What does Biden’s infrastructure bill tell us about the health of US democracy?
Is Washington functional? This week would seem to suggest that the answer is a resounding and surprising yes. On Tuesday, 69 senators – 19 Republicans and 50 Democrats – passed the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework”, a $1tn bill that invests in everything from roads and bridges to electric grids and public transit.
This was the kind of bill many observers of American politics never thought would be possible in 2021: a major new piece of legislation that won support from both parties and will concretely improve people’s lives. The president, his staff and his allies are rightly proud of their big-deal infrastructure bill – and of the legislative skill it took to negotiate and pass it, and with final passage in the House all but inevitable,
President Biden took a well-earned victory lap.
“We proved that democracy can still work,” he said.
But those words were clearly chosen carefully. Just because democracy can work does not mean democracy is working. In fact, a closer look at the bipartisan infrastructure framework – and the effort required to pass it – confirms just how much trouble American democracy is in.
In a functioning political process, a major infrastructure bill like this one would never have passed during Joe Biden’s presidency – because it would have passed far earlier. As far back as 1998, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave America’s infrastructure a D, a grade which has barely improved in the years since. In 2007, a deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis brought the issue of infrastructure funding to the foreground, and in 2008, both parties’ presidential candidates spoke about the importance of fixing our crumbling roads, bridges and highways. Even the Trump administration, with its endless parade of infrastructure weeks, acknowledged the importance of the issue even as they failed to address it.
For well more than a decade, in other words, elected leaders of both
parties have agreed the state of America’s infrastructure is a serious problem. Yet it wasn’t until this week that they finally did something about it. This hardly suggests our political process is functioning as it should.
This years-long delay was even more remarkable when you consider that infrastructure investment has long enjoyed massive, bipartisan support among voters. According to Gallup, practically every poll in the last five years that asked about infrastructure found overwhelming support among Americans. In theory, supporting new infrastructure projects should have been popular no matter who was president. In practice, Republicans were more interested in spending money on tax cuts for the wealthy when they had full control of government, and in denying Democratic presidents victories when they did not.
For more than 10 years, Republican elected officials concluded that the benefit of doing something the American people wanted was outweighed by the benefits of obstruction and rewarding their donors. Politically speaking, this may well have been the correct conclusion. But that suggests there’s something wrong with our political process itself.
Particularly since the only thing that finally did get Republicans to the table on the infrastructure bill was the near-certainty that massive infrastructure investment was happening with or without them. For the first time since 2010, Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House. Early in President Biden’s term, they committed to using reconciliation, which is immune to the Senate filibuster, to pass an infrastructure package.
Republican lawmakers didn’t negotiate because they wanted to improve America’s infrastructure. They negotiated because obstruction was no longer an option. By helping to pass a bipartisan bill, they could at least get credit for popular items and perhaps convince Democratic centrists to pare down a future reconciliation package. Bipartisan legislation, in other words, was only made possible by the alternative possibility of extreme partisanship. That doesn’t change the importance of the bill – but it does suggest the process that led to its passage was hardly an inspiring display of country over party.
So, yes, Washington proved that democracy can still work. But at the moment, American democracy works like this: if a large majority American people agree; and one party wins full control of Washington; and that party is able to find a procedural loophole that would let it take action without the Senate filibuster; and the president and his allies in Congress execute their legislative strategy near flawlessly; and we wait about 15 years; then politicians of both parties will come together and act. Such a political process is many things, but “functional” is not among them.
And our democracy is poised to become much less functional very soon. If voting rights are further eroded, rampant partisan gerrymandering is allowed to go unchecked, and far-right judges continue to legislate from the bench without any real threat of court reform to moderate them, the gap between what the American people want and what Washington does will only widen.
The same week the Senate passed the bipartisan infrastructure framework, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report declaring that we have reached “code red for humanity”. If governments don’t act soon on climate, the planet could become essentially uninhabitable, not in some hypothetical future, but within the lifetimes of Americans born today.
Biden is right: this week, we proved democracy can work. But we were also reminded that we can no longer afford a democracy that works like this.
David Litt is an American political speechwriter and New York Times bestselling author of Thanks Obama, and Democracy In One Book Or Less. He edits How Democracy Lives, a newsletter on democracy reform
Bipartisan legislation was only made possible by the alternative possibility of extreme partisanship