Can Biden escape the trap formed by narrow margins!
When the election gods handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020, they set a trap that he walked right into. The question — one that could define his presidency and affect the 2024 presidential election — is whether he can escape the trap formed by the narrow margins the Democratic Party has in both chambers of Congress. Along with the presidency, Biden was handed a 50-50 vote in the Senate, with the deciding vote to be cast by Vice-president Kamala Harris, and an eight-vote margin in the House of Representatives. Thus, one Democratic Senator or four Democratic Representatives can block any Biden initiative.
At least 15 million people today are stateless, and millions more are threatened with national exclusion. The issue of statelessness thus demands urgent attention, as do works of history that shed light on the problem.
Notwithstanding this, Biden proposed the expansion or initiation of numerous domestic programmes, with improvements to the “social safety net” and environmental efforts.
Most of these programmes are popular. Combatting climate change has more Democratic than Republican support, and the White House wants it badly because Biden will attend the UN climate-change summit (COP26) in Glasgow on October 31. This may have been what led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to set the October 31 deadline for Congress to pass the “human infrastructure/climate” bill.
The $3.5 trillion cost of programmes on the scale Biden envisaged appeared to be high. Spread over ten years, it amounted to $350 billion annually, a less alarming amount (though the White House failed to communicate this effectively). Earlier estimated costs of the package had placed it at between $6 and $10 trillion, largely because Senator Bernie Sanders, the most left-leaning senator, is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. Still, $3.5 trillion had the appearance of being a negotiable number.
But in settling on such an apparently high overall number, did Biden and his aides overlook the fact that, of the 50 Democratic senators, at least two couldn’t be counted upon to go along with such a sum? Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, which has been turning Republican, is believed to be the only Democrat who can carry the state. He won it in 2018 by 3.3 percentage points. By contrast, Donald Trump won West Virginia in the 2016 presidential election by 42 points. Though Manchin is the most conservative Senate Democrat, his party has a strong interest in him winning reelection in 2024 if it is to maintain control of the Senate.
The other unreliable vote is that of Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona and a mystery to her Senate colleagues. Once a radical leftist, she’s now right of centre. So far as is known, Sinema has resisted telling almost anyone how she wants the human infrastructure/climate provisions changed — though she says she’s told the president, who has met with Manchin and Sinema several times. Further vexing the
Democrats’ leaders, the two rebels are understood to want different things. White House impatience with Sinema is growing.
Though Biden served as president Barack Obama’s vicepresident, he apparently failed to learn the lesson of Obama’s healthcare initiative. Obama and his aides did a poor job of explaining what was in their proposal, which gave the Republicans an opportunity to speak of “socialised medicine” and “death panels.” Similarly, most of what the public now understands of Biden’s package is that it was to cost $3.5 trillion.
The president maintains that the package can be paid for by raising taxes on the super-wealthy and businesses, but not everyone is convinced.