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No “performative bipartisanship”

With a Democrat in the White House, Republicans pretend to care about deficits again, writes Catherine Rampell. “It’s almost like clockwork.”

Just as predictably, they care about bipartisanship. Will Democrats “work across the aisle” for the American people, etc.?

Edward-Isaac Dovere explores at The Atlantic how Joe Biden expects to manage his base’s expectations while getting his legislative initiatives passed with or without the cooperation of Republicans:

The success of Biden’s agenda will of course depend on Congress, which is starting off the year having to finish Trump’s second impeachment. “We have to see the Senate as it is”—narrowly divided, with the Democrats’ majority dependent on moderates such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia—“not as we want it to be,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told me. He was in the House at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency; he’s part of a generation of senators who were not in the chamber the last time Democrats had control of both houses of Congress and the White House, and have a different understanding of party politics than their predecessors did. “While I’m sure that Biden is going to want to spend some time trying to explore whether there’s bipartisan buy-in for his priorities, we all have to be willing to take no for an answer.”

[…]

“There’s a consensus that one of the mistakes of ’09 was playing footsie for a long time with Republicans who never had any intent to actually get to yes,” Murphy added. “And the dynamics in the Republican caucus have gotten worse since then, not better.”

If Dovere’s information is right, Biden has little interest in the kind of “performative bipartisanship” of the Obama years:

Biden doesn’t want Democrats to go it alone without first trying to make a deal. If the GOP is seriously interested in uniting the country, he will eagerly engage. But if they use calmer rhetoric as a feint for obstruction, he is prepared to call that out.

And if the Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election continue to push their claims of voter fraud, or if any are found to have had more direct involvement in the attack on the Capitol, that will change Democrats’ negotiating strategy, too. “There are so many moving parts to this that we still do not yet know in terms of people’s involvement,” Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware told me, after reflecting on her own traumatic experience in the riot. “I am a believer in healing, but I know that in order to get there, we have to go through it, not around it.”

Cynical progressive observers I know worry Biden has not absorbed the lessons of the Obama years and expect to see their hopes for progress dashed against Republican obstructionism. The proof will be in the doing, but these are signals that those lessons indeed have been learned.

“If Republican senators hold those bills up by filibustering,” Dovere writes, “Democrats would accuse them of standing in the way of helping Americans, or standing in the way of voting rights. Ending the filibuster would then be an easier sell.” Even “radical extremist” David Brooks thinks that if “Republicans go into full obstruction mode, Democrats should absolutely kill the filibuster.

Sally Kohn was on MSNBC’s “The Beat” Friday night snickering about Newt Gingrich calling out Biden’s team as radical extremists because Republicans have trouble tagging Biden himself with that charge. Voters will need reminding who the real radicals are.

Perhaps someone could assemble clips of prominent Republicans making the “radicals” claim and “smash cut” to MAGA forces storming the Capitol and fighting police. The latter won’t be hard to find.

Osita Nwanevu, staff wrtiter at The New Republic , explored the history of bipartisanship in a long tweet thread on Friday.

https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1352707809046126594?s=20

A 1968 New York Times editorial stated, “Except in time of war…history suggests that self conscious bipartisanship does not work very well in this country…a peacetime coalition could only serve to blur the lines of responsibility.” It was a long and winding road from there to here that I invite you to read yourself.

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