How will Biden deal with GOP attempts at sabotage?
When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge — and I don’t mean the pandemic, although COVID-19 will almost surely be killing thousands every day. I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy.
It goes without saying that Trump, whose conspiracy theories are getting wilder and wilder, will never concede, and millions of his followers will always believe — or at least say they believe — that the election was stolen.
Most Republicans in Congress certainly know this is a lie, although even on Capitol Hill there are a lot more crazy than we’d like to imagine. But it doesn’t matter; they still won’t accept that Biden has any legitimacy.
And this won’t simply be because they fear a backlash from the base if they admit that Trump lost fair and square. At a fundamental level — and completely separate from the Trump factor — today’s GOP doesn’t believe that Democrats ever have the right to govern.
After all, in recent years we’ve seen what happens when a state with a Republican
legislature elects a Democratic governor: Legislators quickly try to strip away the governor’s powers. So does anyone doubt that Republicans will do all they can to hobble Biden’s presidency?
The only real questions are how much harm the GOP can do and how Biden will respond.
The answer to the first question depends a lot on what happens in the Jan. 5 Georgia Senate runoffs. If Democrats win both seats, they’ll have effective though narrow control of both houses of Congress. If they don’t, Mitch McConnell will have enormous powers of obstruction — and anyone who doubts he’ll use those powers to undermine Biden is living in a fantasy world.
But how much damage would obstructionism inflict? For the next few months, as the pandemic continues to run wild, tens of millions of Americans will be in desperate straits unless the federal government steps up to help. Unfortunately, Republicans may be in a position to block this help.
The good news about the very near future, such as it is, is that Americans will probably (and correctly) blame Trump, not Biden, for the misery — and may make Republicans willing to cough up at least some money.
What about the post-vaccine economy? Here again there’s potentially some good news: Once a vaccine becomes widely available, we’ll probably see a spontaneous economic recovery that won’t depend on Republican cooperation.
So Biden might do OK for a while even in the face of scorched-earth Republican opposition. But we can’t be sure of that. America desperately needs action on issues from infrastructure to climate change to tax enforcement that won’t happen if Republicans keep blocking power. So what can Biden do? First, he needs to start talking about immediate policy actions to help ordinary Americans, if only to make it clear to Georgia voters how much damage will be done if they don’t elect Democrats to those two Senate seats.
If Democrats don’t get those seats, Biden will need to use executive action to accomplish as much as possible despite Republican obstruction — although I worry that the Trump-stacked Supreme Court will try to block him when he does.
Finally, although Biden is still talking in a comforting way about unity, at some point he’ll need to start making Republicans pay a political price for their attempts to prevent him from governing.