Biden’s press conference on last Thursday made clear that the achievement of his legislative agenda will be a long slough, inched forward, rather than a blitzkrieg whereby Biden will rush law after law following his spectacular success at the American Recovery Plan. The reasons for this are that the American Recovery Plan was a fluke in that it was subject to reconciliation, whereby only a majority was required, and also because McConnell has made clear that he will hold his caucus together to be against any legislative measure Biden may propose just so that McConnell can in 2022 claim that Biden hadn’t done anything and so the Republicans should take the House and the Senate, even though McConnell has no legislative agenda himself, the same pattern whereby Republicans had said they would replace Obamacare with a better plan and never bothered to offer one for twelve years.
The main issues are not subject to reconciliation because they are not tax issues. The first is the voting rights act that will curtail the recent Georgia law that ends voting at five p.m. even though working class people traditionally vote after work and so after five. Georgia also prevents the number of lock boxes and increases the identifications necessary to vote even though there is no evidence of voter fraud. It even prohibits giving food and water to people who are waiting on line to vote, another form of harassment. Modifying the filibuster would allow voting rights to be accomplished but Joe Manchin wants to tinker the law as he also wants to tinker with gun control issues, another issue that could be carved out from a filibuster were Manchin to allow it. Manchin may overdue his leverage if one of the Republicans, such as Lisa Merkowski, would switch sides or just vote with the Democrats. She is very independent minded and supported in Alaska, where she is up for reelection in 2022, by its Libertarian traditions, and might get even additional support by backing those two measures. So these two laws are a close call that depends on Democrats getting very popular support after some emotional hearings and significant public scrutiny and Biden might get his way if he jumps at an opportune moment, as would happen should Georgia beat up voters or there are a series of gun massacres with AK-47’s.
A different dynamic might work for getting through an infrastructure bill despite McConnell’s opposition. Republican Senators like infrastructure bills because they bring goodies to their constituents. Even a Republican might agree to a bill that subsidized an airport to Bozeman, Montana or allowed a railroad to service Ogden, Utah. It would be up to Mayor Pete, as Secretary of Transportation, to cobble together the various federally subsidized physical objects into an overall rationalized plan for a national network that also includes major upgrades of the Boston to D.C. corridor and the Portland to San Diego corridor, however expensive that might be and however the disruption that would occur in those right of ways so as to build it all. Remember that we never thought the Bruckner Expressway in New York would ever end, nor the Big Dig in Boston, but we are all very pleased that they were done. McConnell would be hard pressed to oppose it all just so as to deny Biden any credit.
The usual pattern is that Presidents have a chance to accomplish something during the first two years of his first term. The model was LBJ who got through his civil rights legislation in the two years between 1965 and 1966. Biden seems to be contemplating a different way forwards. He may wear down Republican resistance over this and the next year and run in 2022 on the basis of Republicans being obstructive, an equivalent of what Harry Truman ran as a “Do Nothing” Congress of the republicans who were in control of 1946-1948, Biden saying that the Republicans were not in the majority but enough to deter Democratic action in the Senate.
Expanding a Democratic majority in 2022 is very plausible if you look at what senators are up to election. Most Senators are pretty certain at reelection, whether they are democrats or republicans because blue states are very blue and red states are very red. Chuck Schumer won last time out by over twenty percent and John Thune won with a similar landslide. Here are the elections in doubt because they won by narrow margins. Maggie Hassan is the Democrat from New Hampshire who won her seat by one percent while Robert Burr in North Carolina and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania also won their Republican seats with a few percentage points. So if these seats change their parties that gives Democrats a net win of two. Things are a bit more complicated than that, however. Warnock has to run in Georgia and he won his January 2021 by a few points but very strong turnout might allow Warnock to prevail even so as to overcome the various voter suppression bills that have passed in the Georgia legislation just a few days ago. Also, Marco Rubio had been reelected last time by seven percentage points. He was already well known and he won by this lower majority than most Republican Senators. Perhaps Rubio being first for and then walking back immigration reform might taint his brand on both sides of the issue. Also, Rob Portman of Ohio is retiring from the Senate and so Democrats have a chance to win an open seat especially if the Republican primary selects as its nominee a far right candidate. So there is a fair shot for increasing Democratic seats in the Senate despite what usually happens in first term midterms.
Distinguish between ordinary and big deal politics. Ordinary politics are what I have just discussed. People in office try to hammer out an advantage so that a constituency will be happy and will dicker with one another to craft a law one way or another to satisfy contributors or even just their own gut sentiments about what is right in the issues, whether about border control or drilling in new oil fields. Claude Rains does ordinary politics in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, and that is associated by Frank Capra as necessarily about corruption, which in Frank Capra’s populist mind is likely to be the case, even though it is not, as is the case with Joe Manchin, who just wants to polissh what he regards as fair gun control even if he is being a bit fine about the matter, the time now to be bold rather than into the details. Also remember that Jimmy Stewart was also for a pork barrel bill even if it was for a boy’s camp. Nothing bold about it; nothing of substance, only the majesty of the Senate and the DC monuments; nothing about Lincoln, who did things.
Big deal politics are those which are weighty and the reason we think they are is sometimes because leading politicians regard them as such. Biden as Vice President said “big fucking deal” about the Affordable Care Act, and Everett Dirkson said that sometimes it is time to change when referring to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Senators may stand around and note great events taking place, as was the Dec,8, 1941 “Day of Infamy” speech, but they also do historic things themselves-- or fail to do something which is itself weighty, and is not regarded as such, as recently happened in refusing to pledge allegiance to the legitimacy of the Biden election because of ordinary politics: their constituencies were not willing to admit it. Only in retrospect and we are not yet there will Republicans become aware of how momentous it was not to declare regular legal order in the process of presidential succession. The Republicans can be condemned as the result of some short term advantage, just as happened because the Federalists had muffed the Hartford Convention at the time of the War of 1812: neither secessionist or not nearly as anti-secessionist as they had made it out to be.
Are the voter suppression laws signed by Brian Kemp of Georgia to be regarded as ordinary or big deal politics? They are ordinary in that his legislatures and the constituents who support him believe him to be delivering legislation as is required and seems obviously to be true. Why not hassle voters by keeping them without water while waiting on lines to vote? Just an annoyance and, anyway, there is no reason to coddle voters who will vote against you anyway, especially because so many of the Black voters seem smug and self-righteous and messing for mischief. Opponents, however, like Biden and Warnock, see this as an assault on the vote itself and so a major issue with which to wage combat. It is time for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
I imagine that Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia knows that he is doing a big deal, just as Orvel Faubus and George Wallace did when they intervened in their states. Kemp is saying, or so I imagine him to be, that enough is enough; it is time to roll back minority voting so as to let the right people to get their officials and to restore Georgia to what it was, whether that is antebellum times or just before Black voters became prominent, which was just a few cycles ago. It is only in retrospect, when the past is a historic event, that people come to recognize how significant were the works that politicians have wrought. So it isn’t that bad guys are trivial or banal in their measures that are evil. There is nothing trivial about it. It just proceeds from doing the ordinary sorts of things, like doing train schedules and passing legislation that favors your party, aware that what is done is retrograde rather than progressive, and either happy or annoyed at the need to do so, while also a watershed either in the making or to be dammed off as progress proceeds. It is hard to judge the moment as ordinary or momentous while it is happening.
The ball has moved into Biden’s court; it is up to him to make the next move, and I suppose he will decide what to do when Congress reconvenes in a week or two. My own druthers would be to decide on the basis of consequentiality. Gun control can be kicked down the road because so few people are killed by mass shootings, but voter suppression is a direct threat to the pursuit of democracy and so all the alarm bells should be ringing. But Biden has to play his violin: he has to have a sense of where the nuances are, from the hints of the many people he talks to, that people are likely to feel relieved if Biden moves on one agenda item rather than another. That is the art of politics and he has been here long enough and been astute enough to hear the overtones and decide which way to jump. More than one bill will result if he guesses right and his agenda can fall crashing down if he goes wrong. He is one of those Presidents who knows just how heavy his decision might be.