Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and vice-presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz talk during the Democratic National Convention Monday night.
One thing that was difficult for Biden in 2021-2022, which ended up sapping a lot of his goodwill as negotiations over Build Back Better dragged out, was that he refused to prioritize any piece of the agenda, instead going for it all. When the Manchin-Sinematic wall ended up nullifying a lot of the taxes needed to cover the expense of new programs under the PAYGO laws, instead of setting priorities the Democrats pinched the programs and time-limited them, making them abjectly worse in the name of just getting started.
In the end, priorities did get set for Biden, but by Congress, and by Joe Manchin in particular. An underrated reason for Biden’s loss of popularity in 2022 in particular was the endless discussions on passing bills, where Manchin was the most visible figure in the Democratic Party. I wrote about this a lot at the time.
On the convention floor last night, I was able to talk to a few members of Congress, and I put to them the idea of what happens if they achieve their goal of a trifecta under a President Kamala Harris in 2025. In particular, I asked what they would prioritize. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) started with the democracy-related bills, the For the People Act and the John Lewis Freedom to Vote Act—“Those are just core Democratic values that we will carry forward.” But then he added that Kamala Harris will add an agenda onto that, including all the care economy measures, and codifying Roe v. Wade.
When I asked Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), who is on the path to potentially becoming Progressive Caucus chair, he added even more to that agenda. “I think that if we have the ability to really pass legislation, I think day one, restore abortion rights across the county, there’s a clear mandate for that. Day two, address voting rights and civil rights across the country… And I think day three, you do the things that matter to working people. Which are things like the right to unionize in this country with the PRO Act, and taxing the wealthy to pay for things that people really deserve like health care and child care.”
There’s a logic to some of this. The abortion and voting rights measures are things that you would need to be exempted from the filibuster to pass, but there’s pretty broad agreement on the particulars within the party; codifying Roe is fairly straightforward, and Democrats in the House already passed the voting rights bills. Then on the rest, there’s a big tax fight coming in 2025, and there should be some residual money available there for at least some facets of the care economy agenda.
But I don’t see a lot of people thinking about what’s going to take precedence, or looking ahead to when the money is finite and getting programs permanently in place, not temporarily like the Child Tax Credit increase, becomes paramount. Nobody wants to put one program ahead of another, especially during campaign season. But the Democrats need a philosophy that it’s better to actually get something solid and lasting done, rather than mashing everything into a paste just to say that they have a comprehensive agenda.
I do think that Harris, who has more buy-in and goodwill than Biden had coming in, could be able to actually set priorities and pick and choose. To some extent, she’s doing that on the campaign trail already. There’s also room to get a lot done on many priorities through executive action. (Yes, I’ll be doing a Day One Agenda Revisited soon.) But there’s only so much to stuff in legislatively at once, at least given the limitations of our Congress.
