Biden Works To Safeguard America From Trump In Final Days In Office

President Biden now has less than 2 weeks in office, and he’s spent the past few days signing legislation and orders designed to help protect Americans from Donald Trump. One of the biggest achievements was the signing of legislation to increase Social Security payments to more than 3 million recipients, and that was followed by an order that forbids oil drilling along the coasts of the country. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains President Biden’s mad dash to protect the country from Trump.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

We now have less than two weeks before President Biden's term in office is over, and Donald Trump gets sworn in as the next president of the United States for the next four years, and knowing that his time is short, knowing that he's gotta do everything he can. In these last two weeks, president Biden has actually spent the last few days doing some pretty remarkable things that are good for the United States and will actually help to safeguard the public against Donald Trump and the Republicans that are now in charge of everything. The first measure, which he signed into law this past Sunday, was to increase Social security payments for public service workers, police officers, firefighters, teachers. If you work in a public sector job and you're on social security, your payments starting now are going to increase. But here's the best part about this legislation that affects, by the way, 3 million people currently receiving Social security.

You're not just gonna see your payments increase starting right now because this legislation goes back a full year. So that increase, you're gonna get a year's worth of back pay on this next social security payment or perhaps the next one. So you're not just getting more money now, you're getting more money from last year as well. This is a huge benefit to these individuals, most of whom are completely reliant upon those social security payments. Because here's the thing, public sector workers actually a couple years ago, had their Social security payments reduced, like just that specific group of people, and that was due to several different pieces of legislation that had expired. So Biden comes along, and of course it passed the house and it passed the Senate signs. This new legislation gets these people the money that they deserve and backdate it to 2024, so they get an entire year's worth of back pay.

That is a huge, huge step forward, especially in the face of Republicans telling us that they want to cut social security. So Republicans are trying to cut it. Biden just increased it, not for everybody, but an increase is an increase. So contrast the two parties that way, one party wants to kill it, one party just increased the payments. So who's looking out for you? That's the question everybody needs to be asking themselves. The second important thing that President Biden did this week was he signed an executive order that put over 600 million acres of shoreline on the United States off

Limits for fossil fuel extraction. And because of the law that he invoked while doing this, it is virtually impossible barring an act of Congress for Donald Trump to undo it. Here's what happened. This action invoked the 1953 Outer continental Shelf Lands Act, a law that gives presidents broad authority to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development. The law does not give presidents explicit authority to revoke the action and place federal waters back into development. So that law that Biden used here says, listen, if you're the president and you want to take federal waters away from oil and gas leasing, you can do that. But if you're the president and you want to give these waters back to oil and gas leasing, you cannot do that. So President Biden, of course, safeguarded, uh, what is the final number here? I want to get this right.

This is 625 million acres of shoreline and federal waters that will not be opened for fossil fuel development. Now, on this issue, I do have to ask a very obvious question. This was an executive order. This is day one stuff. You could have done this at any point in the last four years, and you didn't. Why did you wait till two weeks before you leave office?