Chris Carlson/AP Photo
Leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, endorsed yesterday by former candidate Bernie Sanders, has begun a process of moving leftward on some key issues in the 2020 race.
While acknowledging their multiple policy differences, Bernie Sanders gave a full-throated endorsement to Joe Biden yesterday. Still, it will take more than Bernie’s blessing to convince some younger leftists to swallow hard and vote for Joe come November.
The Biden people are certainly cognizant of the need to unite the party by scrambling leftward on a number of key issues. Already, Biden has extended his pledge to make two-year public colleges tuition-free to four-year public colleges, too. He has about-faced on bankruptcy law, rejecting his own Scroogeian legislative creation in favor of Elizabeth Warren’s more human-friendly model. He has endorsed forgiving student debt to students who attended public colleges and universities who earn less than $125,000 a year. And he’s come out for reducing the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60.
Each of these shifts moved incrementally toward specific Sanders and Warren positions, of course, and each of these candidates’ camps has committed to setting up joint policy committees to see if they can hammer out additional midpoint positions, which still will wind up to the left of where Biden’s been coming from.
The coronavirus pandemic presents some immediate opportunities for Biden to support a more functional safety net. Sanders and Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) have introduced legislation that would commit the federal government to picking up all the health care expenses of uninsured virus patients. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has called for the federal government to emulate a number of European governments by paying for the salaries of workers who’d otherwise be furloughed or laid off, so that businesses won’t have to hire anew when the shutdown is lifted, and workers won’t have their purchasing power reduced and their lives thrown into more turmoil than is necessary. (Jayapal has written a similar bill.)
What progressives need to keep uppermost in mind is that Biden’s positions, should he become president, are a starting point for public policy, not the end point.
What progressives need to keep uppermost in mind, besides the necessity of electing Biden and a Democratic Congress, is that Biden’s positions, should he become president, are a starting point for public policy, not the end point. By ending Donald Trump’s presidency and Mitch McConnell’s tenure as majority leader, and by having a Democratic Senate scrap the filibuster, progressives can bring changes on improvable presidential policy proposals.
Historically, as many if not more progressive advances in American law have come in the form of amendments, beyond what appears in the original legislation. The civil rights bill that the Kennedy administration introduced focused entirely on the desegregation of public facilities. It took the great March on Washington, with its emphasis on “Jobs and Justice,” and some concerted lobbying, to insert language into the final bill that banned discrimination in employment. Similarly, neither the Social Security Act nor the Fair Labor Standards Act (which established the federal minimum wage) originally covered farmworkers, domestic workers, or even, in the case of the FLSA, many retail workers. Those groups were added years later after concerted progressive agitation.
Let’s assume that the Democrats win a trifecta in 2020, taking the White House and the Senate and holding the House. Let’s assume Biden sends a proposal up to the Hill that lowers the age for Medicare eligibility to 60. It may be that, by then, the cumulative political effect of the coronavirus will serve to make Medicare for All effectively irresistible—but I doubt it. In which case, how about an amendment that lowers the age to, say, 45? Too ambitious? How about 50? Lots of middle-aged Americans may find decent-paying jobs with benefits harder to get in the scaled-down, more automated post-virus economy.
If seniors fear their Medicare benefits will be watered down by expanding the recipient pool, how about adding dental and vision care to the list of services that Medicare covers? Right now, Americans under 26 can be covered under their parents’ private insurance. Why not cover more of them, or all of them, under Medicare too? Does all this cost too much? Let the federal government set prescription drug prices, as governments in most other countries do. Let the government regulate prices for medical equipment and the profit margins of private hospitals.
There’s no reason, of course, that a process like the one outlined above can’t be extended to much of a Biden administration’s legislative agenda. My suspicion is that, when it comes to health care, education, worker rights, sustainable sources of energy, building domestic supply chains, and a host of other progressive concerns, there’s some give in Biden’s positions, as he’s already shown in his recent leftward shuffles. Other topics—bank regulation, say—may prove more difficult.
That said, most liberals in 1932 didn’t hold out great hopes for Franklin Roosevelt, and the liberals and labor leaders at the 1960 Democratic Convention were aghast that John Kennedy had selected right-winger Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. Presidencies aren’t made only by presidents; they’re also made by the social forces abroad in the land. More of those social forces are consciously social democratic today than perhaps at any previous time in our history.
Bernie Sanders understands that in his bones; that’s surely one reason why he was able to endorse Joe Biden yesterday with no evident misgivings. His supporters would do well to understand that, too.
