As Joe Biden set out a grand vision for his presidency, in a speech to Congress late last month, cameras captured Representative Pramila Jayapal standing and clapping. Behind her face mask, she later told an assistant, she was smiling. It wasn’t the Joe Biden that progressives like Jayapal expected to see when he meandered out of the Democratic pack and defeated their champions, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, in last year’s primaries. It was the avuncular centrist who persuaded enough voters that he was the safe choice to beat Donald Trump in November. But this Joe Biden goes a lot, a lot more. Like Jayapal mentionned, “President Biden has stood up to the present moment, and I really give him an ‘A’ in what he has done so far. It has been bold, progressive, this is what the country needs.

Jayapal is the leader of the Progressive Congressional Caucus, whose ninety-five members found themselves, to their surprise, pushing an open door in the first few months of Biden’s presidency. After years of frustration at the incrementalist approaches of the Party’s most powerful Democrats, they support a White House occupant who pursues progressive priorities more firmly than any president since Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt. Biden’s agenda has only become more ambitious, which is evident in his approval of federal voting rights legislation and police reform; its $ 2.25 trillion employment, infrastructure and climate plan; and, now, his $ 1.8 trillion Plan of American families. “It’s like we’re doing what we’ve come to Congress to do,” Jayapal said in our recent speech.

Jayapal was working from home in Seattle in early February with the cable news chatter in the background, when Biden moved on to a Lectern of the White House to extol his American bailout and its $ 1.9 trillion in spending. He laid out the benefits, including relief checks, housing assistance, money for child care and family leave, as well as billions to cities, states and small businesses. Although the main motivation was the continued fallout COVID-19 was an unqualified White House endorsement of spending priorities Jayapal and his colleagues on the Democratic Party left had long advocated. But she really stood up when she heard Biden say, “The biggest risk isn’t getting too big. . . . This is if we are going too small. Jayapal called her husband from across the room, “This is our line! He used our line!

Embark on democratic control of the White House and Congress for the first time in a decadeJayapal had urged Party leaders to use this expression and to abandon the cautious solutions that had defined the presidencies of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. With small majorities in the House and Senate, the Senate’s systematic obstruction stands in the way. Jayapal favors the invocation procedural maneuvers-as the budget reconciliation process, if possible – or reform or eliminate filibuster, if necessary. Jayapal told me, “We can’t go back to the voters and say, ‘You know what, I’m so sorry, but there are these racist and obscure Senate procedures that have kept us from doing what we said we were doing. we would if you gave us the House, the Senate and the White House. In other words, go big, even if that means Republicans may benefit the next time they take over the upper house. “To anyone who says, ‘Well, what if the Republicans are in power and we don’t have support?’ I would say, ‘If we don’t do that, they’ll be in power. ‘”

On April 21, she and Sanders introduced the College for All Act, which would eliminate tuition and fees at public colleges and universities, as well as historically black nonprofit colleges and universities, for families earning less than one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars per year. It would also double the size of the Pell Grant, to nearly $ 13,000 per year, and make community colleges and public business schools free. It is much more ambitious than the American plan of the families of Biden. According to details released last month by the White House, Biden’s proposal would provide two years of free community college, a fourteen hundred dollar increase in Pell Grant scholarships, and $ thirty-nine billion in income-based tuition support for students attending HBCUs and other colleges that serve tribes and some other minority communities. “It’s a progressive moment,” she told me. “It’s a populist moment. It is an urgent moment.

Jayapal, who is fifty-five, is serving his third term in Congress. Born in Madras, now Chennai, she grew up in India, Singapore and Indonesia; arrived in the United States at the age of sixteen to attend Georgetown University; and eventually became a naturalized US citizen. After earning an MBA and working in the private sector, she spent nearly a decade working on health equity issues for PATH, a global non-profit organization. The backlash against immigrants of color, including Muslims, Arab Americans and South Asians, following the September 11 attacks, prompted her to create a hate-free zone, now known as the OneAmerica, a Seattle-based immigrant rights organization that she ran for a dozen years. She won a seat in the Washington State Senate in 2014 and in the US Congress two years later. A supporter of Medicare for All, during the Trump administration she pushed Democrats to move beyond what she called “murky moderation.”

In 2020, Jayapal backed universal health insurance and chaired Sanders’ health policy team, but his hopes for a gradual shift were dashed after Biden won the nomination. She became more optimistic last summer, after leading the Biden-Sanders health policy committee, when Biden unexpectedly support promised for a range of progressive ideas. To lobby, Jayapal and his colleagues in the Congressional Progressive Caucus announced in December a sweep set priorities ranging from the cancellation of student debt and the restructuring of fiscal policy to the end of the war in Afghanistan. Yet even after Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their second round in Georgia, handing over control of the Senate to Democrats, she wondered if a party stuck on middle ground for decades would budge. “Could we really deliver?” she wondered.

At every indication, Biden aims to deliver, guided by what is quickly becoming the guiding principle of his presidency: an expanded and activist role for the federal government as funder, incubator, regulator, agenda organizer and provider of services. “Government must be a powerful force for good in the lives of Americans,” Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, said to the Wall Street newspaper. He also said that the Administration would be “without excuse” on a particular point, and there was again this sentence: “The risk of doing too little outweighs the risk of doing too much.”

Biden himself has generally avoided press conferences and interviews, but he defends his policies in controlled contexts. His speech to Congress, which lasted just over an hour and was delivered in muted tones, was the most comprehensive description of his vision he has yet offered. (He finished saying, “Thank you for your patience.”) He spoke of the need to demonstrate the resilience of American democracy after the transgressions of the Trump administration and supporters of the former president, but the word “government” could be replaced. “During our first hundred days together,” he said, “we have acted to restore the faith of the people in our democracy to be delivered. We are vaccinating the nation, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. We are producing real results – people, they can see it, feel it in their own lives. “

A sign of the challenges Biden will face in garnering support for his program – and maintaining Democratic control of Congress next year – is clear in the findings of a Washington To post– ABC News Poll, conducted in mid-April. Fifty-three percent of all respondents said they feared it “is doing too much to increase the size and role of government.” As Biden was addressing Congress, a fundraising email from the Republican National Committee came into my inbox, with the subject line, “Are you watching Biden’s speech?” I was. It read, in a style that characterized the RNC in Trump’s day: “You don’t have to sit down during Joe Biden’s speech to know he’s a member of the radical left and wants to impose his agenda. GREAT SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT to the whole country. The email asked for a donation as proof that “the American people see through their LIES.” Similar messages from house on fire, echoed by pundits and like-minded media, spurred Republicans on the year. last in large parts of the country.