Failing publicly is Biden’s best plan for voting rights bill
While almost everything in Toronto was cancelled and closed this week after being buried in snow, the U.S. Senate urgently cancelled a planned holiday break in order to be seen failing to achieve anything.
No one puts it exactly that way, of course, but I’m not joking — failure is essentially the plan. After recalling the Senate during the scheduled Martin Luther King Jr. holiday recess on Tuesday, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer filed a motion on voting rights legislation that will force a vote on it this week, probably Wednesday, in the full expectation of its defeat.
Why would he do that? So the public can see it fail. As Schumer’s Democratic colleague Pat Leahy said during debate on the bill Tuesday, “We’re gonna let the American people know how we voted.”
Which is to say the vote isn’t expected to become a law, it is instead expected to become an issue in this year’s midterm congressional elections. It’s an election strategy rather than an attempt at governing.
And maybe that’s understandable to many people given the circumstances: a 50-50 partisan split in a Senate that has a filibuster rule that requires 60 votes to get most things (including voting rights) accomplished; a Republican minority that will vote against any Democratic priority, and especially on voting rights legislation; and two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who steadfastly refuse to consider removing or reforming the filibuster rule.
But geez, a lot of Democratic voters and supporters must be starting to wonder what the point of all this election strategy is, exactly, if when they win elections they still can’t get anything done. After all, in the 2020 elections, the Democrats ran the table: they won back the presidency, held control of the House of Representatives, and took control of the Senate (thanks to Vice-President Kamala Harris’s role as the tiebreaking vote).
There have been some significant legislative successes since, but they didn’t stem from Democratic control of those government branches, but from the indulgence of some Republicans. President Joe Biden’s massive COVID-19 stimulus package early in his term came with a surprising level of minority Senate support, and his infrastructure bill passed after drawing enough Republican support to pass.
But this week’s likely failure on voting rights marks the second time in a row that one of Biden’s legislative initiatives has been derailed by members of his own party’s Senate caucus. In both cases, he publicly nailed his own colours to the mast. In the case of voting rights, he gave a rip-roaring speech last Tuesday in Atlanta portraying the legislation as something history will remember as shaping the very course of U.S. democracy. In the case of the president’s economic agenda in the “Build Back Better” social policy bill, he visited Congress to urge on his colleagues, and all but announced he had a deal to get the thing done — and then barnstormed the country promoting his vision.
In both cases, the will of the president — shared by a majority of the House and every other Democrat in the Senate — has been vetoed by Manchin and Sinema. Biden has mentioned a lot lately that as a senator, he was once able to get the famously racist Strom Thurmond to support a renewal of the civil rights-era voting rights bill, but now as president he can’t get two selfproclaimed centrist members of his party to support his highest governing priorities.
(On Tuesday afternoon there was still some flickering hope — so faint it was barely there — for voting rights, in the form of an evening Senate caucus meeting at which Manchin and Sinema’s arms could be twisted one last time. But Sinema was fairly definitive in closing the door to filibuster reform in a speech Monday, so the last attempt at persuasion feels, until proven otherwise, like a formality.)
There does appear, from the outside, as though there may have been another path available. Manchin long insisted there was a version of Build Back Better he would vote for, at roughly the same price tag Biden last supported, that would do fewer things for longer time-frames, and even publicly revealed the details of his demands. This week, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney said the White House never called him about voting rights to try to negotiate any kind of bipartisan compromise version, and suggested he’d have been open to it. “We can work together on almost every issue where there’s common ground,” he said during an appearance on “Meet the Press.”
It’s possible that these offers of compromise were made in the spirit of Lucy van Pelt holding the football that’s certain to be snatched away when Charlie Brown attempts to kick it. (Given the history of Republican Senate obstruction of Democratic presidents over the past decade or more, Romney’s claim of across-the-aisle openness to co-operation should inspire skepticism.) It’s also possible that Biden simply calculated that the compromises required to make a deal would lead to legislation unable to fulfil his goals.
In any case, the current strategy appears to be to fail nobly and visibly now, in hopes that doing so will mean better driving conditions after a November election in which Democrats are widely expected to lose ground.
In the meantime, Biden is left looking like a lot like so many TTC buses we saw in Toronto this week, partially buried in the snow: wheels spinning, engine roaring, getting nowhere except more stuck.
It’s possible that these offers of compromise were made in the spirit of Lucy van Pelt holding the football that’s certain to be snatched away when Charlie Brown attempts to kick it