Biden’s push for unity faces test with fight over Supreme Court
From the opening of his third presidential bid, Joe Biden has argued that he is in a unique position to mend a fractured nation and work — even with Republicans — to “unify the country” into some semblance of consensus.
That central thesis of the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign is being severely tested by the battle over the future of the Supreme Court.
In the week since liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, he’s faced pressure from progressives seeking bolder action. And most Republicans in the Senate, a place where Biden spent 36 years of his career, have ignored his calls to wait until after the election to approve a successor. President Donald Trump is expected to name his pick on Saturday, launching a confirmation process that may only deepen the nation’s sectarian politics.
For now, Biden is holding his ground, defending the purpose and function of institutions and governing processes that are needed to install Ginsburg’s successor but appear to be fraying after years of strain.
“We have to de-escalate,” Biden said on Sunday in his first extended remarks after Ginsburg’s death. “Cool the flames … engulfing our nation.”
He followed up Monday in Wisconsin during a 25-minute speech where he didn’t mention the court at all. “Wehave to bring the nation together,” he said. “That’s going to be my primary job.”
The approach leaves Biden, a former senator shaped by a bygone era of Capitol Hill bonhomie, between ideological firing lines so intense as to risk overshadowing remembrances of Ginsburg as a legal giant, feminist hero and, late in her 87 years, a pop culture icon.
Whether Biden is right will determine not only his prospects in November but what kind of legislative success, well beyond judicial confirmations, he could muster once in office.
“Sometimes it sounds naive,” said progressive labor and Democratic Party leader Larry Cohen, who supports Biden but wants him to be more forceful about overhauling how Capitol Hill works.
Biden is with his fellow Democrats in decrying a swift GOP-run confirmation so close to an election — especially given Republicans’ refusal to consider President Barack Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, in March 2016, eight months before Election Day. Yet, at least publicly, Biden is not entertaining calls among some Democrats and progressives urging him to threaten specific retaliation.
Various groups already wanted Biden to endorse abolishing the Senate filibuster to allow anything to pass by majority vote. Now some want Biden to add the warning that a Democratic majority and President Biden would expand the Supreme
Court at their first opportunity.
Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a consummate establishment Democrat like Biden, has declared that “nothing is off the table” if Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell go through with cementing a 6-3 conservative supermajority four years after denying Garland a confirmation vote. Garland would have tilted the court 5-4 in favor of Democratic appointees in 2016.
Inflaming tensions are other fundamental dynamics. Republicans hold a 53-seat Senate majority, but that group collectively represents millions fewer Americans and got millions fewer combined votes than the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus. Trump is the second consecutive Republican president not to win the national popular vote in his first election. In fact, since 1988 Republicans have won the presidential popular vote just one time: President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004.
Advisers to Biden and Trump agree that Democrats almost certainly will win it again this year, too.
“Democracy is being restricted to the elite and their minority,” said Cohen, among the leaders pushing to end the filibuster.
Yet Biden doesn’t lament the curious turns of the nation’s institutions. Rather, he’s staked his campaign on defending the structure.
“I’m gonna say something outrageous. I know how to make government work,” Biden said at his first big rally in Philadelphia on May, 18, 2019.
Indeed, as a former six-term senator and two-term vice president, Biden tells stories of backslapping and deal-making that he contends can be reprised.
“Compromise is not a dirty word; it’s how our government is designed to work,” he told a teachers union audience this summer. “I’ve done it my whole life.”
A day before Ginsburg’s death, Biden reiterated his optimism. “With President Trump out of the way,” he predicted he’d find “somewhere between six and eight” GOP senators to work with a newDemocratic majority.
“I’m going to be America’s president,” Biden insisted, “not a Democratic president.”