GOP gains ground despite Dem control
President Joe Biden quoted the liberal icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he first addressed Congress last year, laying out a policy plan with New Deal-sized ambition: curb climate change, reduce college and drug costs, raise corporate taxes, subsidize child care and continue tax rebates for parents, among other initiatives.
Fourteen months later — despite unified Democratic control of the House, Senate and White House — none of that has passed into law. At the same time, the conservative rebellion birthed in response to Roosevelt’s legacy notched major public policy victories in the courts and in states across the country.
The landmark conservative Supreme Court victories this week on abortion and guns capped a year-long string of victories on the right, especially in 23 states, including giants like Texas and Florida, where conservatives control all branches of elected government. Republicans have expanded school choice, reformed school curriculums, lowered taxes and launched a new wave of culture war fights.
With the court’s ruling on Friday overturning Roe v. Wade and the right to an abortion and on Thursday curtailing restrictions on gun ownership, conservative activists have been hit by a wave of celebration amid growing hopes for retaking the House and Senate this fall.
“You don’t plant and reap at the same time. And this has been a long process. The fruit of yesterday has been a long time coming,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Christian
conservative group, said Saturday. “There were times that I didn’t even think we would get to this point.”
Liberals, meanwhile, have grown increasingly concerned that they will lose their chance to fully capitalize on control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — a situation of unified power that has last only happened after the 1992 and 2008 elections. Leaders of both parties expect a Republican takeover of the House in the midterm elections.
For the conservative movement, the liberal frustration is its own victory.
“I don’t see what permanent structures that the Democrats created in their first two years. Obamacare was a permanent structure,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said of Biden’s presidency. “They missed, forgot, didn’t focus on the fact that the New Deal was passed when they were almost an 80% majority in the two houses. In 1964, after Goldwater loses, about 70% of House and Senate were Democrats and you passed the Great Society.”
At the root of the Democratic struggles is the tenuous nature of Biden’s victory in the 2020 election cycle. Although he beat President Donald Trump, Republicans nonetheless picked up a net gain of 14 seats in the House and flipped the New Hampshire state legislature. Republicans now control both the House and Senate in 30 states, compared with 17 states in Democratic control, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The 50 senators who caucus with Democrats have struggled since Biden’s inauguration to unite around his agenda.