Winning Senate control, Dems face little room for error in pursuing new agenda
WASHINGTON — In a week consumed with shock and anger after a mob loyal to President Donald Trump breached the U.S. Capitol, Democrats pledged to move the country forward under President-elect Joe Biden by wielding a powerful, longsought prize — total control of the Congress for the first time in a decade.
After winning both Senate runoff elections in Georgia last Tuesday, jubilant Senate Democrats could run up against the same challenge as their counterparts in the House in crafting a sweeping, new progressive agenda: keeping their members in line.
Even as they took back control, Democrats face a Senate chamber that is split 50-50, with incoming Vice President Kamala Harris, in her capacity as Senate president, casting the tiebreaking vote. In the House, Democrats saw their majority shrink in the 2020 elections to the smallest advantage either party has held in decades in the lower chamber. The Democrats have four seats above the minimum of 218 needed to maintain a majority.
Democrats promised last week to move swiftly on a range of priorities — even as one key moderate, Sen. Joe Manchin, D- W. Va., bucked the party by refusing to endorse some key priorities: the immediate removal of President Donald Trump from office by impeachment and the $2,000 COVID-19 relief checks.
Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, a top member of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the ability to set the Senate’s agenda for votes and nominations could not be understated. Mr. Doyle said he expects Democratic leaders in the upper chamber to clear a logjam of more than 400 House bills that have been blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“What changes dramatically is we now set the agenda,” Mr. Doyle said in an interview last week.
“Obviously, you still have to get the votes,” he acknowledged. “But what Mitch McConnell has done is not put bills on the floor. Now, senators are at least going to have to go on record.”
Mr. Doyle said one of Democrats’ first moves will be to bring up the $2,000 direct payments — higher than the $600 checks approved last month and the $1,200 checks approved last March. Mr. Trump and Democrats pushed the measure, called the CASH Act, last month, but it was blocked by Mr. McConnell at the end of the year.
Mr. Doyle said he can “guarantee” that new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., would put it up for a vote.
“Now we’ll see if all these Republicans who claimed they were for it continue to be for it,” Mr. Doyle said.
On judicial appointments, he said “our president will send down names, our Senate majority leader will schedule it for hearings, our chairs will conduct the hearings. It’s a complete shift in how the agenda gets set.”
The Georgia races dashed the hopes of Sen. Pat
Toomey, R- Pa., to rise tochairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, for his final two years in office.
Mr. Toomey is instead expected to serve as ranking member on the committee alongside Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a lawmaker with whom Mr. Toomey has found some common ground amid wide differences.
Mr. Brown, in a call with reporters last week, said Democrats would press for a “much better, stronger package to deal with COVID,” including aid to state and local government, expanded unemployment benefits and greater rental assistance and stronger eviction protections.
He said, “Housing has gotten short shrift” on the panel, which is often shortened to the Senate Banking Committee.
Mr. Brown said he will press for major Housepassed bills like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which unions consider the most dramatic expansion of labor rights in almost a century. Democrats will press for minimum wage increases and an expansion of overtime pay for more workers.
Progressive ideas have wide support among Americans, Mr. Brown said.
“Call it what you may, but it’s what the American people want,” Mr. Brown said. “There’ll be differences of opinion, but on the main issues Biden campaigned on and [incoming Georgia Sens. Raphael] Warnock and [Jon] Ossoff campaigned on — we’ll move ahead on all of those.”
Mr. Brown said he expects to start confirmation hearings on Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, nominated to be secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Cecilia Rouse, a Princeton economist nominated to be chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, as soon as Jan. 21.
Manchin in the middle?
Democrats can ill afford to lose even one of their members, and Mr. Manchin could be a wild card.
A former governor of West Virginia elected to Congress in 2008, Mr. Manchin is ranked as the Senate’s most conservative Democrat by VoteView, an ideology score first developed some 30 years ago at Carnegie Mellon University.
Mr. Manchin voted to confirm many of Mr. Trump’s Cabinet and judicial appointees, including Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Mr. Manchin voted against Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to protest the rushed process, he said.
But Mr. Manchin also voted with Democrats to remove Mr. Trump from office last February. And, since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, Mr. Manchin has joined with other Democrats and Mr. Toomey to press, albeit unsuccessfully, for gun control measures like background checks.
Mr. Manchin plans to chair the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee with an “all-ofthe-above” energy policy that includes everything from fossil fuel resources to renewables, according to an assessment of changing
Senate politics released last week by Bracewell, a Washington lobbying firm that works with energy industry clients.
That could complicate Democrats’ hopes for a climate change bill where the party’s more liberal flank supports stronger environmental provisions like those in the Green New Deal, a resolution Mr. Manchin opposes.
“Manchin’s close friendships on both sides of the political aisle have always made him a key player on pending legislation,” said Scott Segal, a Bracewell partner.
“With the Senate divided 50-50, legislation on topics like climate change and clean energy simply must take the views of Manchin and other moderates firmly into account or those bills will have little chance of advancing,” Mr. Segal said.
Mr. Manchin, who was unavailable for an interview Friday, has made waves recently by shooting down some Democratic priorities like ending the filibuster.
“We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police,” he tweeted in November, linking an interview he did with The Washington Examiner, a right-leaning publication. “We are the party of working men and women. We want to protect Americans’ jobs & healthcare.”
Mr. Doyle said the ability for Democrats to have leverage in negotiating bills and scheduling votes could unify Democrats and put pressure on Republicans.
“There will be certain pieces of legislation that may not have the votes required to pass, and I think that gets into the more controversial things,” Mr. Doyle said. “But for a lot of things, it makes a huge difference when you control the agenda and you control the committees.”