Tom Williams/AP
Biden and McConnell at Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address
Joe Biden sometimes talks about the 2020 election like the end of a natural disaster: Having surveyed the wreckage of the Trump years, we’ll join together to commit ourselves to setting things right, then get down to the work of the cleanup.
It’s a nice way to think about it—everyone pitching in to solve problems, bring the country together, and show that we aren’t the hateful and gullible nation Donald Trump wanted us to be. Unfortunately, that’s not how it’s going to work. If he wins, Biden will face a Republican Party determined to make him fail. Imagine trying to clean up from a hurricane while someone is slashing your tires and throwing rocks at you.
This is something anyone who pays attention to politics knows. But it’s important to understand one of the key weapons they’re going to use to prevent Biden from implementing the agenda he’s running on: bipartisanship.
Or more precisely, the desire for bipartisanship, a desire that pulses in the heart of so many in establishment Washington, including journalists, pundits, and think-tankers—and way too many Democrats, including Biden himself.
If Biden not only becomes president but is fortunate enough to have a Democratic House (a near certainty) and a Democratic Senate (essentially a toss-up at this point), the idea of bipartisanship will be the mortar Republicans use to build a wall of obstruction. Which is why what Biden actually needs to do is to be uncommonly, emphatically partisan.
Republicans want Congress to be as slow and inefficient as possible, yet they’re the ones most likely to tell their constituents that “Washington can’t get anything done.”
Come next January, Republicans who spent the last four years enabling Trump will refashion themselves as defenders of unity. After all that rancor, they’ll say, the last thing we need is more partisan bickering. If and when Democrats move to enact what may be the single most important reform that will determine the success of Biden’s presidency—eliminating the filibuster—they will act shocked and appalled, as though Democrats were dragging Mr. Smith himself to the floor of the Senate to disembowel him on live TV.
At that moment, Republicans will have the moral support of much of official Washington, especially the news media. A hundred scolding editorials will be written, waxing poetic about how the Founding Fathers would be appalled at this affront to the system they built (even though the filibuster did not emerge until well into the 19th century).
This will make Democrats extremely nervous, tempting them to maintain the suffocating status quo out of a misplaced sense of propriety. That’s because for years, Democrats have been gripped by the bizarre delusion that the voting public cares deeply about procedural disputes in Congress, and will punish a party that goes too far in challenging or changing procedures while it rewards the party that demonstrates its commitment to civility and orderliness in legislating.
Republicans, on the other hand, have long realized that voters neither know nor care how the filibuster works or whether the blue-slip rule is still in force or anything else about how Congress goes about passing laws. What matters to the public is outcomes, not process.
And without going too far into the weeds, we should keep in mind that the arguments in defense of the filibuster are much like those in defense of the electoral college, in that they range from the almost reasonable sounding yet factually wrong to the utterly deranged. I’ll just mention two.
First, many people claim—and Republicans certainly will if Democrats steel their spines enough to move toward majority rule in the Senate—that the filibuster encourages bipartisanship, forcing the majority party to seek the minority party’s input and craft consensus legislation that will have the support of the entire public. Otherwise we just have a narrow agenda pursued by whichever party has a temporary majority.
But if that were true, this would be a golden age of bipartisan legislating, with Congress regularly passing ambitious laws to solve critical problems with the support of both parties. That is clearly not what has happened, for the simple reason that the parties have very different agendas. If one party wants to stop climate change while the other party wants to promote fossil fuels and let corporations pollute more, there isn’t a neat compromise just waiting to be attained.
The second argument—one Democratic senators are disturbingly likely to believe—is that while the filibuster is frustrating when you’re in the majority, you shouldn’t get rid of it because one day you’ll be in the minority again. The problem with that argument is that its only beneficiary is the GOP.
If you’re the party that wants government to do big things, you’re the one hurt by gridlock. On the other hand, if your party only has a few items on its agenda, gridlock isn’t much of a problem. If Mitch McConnell was terribly frustrated by the filibuster, he would have eliminated it on the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. But he didn’t need to, since the only thing the GOP really wanted to do via legislation was cut taxes for the wealthy, which they did. After that they were nearly finished; they couldn’t even muster 50 votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and given the upheaval it would have caused, McConnell was probably relieved.
But it goes beyond the filibuster. As they look to de-Trumpify their image, Republicans may well come up with their own slate of reforms meant to slow things down and turn away from partisanship—once Democrats have an actual opportunity to govern. For a preview, you can read this op-ed by Sen. Ben Sasse, proposing a series of changes to the Senate (One 12-year term! Get rid of committees! Make senators live together in dorms!) meant to return comity and civility to the body.
Biden and Senate Democrats shouldn’t fall for it. Instead, they should go in exactly the other direction, by seeking to eliminate everything that makes the Senate so fundamentally anti-democratic.
In addition to eliminating the filibuster, that means granting statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, which between them are home to 3.8 million Americans without congressional representation.
Republicans will call it a “power grab,” crying that it offends every notion of fair play. To which Democrats should say: Too bad. It’s the right thing to do, and if it benefits our party, all the better.
There’s an irony in all this, which is that Republicans want Congress to be as slow and inefficient as possible, yet they’re the ones most likely to tell their constituents that “Washington can’t get anything done,” a state of affairs that supposedly can be cured with the proper injection of “common sense” and—if Democrats are in charge—bipartisanship. If things aren’t getting done, it must be because there’s too much partisanship.
But the truth is that if you have power, being partisan is precisely how you get things done.
Just before the 2014 midterm election, when it was becoming clear that Republicans would take control of the Senate, then-Vice President Biden said of his former GOP colleagues, “Are they going to begin to allow things to happen? Or are they going to continue to be obstructionists? And I think they’re going to choose to get things done.”
It was ridiculous at the time, and it’s even more so now. One hopes Biden—and the rest of his party—will realize that there’s only one path to getting things done: more partisanship, not less.
