Sen. Bernie Sanders said Sunday he’d like to see more progressives in President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet.
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Sanders said, “What I have said many, many times is the progressive movement itself probably is 35 or 40 percent of the Democratic Coalition. And I believe that the progressive movement deserves seats in the Cabinet; that has not yet happened.”
Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who ran in the Democratic primaries in 2016 and 2020, remains a leading voice for encouraging the Democratic Party to shift further to the left.
“I would like to see,” Sanders added, “strong progressives in the administration who are going to stand up for the working families of this country, who believe that healthcare is a human right, who believe we’ve got to make sure that public colleges and universities are tuition free and that we have to be aggressive on issues like climate change, racial injustice, immigration reform.”
In discussing Biden’s possible picks for attorney general, Sanders said he wasn’t sure if Judge Merrick Garland — President Barack Obama’s ignored nominee for the Supreme Court in 2016 — was progressive enough for his tastes.
While challenging Biden’s selections, Sanders had much harsher words for President Donald Trump and his refusal, at least so far, to sign the $908 billion government stimulus bill.
He said that senators assumed that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was speaking for the president when he took part in the bipartisan negotiations that crafted the measure. The stimulus bill was overwhelmingly approved by the House and Senate last week, but the president has yet to either sign it or veto it.
“Suddenly,” Sanders said, “because we have an extraordinary narcissist, pathologically narcissistic in the White House, he said, well, yes, I know they’re in tense negotiations, you pass the $908 billion bill, it has, you know, the extending unemployment, it has direct payments, it has this, that, and everything else, but you know what, I’ve now decided that I’m going to jump into the game and I want $2,000.”
CORRECTION: The network that Sanders’ interview aired on was listed incorrectly in an earlier version of this article.