The nine Democrats making Pelosi’s life harder
Popular or unpopular, good economy or bad, the president’s party almost always loses seats in a midterm election. That there are so few exceptions — Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1934, Bill Clinton and the Democrats in 1998, and George W. Bush and the Republicans in 2002 — proves the rule.
The upshot is that if you are a member of Congress in the majority — and you share a party with the president — the die has been cast. Your party will most likely lose seats in the next election. You might lose your seat. With that in mind, you can fret and tinker and try to save yourself, or you can do as much as possible with the time you have in power. Voters may not reward productivity, but they almost always punish failure.
I say all of this apropos of the Democrats’ two-pronged infrastructure strategy. Moderate and conservative Democrats want a bipartisan bill for roads and transit that they can tout to their voters; progressive Democrats want a partisan bill for new programs and benefits to shore up and expand the American welfare state. Some moderates also fear that anything more aggressive than the bipartisan bill might expose them to backlash in their districts.
If, in 2020, Democrats had won the kind of overwhelming majority they enjoyed at the outset of the Obama administration, one side or the other might be able to win an outright struggle over the party’s agenda. But razor-thin margins in the House and Senate give each side the power to kill most of the other side’s top priorities. The solution is to do both bills at the same time; to link the passage of one to the other. There will be no bipartisan bill if the partisan one isn’t passed, and no partisan bill if the bipartisan one does not come to a vote. If the two sides don’t hang together, then they will both go down to defeat.
For a while, it looked like Democrats on both sides were on board with this approach. But then the Senate actually passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill. At which point, a group of more conservative Democrats in the House reneged on the deal.
In a letter sent earlier this month, nine Democrats — Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia, Filemon Vela of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Ed Case of Hawaii, Jim Costa of California and Kurt Schrader of Oregon — warned Speaker Nancy Pelosi that they would not vote for a budget resolution authorizing the partisan reconciliation package unless the House first passed the Senate-approved bipartisan infrastructure bill. “Some have suggested that we hold off on considering the Senate infrastructure bill for months — until the reconciliation process is completed. We disagree,” they wrote.
Now it’s two weeks later and they haven’t budged. “Time kills deals,” wrote the nine members in an op-ed for The Washington Post. “This is an old business saying and the essence of why we are pushing to get the bipartisan infrastructure bill through Congress and immediately to President Biden’s desk — as the president himself requested the day after it passed the Senate.”
This time they were joined by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.VA. “Just like Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate to pass the historic bipartisan infrastructure package before considering the Democratic budget resolution, the House should put politics aside and do the same,” Manchin wrote in a statement. “I urge my colleagues in the House to move swiftly to get this once in a generation legislation to the president’s desk for his signature.”
It should be said that Joe Biden has not actually asked Congress to fast track the bipartisan infrastructure bill ahead of the reconciliation package. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, told NBC News that Biden “has been clear that he wants both bills on his desk and that he looks forward to signing each.”
The nine members in question are also out of step with their districts, where the most likely voters back the budget reconciliation package without much in the way of reservation, according to a recent survey from the left-leaning firm Data for Progress.
The facts of the situation aside, it simply boggles the mind to watch another set of conservative and moderate Democrats persuade themselves that they are not subject to the laws of politics and will come out ahead if they, as Democrats, undermine the Democratic president.
We are well past the age of split-ticket voting. If and when voters turn against Biden, they’ll turn against congressional Democrats too. Try as they might, these Democratic skeptics will struggle to distance themselves from their party and its leadership. If past elections are any evidence, they’ll fail.
The only thing that could possibly buoy their prospects is the president’s popularity, which depends, in part, on his success. For conservative Democrats, handing Biden a major legislative defeat — which is what might happen if the House scraps its two-track process — is the very definition of an own goal, assuming they hope to stay in office. We saw this exact dynamic in 2009 and 2010, when moderate and conservative Democratic demands to scale back the Affordable Care Act did little to stem voter anger but did produce a less generous bill that took more years than necessary to disburse its benefits (and consequently diminished its political benefit).
But this just brings us back to the beginning. Democrats will probably lose the House. They may well lose the Senate. This might be the last Democratic “trifecta” for another 10 years or more, given partisan gerrymandering in one chamber and the Republican Party’s structural advantage in the other. The best play, then, is to go all out: to stop the games and pass as much of Biden’s agenda as possible; to do what they can to level the electoral playing field and combat voter suppression in the states; and to make the structural reforms (D.C. statehood, for example) that might bring American democracy a little closer to “one person, one vote.”
The point of winning power is not to stay in power; it is to use it. And if you use it well — if you do what you said you would do — you might actually get to keep it.