The Resistance So Far

Almost ten months into the Trump administration, how are the Democrats doing as an opposition party? The first instinct of rank-and-file liberals is always to dismiss them as ineffective (just as, not coincidentally, it is the first instinct of conservatives to bemoan Republicans’ congenital lack of spine). And the first instinct of the mainstream press is to feed that narrative with a steady supply of “Democrats in disarray” articles. It’s an old storyline and a mossy one; my friends and I, in e-mails, mockingly use the hashtag #demsindisarray when we note articles that overhype some new Democratic calamity. Yet there is some truth to both claims. “Disarray” isn’t exactly an unfair adjective for a party that controls no branch of the federal government and only sixteen governors’ mansions and thirteen state legislatures (Republicans control thirty-two, and five are divided). And, I might add, a party still not quite over the shock of that loss last November.

As for effectiveness, in the country’s recent history, the Democrats have never been as united or effective in opposition as the Republicans. This is less a matter of will and backbone than of the Democrats’ loyal voter base, both smaller and less rabidly monolithic than the Republicans’. To take the highest-profile example of the failure of Democratic opposition in recent times, 43 percent of Democrats in both houses of Congress (110 out of 257) voted for the Iraq war resolution of 2002. One can certainly see that as lack of backbone. At the same time, pre-war polls showed that Democratic survey respondents said they supported the war at levels around 40 percent.1 So, like it or not, those congressional Democrats reflected the will of the Democratic rank-and-file pretty closely.

The Republican Party of the past quarter-century, in contrast, would never give a Democratic president 43 percent of its vote on anything of importance. That’s not because it’s tougher or meaner, but because it’s responding to a different and less forgiving political reality—one in which, over the past thirty years, lavishly financed conservative pressure groups and right-wing media outlets have combined to create a base that brooks no compromise or accommodation. For a Daily Beast column back in 2011, I compared oppositionparty levels of support in Congress for George W. Bush and Barack Obama on four of each president’s major initiatives.2 The average Democratic support

1See, for example, Caroline Smith and James M. Lindsay, “Rally ’Round the Flag: Opinion in the United States Before and After the Iraq War,” the Brookings Institution, June 1, 2003. 2See my article “Data Show the GOP’s One-Sided War on Democrats,” The Daily Beast, September 9, 2011. The four Bush initiatives I examined were the first tax cut, the “No Child Left Behind” bill, the Iraq war vote, and the Medicare expansion of 2003. The four Obama initiatives were the stimulus, the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank financial bill, and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal. I think it was fair and accurate for Bush in both houses on those four bills was 41.1 percent. The average Republican support for Obama on his four bills was 5.75 percent. The two parties are just different species. However, in the age of Donald Trump, they’re becoming less different. True, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ leaders, did make a deal with the president to delay a vote on the debt ceiling for three months, a deal virtually shoved in their faces by Trump at an early September White House parley that the president described to the press as “a very good meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer” (GOP leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan had been in the room, too). That measure, attached to Hurricane Harvey relief, sailed through Congress. The next week Schumer announced that the trio had also reached a deal to protect the so-called Dreamers, people who were brought to the United States as undocumented children. There has been no congressional action on that yet, but in early October the White House announced that it would attach to any Dreamers legislation some harder-line measures like funding for a border wall and 10,000 more immigration agents. Schumer and Pelosi quickly signaled that any deal along those lines was impossible. On other matters, when it comes to big legislation, congressional Democrats have been consistent in their opposition to the White House. They forced McConnell to invoke the “nuclear option” on Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch’s nomination when it failed to get the sixty votes needed to clear the procedural

to call these at the time each administration’s major legislative actions. “cloture” hurdle. Democratic senators have blocked judicial nominees twice by refusing to return to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee a “blue slip” signaling approval of the nominee. This was a practice Republicans used aggressively during the Obama years, though McConnell is now threatening to abolish it.

A unanimous stand has been taken by Senate Democrats on three health care votes. Of course, the Democrats didn’t block health care repeal—the Republicans did that themselves. But it was impressive that not a single Democrat in either house voted for it, especially in the Senate, where nine Democratic senators will be defending their seats next year in states Trump won.

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Democrats are showing more resolve partly because of the extreme nature of this presidency, but mostly because their base is getting a bit—a bit—more like the Republican base. This may be quite a bad thing for the country in the long term, but in the short term it’s very much a good thing. The liberal base is larger and more energized than it’s been for many years. The Indivisible movement, which started after the election when four former congressional staffers wrote a pamphlet that caught fire called Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda, was an immediate success and now boasts nearly six thousand chapters across the country—most in the places you’d expect, but eleven in Idaho, seven in Wyoming, and two in my purple-leaning-red hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia. When Republican members of Congress were strafed at town hall meetings last summer by constituents irate over health care, chances are that one of the local Indivisible chapters helped organize those attacks.

The women’s marches held across the country and the world on January 21 have likewise spurred a sustained engagement on the part of thousands. A Women’s Convention will be held in late October in Detroit, according to its website, “for a weekend of workshops, strategy sessions, inspiring forums, and intersectional movement building to continue the preparation going into the 2018 midterm elections.” Speaking of those midterms, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reports that candidate recruitment is far ahead of where it was in 2016. A staffer at the DCCC told me that it has identified eighty House seats as worth contesting and already has good candidates for seventy of them. The main reason? “A lot of people are finally saying yes,” the staffer said; they see the act of running for office as more of a duty post-Trump, after previous demurrals. Around ten military veterans are running as Democrats, and there’s a group of people motivated by the health care repeal efforts—doctors and people with personal health scares and stories to tell.

All this activity has made Democrats in Congress begin to do something they haven’t done for many years: respond to pressure from the left. Ever since Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984 and the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council the next year, Washington Democrats have feared being seen as too liberal. Now, they’re more likely to fear being seen as not liberal enough. This creates no friction when it comes to deciding what they’re against. On the Republican health care bills, there wasn’t much space between Senators Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin; both voted no all three times, and there was never any sense that Manchin (whose state, West Virginia, Trump carried by more than forty points) was wavering. West Virginia accepted the Medicaid expansion, which covered about 175,000 residents in that state of very poor health indexes.

The tax bill now working its way through Congress will be a pivotal test of both the Democrats and the resistance and may tell us a lot about the extent to which our politics have really changed. Two arguments have long been used to sell tax cuts, arguments the Democrats have never really won since Ronald Reagan’s time. First, Republicans have always downplayed the enormous benefits going to the wealthy and emphasized the comparatively minuscule savings for the middle class. Consequently, a significant minority (though not a majority) of Democratic lawmakers has always voted for Republican tax cuts. The cuts were popular, and these Democrats felt pressured to support them. Second, Reagan promised that enormous tax cuts would lead to economic growth, and when, following the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the gross domestic product grew at rates above 3.5 percent and the unemployment rate slipped down to near 5 percent, he looked