Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
President Joe Biden, accompanied by CNN journalist Don Lemon, speaks at a CNN town hall at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, July 21, 2021.
Day before yesterday, I heard that a prominent Democrat had had meetings with both President Biden and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, and came away with a surprising conclusion: that Manchin was ultimately OK with ending the filibuster, but that Biden was determined to keep it.
I don’t know about Manchin’s true leanings, but the world found out about Biden’s last night, at a town hall in Ohio. There, the president acknowledged that he’d like to require senators to actually talk and hold the floor while filibustering, but added that he still wanted to preserve this deeply undemocratic process. He didn’t take back his previous criticisms, including that the filibuster is a relic of Jim Crow politics. However, he said, “There’s no reason to protect it other than you’re going to throw the entire Congress into chaos, and nothing will get done.”
Nothing will get done? That’s precisely what will happen if the filibuster is preserved, as Mitch McConnell’s Republicans have repeatedly made clear.
The president’s musings, alas, kept coming. Asked about the prospects for ensuring Americans’ voting rights, Biden affirmed that that was a super-critical issue and he certainly wanted the Senate to pass the pending legislation. However, he added, “I want to make sure we bring along not just all the Democrats; we bring along Republicans who I know better.”
Better than what? Better than he knows Boolean algebra? Or, probably, that he knows them better than their critics know them, or than they know themselves? Or that they have better instincts, more support for the fundamentals of democracy, than all evidence suggests?
How to explain the president’s determination to preserve a senatorial process that will doom every element of his own agenda save those which can be enacted through reconciliation?
I suppose it’s possible that Biden believes the particulars of the reconciliation package—affordable child care and the expansion of Medicare, to name just two—will prove so popular that Democrats will sweep the 2022 midterms and have enough votes in the next Congress to overcome Republicans’ opposition to the remaining elements of his agenda.
Another possibility, just as likely, is that Biden has been satanically possessed by Mitch McConnell, who actually is an ill-concealed Lucifer.
More likely, Biden is simply still a creature of the Senate, wedded to old rules that over the past several decades in particular have become a dagger to democracy’s heart.
If there’s any consolation to be taken from Biden’s remarks, it’s that he can’t veto any change to Senate rules. Still, without his pushing, the prospect that the Senate Democrats will unite to kill the filibuster are very, very, very (and very) remote.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that the entire Democratic base is united in wishing it gone. Biden’s abandonment of the party’s base on this issue of all issues requires that base to be more militant, to threaten primary challenges to Democratic senators who don’t support the filibuster’s demise. That means the institutions that constitute the base—unions, activist groups, major funders—need to go on record backing such primary challenges.
The phrase “Say it ain’t so, Joe” was made famous by a 1920 newspaper account of what a Chicago newsboy said upon hearing that the White Sox’s star player, Shoeless Joe Jackson, had taken a bribe to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Biden hasn’t yet become a boyhood idol, but the newsie’s reaction seems an entirely appropriate response to Biden’s self-undoing—and would it were only self.
