Congress ends ‘horrible year’ with bitter divisions
Dems’ achievements eclipsed by setbacks from Republicans
WASHINGTON — A congressional year that began with an assault on the seat of democracy ended at 4 a.m. Saturday with the failure of a narrow Democratic majority to deliver on its most cherished promises, leaving lawmakers in both parties wondering if the legislative branch can be rehabilitated without major changes to its rules of operations.
“It has been a horrible year, hasn’t it?” asked Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, as she looked back on failed efforts to convict a former president and to create a bipartisan commission to examine the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, as well as numerous legislative endeavors that could not find bipartisan majorities.
The Senate limped out of town in predawn darkness after slogging through nominations one by one but leaving dozens of President Joe Biden’s nominees still awaiting confirmation to fill key positions at home and abroad — because a handful of Republican senators erected a blockade.
Biden and Democrats can point to some major successes in 2021, including a $1.9 trillion pandemic aid plan that included a $300-per-child income support that slashed poverty rates; a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law that had eluded the two previous presidents; the confirmation of 40 judges in Biden’s first year, the most of any president since Ronald Reagan; and a House inquiry that has begun to reveal more about the roots of the Jan. 6 riot.
But the desultory end to the first session of the 117th Congress left few happy. Republicans — helped along by Democratic holdouts — succeeded in obstructing much of Biden’s agenda, including a major voting rights push meant to neutralize new restrictions their party has enacted at the state level. Democrats accused them of an assault on the foundations of democratic pluralism.
At times, Democrats tried resorting to bare-knuckled tactics to steer around that obstruction — drawing charges from Republicans that they were trampling the rights of the congressional minority in ways that they would soon regret — and still fell short of their goals.
House Democrats, who hold a slim majority in their chamber, fumed at their counterparts in the evenly divided Senate for failing them, while Senate Democrats railed against two of their own — Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — for grinding Biden’s agenda to a halt with their refusals to fall in line.
The disappointments were impossible to deny. Democrats have been warning with growing urgency that forces loyal to former President Donald Trump have been moving the pieces into place to disrupt or potentially overturn the next presidential election — through new barriers to voting, partisan election controls and gerrymandered House districts.
Yet efforts to enact expanded voting rights, institute fair election rules or place any new controls on the presidency have hit a wall in the Senate.
A self-imposed Christmas deadline to pass a $2 trillion social safety net and climate change bill through the Senate came and went, with one senator in particular, Manchin, looking increasingly intransigent.
Other promises to overhaul
the nation’s crippled immigration laws, force the conversion of electric utilities to renewable energy, strengthen gun safety laws and reform policing rules appear dead.
Even raising the borrowing limit to make sure the federal government did not default on debt incurred under both Trump and Biden could only be accomplished by the most convoluted of legislative machinations.
“Welcome to the United States Senate. I’ve been here for 25 years, and I’ve seen the decline of this institution to the point where we
no longer function as we once did,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat. He added, “Until we change the rules of the Senate and get serious about legislating on behalf of the American people, we’re going to continue to suffer this frustration.”
Lawmakers from both parties blamed their opponents for the malaise hanging over the Capitol. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said any number of issues might have been resolved if Democrats had simply approached open-minded Republicans to find solutions.
He pointed to an income
security plan he rolled out in February that could have been the basis for negotiations as the Democrats struggled to extend their $300 child credit beyond 2021. No one even broached the subject with him, he said.
But beyond partisan finger pointing, few could argue the legislative branch of government was functioning properly. As long as most policy bills need 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s remarkable ability to corral her whisper-thin House majority will be for naught on most legislation.