Dems are on the clock
With two-year window, repeat after me: Help people fast
President Joe Biden takes off ice with a ticking clock. The Democrats’ margin in the House and Senate couldn’t be thinner, and midterms typically raze the governing party. That gives Democrats two years to govern. Two years to prove that the American political system can work. Two years to show Trumpism was an experiment that need not be repeated.
Two years.
This is the responsibility the Democratic majority must bear: If they fail or falter, they will open the door for Trumpism or something like it, and it will be far worse next time. To stop it, Democrats need to re-imagine their role. They cannot merely defend the political system. They must rebuild it.
“This is a fight not just for the future of the Democratic Party or good policy,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told me. “It is literally a fight to restore faith in small-d democratic government.”
Among the many tributaries flowing into Trumpism, one in particular has gone dangerously overlooked. In
their book “Presidents, Populism and the Crisis of Democracy,” political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe write that “populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government — and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power.”
President Donald Trump was this kind of populist. Democrats mocked his “I alone can fix it” message for its braggadocio and feared its authoritarianism, but they did not take seriously the deep soil in which it was rooted: The U.S. system of governance is leaving too many Americans to despair, too many problems unsolved, too many people disillusioned. It is captured by corporations and paralyzed by archaic rules. It is failing, and too many Democrats treat its failures as regrettable inevitabilities.
But now Democrats have another chance. To avoid the mistakes of the past, three principles should guide their efforts. First, they need to help people fast and visibly. Second, they need to take politics seriously, recognizing that defeat in 2022 will result in catastrophe. The Trumpist Republican Party needs to be politically discredited through repeated losses. And, finally, they need to deepen American democracy.
The good news is that Democrats have learned many of these lessons, at least in theory. The $1.9 trillion rescue plan that
Biden proposed is packed with ideas that would make an undeniable difference in people’s lives, from $1,400 checks to paid leave to the construction of a national coronavirus testing infrastructure that will allow some semblance of normal life to resume.
And congressional Democrats have united behind sweeping legislation to expand American democracy. The “For The People Act,” which House Democrats passed in 2019 and Senate Democrats have said will be their first bill in the new session, would do more to protect and expand the right to vote than any legislation passed since the Great Society, and it would go a long way toward building a fairer and more transparent campaign financing system. In June, House Democrats passed a bill granting statehood to Washington, D.C., which would end one of the most appalling cases of systematic disenfranchisement in the country.
“It’s time for boldness, for there is so much to do,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “This is certain, I promise you: We will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era.”
But none of these bills will pass a Senate in which the filibuster forces 60-vote supermajorities on routine legislation. And that clarifies the real question that Democrats face.
Just Help People
The last time Democrats won the White House, the Senate and the House was in 2008, and they didn’t squander the moment. They passed the stimulus and Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. They saved the auto industry and prevented a depression and, for good measure, drove the largest investment in clean energy infrastructure in U.S. history.
But too little of their work was evident in 2010, when Democrats were running for reelection. The result was, as President Barack Obama put it, “a shellacking.”
Tom Perriello is the executive director of U.S. programs at the Open Society Foundations. But in 2009, he was a newly elected Democrat from Virginia’s 5th district, where he’d narrowly beaten a Republican. Two years later, Republicans took back his seat. They still hold it. Looking back, Perriello told me what he thought that Democrats could’ve done to save his seat.
“There’s a belief among a certain set of Democrats that taking an idea and cutting it in half makes it a better idea when it just makes it a worse idea,” he said.
As we talk, he ticks off the examples: The stimulus bill was whittled down, ending far beneath what economists thought necessary. The House’s more populist health reform bill — which included a public option, heftier subsidies and was primarily financed by taxing the rich — was cast aside in favor of the Senate’s stingier, more complex proposal. The House passed “cramdown” legislation, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of mortgages so banks took losses and homeowners would have been more likely to keep their homes, but the bill failed in the Senate, and the impression took hold — correctly — that Congress was bailing out the banks, but not desperate homeowners.
The Obama administration believed that if you got the policy right, the politics would follow. Make the Senate Great Again
Biden’s agenda will live or die in the Senate. Odds are it will die, killed by the filibuster.
The modern Senate has become something the Founders never intended: a body where only a supermajority can govern. From 1941 to 1970, the Senate only took 36 votes to break filibusters. In 2009 and 2010 alone, they took 91. Here’s the simple truth facing the Democratic agenda: In a Senate without a filibuster, they have some chance of passing some rough facsimile of the agenda they’ve promised. In a Senate with a filibuster, they do not.
Tellingly, both Obama and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader at the beginning of the Obama administration, have come to support the elimination of the filibuster.
“It’s not a question of if the filibuster will be gone, but when it’ll be gone,” Reid told me by phone. “You cannot have a democratic body where it takes 60% of the vote to get anything done.”
When I asked Biden, during the campaign, about filibuster reform, he was reluctant but not definitively opposed. “I think it’s going to depend on how obstreperous they” — meaning Republicans — “become,” he replied.
Senate Democrats could eliminate the filibuster if every single one of them wanted to, but even a single defection would doom them. Sen. Joe Manchin has promised to be that defection. Red state Democrats like Manchin have long held to a political strategy in which public opposition to their party’s initiatives proves their independence and moderation. To give Manchin his due, a more high-minded fear — shared by others in his caucus — is that we have just come through a long, ugly period of partisan norm-breaking. Surely the answer to Trump’s relentless assaults on decorum, to Mitch McConnell’s rewriting of Senate rules, is a return to the comity they cast off. A version of this may appeal to Biden, too: Trump stretched the boundaries of executive authority, so perhaps he should retreat, offering more deference to Congress. But if this is what he means by “unity,” it will just empower the merchants of division
Democrats for Democracy
“Democracy is precious,” Biden said at his inauguration. “Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”
It’s a stirring sentiment, but wrong. Democracy barely survived. If America actually abided by normal democratic principles, Trump would have lost in 2016, after receiving almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Trump lost by about 7 million votes, but if about 40,000 votes had switched in key states, he would have won anyway. The Senate is split 5050, but the 50 Democrats represent more than 41 million more Americans than the 50 Republicans.
This is not a good system.
It is broken because of gerrymandering, because of the Senate, because of the filibuster, because of the Electoral College.
It is also broken because we directly disenfranchise millions of Americans. In the nation’s capital, 700,000 residents have no vote in the House or Senate at all. The same is true in Puerto Rico, which, with 3.2 million residents, is larger than 20 existing states.
“It would be a devastating civil rights failure if we didn’t achieve statehood now,” Stasha Rhodes, the campaign director of 51 for 51, which advocates D.C. statehood, told me. “It would also be a sign that Democrats are not interested in restoring and strengthening American democracy.”
The Vaccine Opportunity Great presidencies — and new political eras — are born of crises. Thus far, America has bobbled its vaccination rollout. But the fault doesn’t lie only with Trump. In blue states where Democrats command both power and resources, like California and New York, overly restrictive eligibility criteria slowed the rollout, and huge numbers of shots were locked in freezers.
It’s an embarrassment.
A successful mass immunization campaign will save lives, supercharge the economy and allow us to hug our families and see our friends again.
Biden’s team understands that. Their $20 billion plan to use the full might of the federal government to accelerate vaccinations hits all the right notes. But it’s attached to their $1.9 trillion rescue plan, which needs 10 Republican votes it doesn’t have.
Here, too, Democrats will quickly face a choice: To leave their promises to the American people to the mercies of Mitch McConnell, or to change the Senate so they can change the course of the country.
In other words, what Democrats need to do is simple: Just help people, and do it fast.