out how you deal with mental illness, how you deal with homelessness, whether those are, in fact, police responsibilities, making sure the police officers are not killing innocent African-Americans. That is not defund the police.”
Sanders also confirmed that he was in touch with the Biden transition team about a possible cabinet post after he expressed interest in the labor secretary position last week.
“I talked to the Biden administration,” he said, adding, “I want to do my best in whatever capacity as a senator or in the administration to protect the working families of this country.”
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