It was both exciting and moving for a politics buff like myself to see at around midnight on the night of Nov.5-6, the House of Representatives passed the Infrastructure Bill and passed a procedural hurdle for the Build Back Better Act, paving the way for the passage of that in two weeks time. The elaborate parliamentary procedures which assure that bills passed into law are properly legislated meant that the procedures are ceremonial and repetitious and for that reason all the more dramatic. I watched on live television to see the vote build up, the “yes” votes staying close to twenty votes ahead of the opponents until it became clear that the bill had passed because there were not enough votes left so that the margin of winning could not be overtaken even if all the remaining representatives had voted against it. Then, because this was an important bill, there was a vote on whether to table the bill, and that was defeated, that requiring the process of voting to happen all over again, the tallies going up on the electronic devices for voting as well as requiring members for a second time to announce to the Speaker that they are informing the body that so and so is voting although absent as either yea or nay. This new rule was adopted by the House so that members who are sick from Covid need not be present in the body in order to vote, something that previously had not been allowed. So we saw the same faces saying again that the same names would say yes or no, and that was dramatic for its repetition as if someone might change their mind or if the tallies would be different, and in fact the bill to override tabling the bill did have a different result than the bill itself. The tabling resolution was a party line vote while the original bill passage had some Republican and Democratic crossovers. Then there was a procedural vote for the Build Back Better bill that passed though the Democrats passed it by only nine votes, which testified how hard it was to corral all of the Democratic Caucus to agree to it if it were to pass. What an observer of these proceedings could see was the majesty of Article One of the Constitution, which describes the powers of theCongress, that it can move legislation, as unwieldy and slow as the proceedings may be to accomplish a vote. The power of the Constitution to get things done is actual and visible, despite, as I have said in a previous blog post, there are claims that congresspeople are marionettes whose strings are pulled by elsewhere and by sinister powers. It seems to me that the good and the bad of Congress is right out there: hard negotiations behind the scenes to get narrow majorities on the floor.
But let us not be too sanguine about what Congress did or what will happen a few weeks from now. There are a great many points of view under the big tent of the Democratic party and it is a tribute to Biden that he along with Nancy Pelosi and many others to which he gives credit for having managed its 435 members. Some of them may change their minds before the final vote on Bring Back Better and there is only the President’s word, this morning, that he has confidence that he will have the Senate vote to pass it, meaning that both Sinema and Manchin will agree to it.The fear is that the Democrats in either house will not remain or made aligned and the bill will fail because, as Will Rogers famously said about a hundred years ago: “I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Republicans stand together with very few exceptions but the factions within the Democratic Party are quite contentious and willing to wrest any bit of leverage so as to fashion the final version of a bill even if it endangers the entire edifice that they also want to have passed. Remember how close was the vote to get through Obama's Affordable Care Act. Scott Brown was the Republican who was a surprise win for the Senate seat to complete the term of Ted Kennedy after he died and so the too long extended negotiations over that act was in danger. Manchin or Sinema, for their part, might harden their opposition to Build Back Better or be sweetened by those opposed to the Build Back Better bill. You never know.
Remember what happened when, in 1848, following demonstrations throughout the German states and the resignation of storied figures like Prince Metternich, liberals of all stripes convened to form a constitution whereby Germany would be united and democratic, but the dickering kept on until the conservative forces were able to realign themselves and so Germany became neither united and democratic, united without Austria a generation later and under a constitution whereby the parliament had no authority over the military. A success delayed is a success denied. The same thing happen more recently in Cairo during the Arab Spring of when the liberals, the modernizers, with their smartphones and degrees wanted to get rid of Mubarak and make Egypt a western nation, dickered between themselves and so could not get a majority in what was a free election, refusing to find some liberal figure as their common figure, Mohamed Elbarandei, the Egyptian but long expatriated Director General of the UN Atomic Energy Agency, already accomplished as a Nobel Prize winner, and so the win went to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was so ill-equipped to govern that the army soon enough got rid of him and its general took control and has run the place ever since. A revolution delayed is defeated.
Military historians like to say that a war is the most complicated human endeavor there is. Not quite so. Legislation is. But military conflict provides parallel processes in the political conflicts that go on in legislation and so can serve as a set of metaphors for what happens in the process of legislation. Military battles take place when one side or the other has mastery of the opposition, such as in Pearl Harbor and Corregidor but most take place when both sides have mobilized enough forces so that both have a chance to win at least until the two sides have become sufficiently unbalanced so that one or the other is bound to win. The Japanese brought enough soldiers to Guadalcanal so that they thought they might overcome Henderson Field, and those Japanese who could were evacuated when that was no longer possible. A battle is therefore a moment of timing before other forces come into play. That is why Napoleon thought that he could hit one army before turning to another and that Hitler thought that new weapons would come to the rescue of the Third Reich. The point is that wars mattr and battles matter at the moment when they are contested.
The same is true of legislation. The political parties contend with one another about the issues at the moment, the issues getting lost when the culture moves on to other issues. But contend they will be on the battlefield at which they have been confronted. That is a way to understand how Democrats and Republicans are successful or not at their chosen endeavors. Democrats do well in the long run at extending health care and, in general, entitlements. They do so gradually. In the Sixties, they got Medicare and Medicaid. In the Obama Administration, they got the Affordable Care Act, the American people deciding they liked it only after it was implemented. Now Biden has increased coverage for government supported health insurance even more and wants to provide hearing services to the elderly but not provide eye care and dental care, perhaps because those two are so expensive. Those two related services will have to come in a later time, perhaps in another generation. Meanwhile, there is the extension of social services such as pre-K while waiting again to get free community college. Liberals are patient at getting into these issues one bite at a time even if Progressives want more than the public might be willing to chew.
Republicans, on the other hand, do the best they can to delay the inevitable so far as entitlements are concerned. They are like German General Kesselring who made the Allies fight forward from the boot of Italy to the Alps in a two year campaign, the Germans retreating from one well fortified defensive line to another and so keeping the million men Allied army out of action while the real battles took on elsewhere, on the Eastern and Western Fronts. Republicans are always disappointed because they are just against health and entitlement policies rather than craft alternative one but they always manage when in power to cut taxes and regulations which the Democrats had increased when they were in power. A lot of geographical theatres of operation engage in contesting a war or a legislature.
Republicans, on the still another hand, are more successful than Democrats in dealing with cultural and social issues, despite what seemed for most of my life as the inevitable march forward on civil rights and the right to choose. It might have seemed that the status wars over ethnicity and gender were over. Blacks got the Civil Rights acts of the Sixties and women got their abortions, which was key to allowing women to control their own lives as to both family and work life. But the Shelby County case gutted the voting rights bill and the Supreme Court is about to overturn Roe v. Wade. The long fight of the Republicans will have won their battles. Moreover, the Republicans have been on the offensive or, rather, were Kesselringian in their resistance about gun control ever since the sunset of the Brady Bill. Republicans have been able to put off any gun reform even about major mass shootings and resist legitimate gun control over handguns that devastate local urban communities. A battle delayed can be a battle lost, though it can also mean that one so long delayed is no longer relevant as is the case with abortion, now that there will soon be prescription drugs to allow abortion to be carried out at home and because abortion is going down anyway because of better contraception and better maternal health and higher ages of marriage. If you delay the battle, the grounds on which it is fought become irrelevant.That is also happening with voting rights in which Republicans are making a last ditch effort to keep whites a voting majority in many places by making voting procedures more difficult. That won’t help very much if the demographics of the population shift in a generation into being a majority minority population. Even Texas will finally become a blue state when Hispanics get to be an even larger part of the population. Then Republicans will have to do what Marco Rubio suggested a decade ago: that Republicans court Hispanics and so become part of a new majority coalition of Hispanics and less educated whites over against the educated whites and the Blacks who support the Democrats and so provide for a political war without bloodshed between evenly powered demographics rather than just ideology and passion, which some of us thought, when much younger, was an improvement when the politics of self interested parties were replaced by principled and ideological parties because it turned out that some of the principled people were irrational and given to alternative facts.
Another possibility is that political conflicts will find a very different set of issues, move along to some other matters, such as defining, much less protecting, privacy, or going to Mars, so as to replace old fashioned kitchen table politics, just as women’s rights and race relations replaced the issues of the Great Depression. Even if that takes some political creativity, it has happened before. Prohibition was once a big issue as was marijana use. Military wars are also creative. The contending nations maneuver in cyberspace so as to position themselves to cut off an enemy’s electrical grid or allow its rivers to flood by controlling a nation’s dams.There are no ends of mischief for military people to invent. There are a lot of things that could happen in the rest of the current century though I hope that they will not be as bad as my two nadir centuries, the Seventeenth and the Twentieth.