Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
President Joe Biden arrives to speak in support of changing Senate filibuster rules, on the grounds of Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, January 11, 2022, in Atlanta.
We had about three hours of legislative hope on Tuesday. At 4:15 p.m. Eastern time, President Biden gave a speech in Atlanta endorsing the elimination of the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, telling his party to not let procedure and norms get in the way of progress. At around 7:00 p.m., Chuck Schumer, in an event with the Center for American Progress, said resignedly, “I don’t want to delude your listeners: This is an uphill fight, because Manchin and Sinema both do not believe in changing the rules.”
When a sitting American president admits that the supermajority legislative requirement in Congress is an anachronistic relic, that matters (even if Donald Trump kicked this off by calling for an end to the filibuster five years ago). But the holdouts on the filibuster are still holdouts, and none of the smaller changes being suggested—removing the filibuster on the motion to proceed to considering the legislation, while keeping it on the motion to end debate and move to a vote, for example—would actually lead to passage of the bills Democrats want to pass. (Bills that don’t even really protect from the real threats to elections, it should be said.)
The filibuster debate, in other words, is going in the right direction but not yet in a way that is likely to lead to success. You could argue that the spotlight on voting has pressed the self-appointed bipartisan guardians of democracy into action to do something they can call solving the problem. But I’ve seen bipartisan gangs’ work product before, and let me suggest that it may wind up as less than advertised.
There’s something to the idea of politicians getting credit for trying, by showing their base that voting rights matters enough to provoke a fight over it. Still, you usually don’t have to get credit for trying against your own political party. Even civil rights leaders are growing tired of talk without action; some groups boycotted the Biden speech for this reason.
Nearly a year into the Biden presidency, we have to be honest about the weird passivity around COVID that is leading to bad policy.
Talk without action, and not just on voting, has been how the Democrats have used the governing trifecta since March’s passage of the American Rescue Plan. And it drives not only exhaustion but bad policy. Despite a promising start that suggested Biden’s administration had internalized the lessons of the Obama presidency and the pain of doing too little, there’s been a slow-motion pivot right back to that state of affairs, which heralds political disaster.
Legislative paralysis is mostly to blame for this; there is no majority for the Democratic platform in Congress as long as that majority relies on Joe Manchin. But the bigger problem is that the perspective that better things aren’t possible has begun to infect an executive branch with plenty of options to improve the situation.
Witness the Biden administration official who responded to CNN’s question about whether there should be additional relief measures during the omicron variant spike by saying, “No. There might be something small for restaurants. But the economy is booming, there are millions of open jobs, and we do not believe people should be sitting at home if they are vaccinated and boosted, as most adults are.” It took all of one week for that aristocratic-sounding response to become inoperative; House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters this week that the White House would be asking for “substantial” relief funding.
There’s a vehicle for this in the government funding omnibus bill that needs to pass by February 18 to avoid a shutdown. But there appears to be a disconnect in where to direct resources. The White House, according to Hoyer, is talking about funding COVID testing, vaccines, and school upgrades; members of Congress seem more focused in preliminary discussions on restaurants, gyms, live venues, and other small businesses that are suffering during omicron.
The initial relief provided by the Restaurant Revitalization Fund and other small-business measures has been completely depleted, while there is substantial funding left from prior relief bills for schools and testing. The White House is readying the delivery of at-home tests to every American, and has funding available to open more test centers, deliver more tests to schools, and finally implement that door-to-door vaccine service we heard about months ago.
Nearly a year into the Biden presidency, we have to be honest about the weird passivity around COVID that is leading to bad policy. Much as Rick Santelli’s rant against homeowners intimidated, at least psychologically, the Obama administration from issuing broad mortgage relief, the assumed threat of anti-lockdown protests has led to an attenuation of anti-pandemic options to a ridiculous degree. We’ve backed into adopting Sweden’s “let ’er rip” strategy for COVID, and we’re not enacting any Sweden-style welfare-state policy to at least assist those who get sick in the aftermath.
The White House may be thinking that, in the midst of an inflation messaging war, spending more money on short-term relief may effectively end even the conversation on Build Back Better. But that ship looks to already have sailed. Democrats in recent days have prioritized “cutting a deal,” but Sen. Manchin, the main obstacle, isn’t in a deal-making mood. He pulled the as-yet-unseen $1.8 billion offer he made to the White House last month, and the last we heard the only way to get him to re-engage is to drop the now-expired expansion of the Child Tax Credit.
Senate colleagues describe negotiating with Manchin on voting rights as like nailing Jell-O to the wall, and I’m sure with BBB it’s no different. Manchin called Wednesday’s inflation numbers “very very troubling,” and even if the government announced it had found a trillion-dollar gold bar buried in back of the White House, he’d call that troubling too. When you don’t actually want to move anything forward, everything seems like a hindrance to doing so.
I argued last month that the Day One Agenda is still available to make progress, get Manchin off the front page, and give the political system something else to debate. There’s at least one indication of that working. Biden has made a priority of highlighting the meat monopoly as a driver of inflation. While the December inflation numbers showed prices rising 7 percent year-over-year, meat prices actually fell. This is a signal that presidential power derives not just from executive action, but from using the spotlight and the bully pulpit. For companies with pricing power, pricing is a choice, and the meat processors may have decided to back off for now, the way steel companies did after JFK’s aggressive callout of their price hikes in the 1960s.
While that is somewhat promising, ultimately a president cannot appropriate money directly. The poverty-smashing Child Tax Credit has expired, and there’s no real vehicle to revive it at the moment. Other relief programs are running out, too. I marveled during the Great Recession at the fact that fiscal policy turned negative while the economy was still in tatters during the second quarter of 2010. The 2009 stimulus package no longer contributed to economic growth, and government policy in fact was harming it. Amazingly, despite all the money expended over the past two years, we’re now headed back in that direction.
Data collected by the Brookings Institution shows that the year-over-year moving average of the government’s fiscal impact was a scant 0.32 percent in the final quarter of 2021, and by the first quarter of this year is set to move sharply negative, to -2.04 percent. That’s a faster reversion to negative fiscal impact than happened under the Obama administration. Larry Summers and his elite economist cabal have been huffing about “runaway spending,” and we’re about to see what happens with their preferred program of austerity, right as the virus rips through the country.
This is why you see Bernie Sanders exclaim that Democrats have turned their backs on the working class. The tight margins in Congress, a premature economic victory lap from the White House, indecision amid yet another COVID surge—all of these are to blame. Fixing this grim state of affairs—and its likely disastrous political consequences—will require a level of ingenuity that has not been in evidence in the first year of full Democratic control.
