The left is pushing: Will Biden resist?

Democrats pile on pressure to reform institutions of entrenched Republican power, write Sydney and Astead Herndon

There is a battle brewing among Washington Democrats that is set to boil over if Democrats take back the Senate and former Vice President Joe Biden defeats President Donald Trump in November.

Even as Republicans line up behind Trump and a vision of conservative government, Democrats are navigating fault lines in their own ranks over how they would govern as the controlling party. Some Democrats, and not just on the left wing, are increasingly embracing structural changes to the political system — including eliminating the Senate filibuster, ending the Electoral College and granting statehood to Washington DC — while others reject these ideas as norm- busting power grabs that are unpalatable to a majority of voters.

The tussle has only intensified with the looming Supreme Court battle over Trump’s nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett. The potential for a decades- long conservative majority on the court has prompted changeseeking Democrats to add another item to the policy list: expanding the size of the Supreme Court.

“If Republicans confirm Judge Barrett, end the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court,” Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts said in a tweet last week. Even Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said last week that “everything is on the table”.

But the growing momentum for structural change faces a 1.8m roadblock, hand delivered by the primary voters within their own party: Biden.

A consummate Washington institutionalist who served in the Senate for nearly four decades, Biden to this day often speaks in fond and wistful terms about Senate customs of yore. From a policy standpoint he has largely rejected calls to eliminate the filibuster, only recently signalling some openness to doing so, or to expand the Supreme Court. He has said he opposes the movement to defund the police and has proposed increasing funds to law enforcement, with conditions.

In comparative terms, Biden would be a very progressive president. On issues of climate, education and even healthcare, he has proposed an agenda that has drifted leftward.

Yet on institutional change, Biden has not matched the urgency from the left that the election and the Supreme Court fight have stirred. Since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Biden has studiously avoided echoing some of his fellow Democrats who advocate for deep structural change, instead broadly imploring Republican senators to “follow your conscience” on the court vacancy. Asked in a television interview last week if he would consider adding seats to the Supreme Court, he said that it was a “legitimate question”, but then said he was not going to answer it.

The discord could set Democrats on a collision course: a party increasingly seeking to play by different rules led by a figure who helped create the current ones. The outcome of the fight will help define a party that has rallied around the mission of defeating Trump and Senate Republicans but remains ideologically diverse.

Representative Karen Bass of California, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus who was in the running to be Biden’s vice- presidential selection, said in an interview that the calls for transformational changes to government were coming from a place of Democratic frustration. Though Biden has repeatedly insisted he could work with Republicans once Trump is removed, Bass said that the Senate had become so dysfunctional that even Biden would have to admit that the bipartisan chamber of his era was gone.

“I would guess that he would say that ‘ this Senate is not the Senate that I served in’,” said Bass, who was elected to Congress in 2010.

But she said that Democrats for now were united around issues like protecting the Affordable Care Act, which Trump has threatened to dismantle, and ensuring safe access to ballots in November. After that, she said it was hard to predict what issues would remain salient if Democrats achieved a majority government.

“I think the preparation for a new administration is going to take priority over things like whether or not there’ll be a change in a filibuster or all those other issues,” she said.

Some of these once- fringe issues were already entering mainstream discussion even before the Republican rush to replace Ginsburg. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House of Representatives passed a historic bill establishing Washington DC as the 51st state earlier this year. And the idea of ending the Electoral College gained traction in the Democratic presidential primary, with candidates including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg supporting it. Warren tied the issue to the 2016 election result, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton despite losing the popular vote.

But other issues, including eliminating the filibuster and expanding the size of the nation’s highest court, continue to split the party. Unlike typical intraparty battles, however, the divide is not strictly between the progressive and moderate wings. Instead, against the backdrop of the Supreme Court battle, new quasi- alliances are forming.

In perhaps the most striking shift, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a centrist and one of the few Democratic senators to represent a state that Trump won in 2016, said last week that he would be open to eliminating the 60- vote threshold in the Senate.

“I didn’t come here to not do anything. I came here to get things accomplished,” Tester told National Review. “I think the filibuster’s very important, and I think it makes for better legislation, and I still believe that. I still support the filibuster, but, like I said, we’ll see what happens with the other side.”

It was a change of heart that reflected a widely held belief among Democrats that Republicans in the Senate have weaponised Washington’s rules. And it underscored the extent to which the Supreme Court fight has galvanized even some moderate Democrats to reconsider the status quo if their party wins back a Senate majority.

Yet even as Democrats favouring big changes slowly gain allies, several moderate senators have continued to reject the idea of filibuster reform, including Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Dianne Feinstein of California.

“I think the filibuster serves a purpose,” Feinstein, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said last week. “It is not often used, it’s often less used now than when I first came, and I think it’s part of the Senate that differentiates itself.”

In Biden’s administration, or after Trump is re- elected, the party will have to reconcile differences between ideological and generational factions.

For now, all it cares about is winning. “Our overall focus is the next 38 days,” Bass said, referring to Election Day. When asked what issues help Democrats win, she did not mention court expansion, filibuster elimination or busting the Electoral College, and returned instead to the kitchen table concern that Biden’s campaign is emphasising: “Healthcare, healthcare and healthcare.”

If Republicans confirm Judge Barrett, end the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.

Senator Ed Markey