I’m more than willing to give the Biden administration some time to get their bearings and figure out the lay of the land after the carnage of the Trump years. But I am very, very skeptical that they will be able to “work with” Republicans even if Biden thinks he has some kind of special talent for it. They are way too far gone.
Ron Brownstein has some thoughts on this:
The dissonance between the first and second halves of Joe Biden’s landmark speech this week encapsulates a central strategic challenge he’ll face as president.
During his victory speech on Monday, following the Electoral College vote, Biden denounced more forcefully than ever before the Republican Party’s legal maneuvers to overturn his win, arguing that they constituted an effort “to wipe out the votes of more than 20 million Americans … a position so extreme, we’ve never seen it before.” Yet in the speech’s final sections, Biden pivoted to a more familiar message, promising to “turn the page” on these skirmishes and insisting that he’s “convinced we can work together for the good of the nation.”
The big question his remarks raise is whether the Republican Party that Biden described in the speech’s first half is truly open to the kind of cooperation and partnership he promised in the second.
The answer is already dividing centrists—who believe that Biden has no choice but to seek agreements with congressional Republicans—from progressives, who fear that he will sap his momentum and demoralize his coalition if he spends weeks on what could prove to be fruitless negotiations over COVID-19 relief and other subjects. The divide is not only ideological but generational too: Compared with Biden, who came of age in the more collegial Senate of the 1970s and ’80s, younger congressional Democrats forged by the unrelenting partisan warfare of the modern Congress—a group some Democrats think includes Vice President–elect Kamala Harris—are generally less optimistic about finding common cause with Republicans.
I actually disagree with this a little bit. I don’t think the divide is ideological or generational as much as is it strategic and tactical. I’m old and yet I am convinced that the Republicans are a destructive, nihilistic power mad force that is going to do everything they can to sabotage anything that will help the American people and potentially benefit their political enemies. They are hopeless in my view. So I’m for the Biden administration using the power they have to enact policies that must be enacted if we are to survive. (And I’m ferevently hoping for a good result in georgia which changes everything.)The GOP is a roadblock to that and while it’s certainly fine to keep the lines of communication open — who knows, maybe Romney and Murkowski will come over once in a while — but putting any confidence in them is a huge mistake.
This isn’t about policy. There may be ideological differences within the big Democratic coalition that have to be hashed out. But Republicans are bad faith actors and cannot be counted upon to do anything but obstruct.
Brownstein continues:
Biden’s recent criticism of the GOP is notable because the president-elect has generally downplayed Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the election while emphasizing his own optimism about future cooperation. Biden aides told me that his priority has been to project his victory’s inevitability, and to avoid giving what one top adviser called “any additional lift or credibility” to Trump’s groundless claims of election fraud, even as more Republicans have embraced them. But that choice has come with what some Democrats see as a serious consequence: a failure to alert the public to the magnitude of the president’s assault on a democratic election, and to the broad willingness inside the GOP to join him.
The president-elect struck a different tone in Monday’s speech, when he condemned a Texas lawsuit to toss out the election results in four swing states where he won—litigation endorsed by about two-thirds of both GOP House members and Republican state attorneys general. Appearing on behalf of the Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia on Tuesday, Biden kept the pressure on, lashing the state’s two GOP senators for endorsing the lawsuit, which would have invalidated the votes of nearly 5 million of their own constituents.
That messaging marked a subtle but significant departure from Biden’s usual language during the campaign, when he mostly presented Trump as an aberration within the GOP, and repeatedly predicted that once he was defeated, more in the party would return to centrist dealmaking. Biden’s broad criticism of Republicans on Monday may have been his most candid acknowledgment yet that much of Trump’s party has followed him over the past four years toward more radical positions, particularly by abetting his serial assaults on the rule of law.
But the senior Biden adviser said that in targeting the GOP’s postelection actions, the president-elect’s goal was not “trying to score points against Republicans” or branding them as anti-small-d democratic. Rather, his intent was to reassure Americans that the failure of Trump’s efforts, even with the support of so much of his party, underlines the fundamental resilience of American democracy. “It was … more about trying to lay out the scope and the magnitude of the crisis that we had just navigated,” said the adviser, who like others I talked with for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.
Although almost the entire Democratic Party remained silent during the first weeks of the postelection period, more recently some members have raised sharp alarms about the long-term implications of the GOP’s actions. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut delivered a blistering floor speech on Friday in which he declared that Republicans who support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election “are engaged in a treachery against their nation.”
In an interview yesterday, Murphy told me that he fears Republicans may grow even more brazen in seeking to subvert future elections. “You can foresee a circumstance in which a Senate election is overturned in a red state in 2022, because I think the majority of Republicans have come to the conclusion that if a Democrat wins in any place other than New York or Connecticut, it must be because of fraud,” Murphy said. “That’s the point at which the blue states start to say, ‘Hey, can we be in this together with states that aren’t actually committed to democracy and the free will of voters?’”
The GOP’s unprecedented postelection maneuvering poses an inescapable question for Biden: whether reaching bipartisan agreements is possible when many Republicans have become so radicalized that they still refuse to acknowledge Trump’s defeat.
They are that radicalized. 79% of Trump voters believe the election was stolen and these people have done nothing to disabuse them of that lie.
He goes on to point out Biden’s recent comments that the Republicans are going to wise up and that the fever will break. And notes that some people are deeply skeptical:
In an open memo published late last month, four leading progressive groups said such optimism could prove electorally dangerous for Democrats—by luring the party into dead-end negotiations that demoralize the Democratic base heading into the 2022 election. “The only question is whether Democrats spend the next two years playing into Republicans’ hands by feeding the pretense that [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell is seeking to negotiate in good faith,” the groups wrote.
Biden should target McConnell almost immediately, says Sean McElwee, a founder of the progressive polling-and-analysis firm Data for Progress, one of the organizations that signed the open memo. “Democrats really need to start making people understand that Mitch McConnell is leading a do-nothing Senate that should be replaced in the midterms,” McElwee told me. “You want to make Mitch McConnell the enemy, and we need to get his favorables down to nil and then tie all of the Republicans to” him.
By contrast, the centrist Democratic group Third Way this week released a poll showing that a strong majority of registered voters want political leaders in both parties to seek compromise. In the survey, 85 percent of self-identified Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans said they prefer political leaders who will “compromise in order to get things done.”
Matt Bennett, the group’s executive vice president for external affairs, told me that while Republicans’ behavior since the election has been “openly seditious,” Biden has no choice but to seek agreements with them. Referring to Biden’s remarks after the Electoral College vote, Bennett said: “He couldn’t make the entire speech the first half; he had to have the second half. You simply can’t enter office as a new president convinced that there is no hope of working with your political opponents.” (He added one qualification: “I guess Trump did that, but that resulted in the worst presidency in American history, so that’s not one to emulate.”)
In practice, these two perspectives may not really be all that different. McElwee agrees that Biden should work, wherever possible, to divide the GOP by seeking to attract at least a few Republican senators to his policy priorities. And Bennett said that while Biden must continue to pursue agreements “in the hope that Republicans will come to their senses, he also needs to be mindful that they may not.”
That’s fine. But keep in mind that people always say they want bipartisan cooperation and what that means in practice is that they want the other side to capitulate to their agenda. Why even Mitch McConnell may give way if Biden agrees to enact the GOP agenda with no changes. (Actually, he probably won’t.)
The real difference among Democrats may be over where to strike the balance between conciliation and confrontation—between seeking agreements and building a case against McConnell as a blindly partisan obstructionist, the same way Republicans have worked for years to paint House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a radical.
Biden probably lands much more on the conciliatory end of that continuum, both because of his long experience in the clubbier Senate of decades past and because of his belief that he’s negotiated productively with McConnell before (a view not all Democrats share). But his is not the only viewpoint in the incoming administration. Jen O’Malley Dillon, his campaign manager and future White House deputy chief of staff, expressed the flintier perspective common among younger Democrats in an interview published this week in Glamour. Dillon said that while Biden must pursue the “bipartisan ideal” he offered voters, she, at least, will enter any negotiations without illusions: “I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of fuckers,” she said. “Mitch McConnell is terrible.”
They are a “bunch of fuckers” and Mitch McConnell is terrible. The fact that she’s advising Biden makes me feel better.
I think this represents the real divide in the Democratic party and it’s not ideological. There are progressives and centrists alike who think the GOP has shown itself to be an undemocratic, abusive political faction that is dedicated to obstruction by any means necessary — which means the Democratic strategy must work with that reality. There are also progressives and centrists who believe either that Republicans can be reasoned with or that they are irrelevant. I am in the first camp: they are too powerful to ignore and also bad actors that cannot be reasonably dealt with. These different views require different tactics and I hope that the people around Biden don’t let him waste too much time dallying with Mitch who is always, always acting in bad faith.
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