“So it’s hardly worth asking whether congressional Republicans will heed Biden’s call for federal voting rights safeguards,” writes CNN’s John Harwood. Republicans have made clear their only move is “No.”
They are after all the conservative party. Preserving the status quo has been their imperative since before the inaugural issue of the The National Review (CNN):
But in the era of partisan polarization, that impulse has hardened into resistance to governance itself. On issues that rile them most — the changing face of America, domestic spending programs, tax increases — congressional Republicans have flashed red lights at Democratic and Republican White Houses alike.
Democrats need to remind voters at every turn of 1) Democrats’ efforts to make their lives better (and paint voters a mental picture), and 2) Republicans’ efforts at every turn to prevent making their lives better. Plus, remind voters of 3) Republicans’ rejection of the fundamental principle of American democracy. Voting and majority rule is baked into the Constitution conservatives once upheld as sacrosanct but now view only as a convenience when they win and invalid when they do not.
On the Democrats’ popular infrastructure package, for example. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York does not want Democrats to settle for Republican minority-dictated legislation. Nor does she want to accept the media’s inclination to blame Democrats for Republican obstructionism. She will, however, call out (indirectly) Democratic senators standing in President Joe Biden’s way.
But Democrats also need to show that they have more moves than throwing up their hands in frustration at Republican efforts to stymie theirs. The minority party should not get a veto. That power resides in the presidency, and even that is not absolute.
Every House and Senate Republican said no to Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package, then many went home and took credit for elements of it that improved their constituents’ lives.
Harwood continues:
Yet most remain pessimistic that a deficit-financed infrastructure compromise can attract support from at least 10 GOP senators, the minimum needed to join Democrats in surmounting a filibuster. Though congressional Republicans readily swelled the deficit to enact Trump’s tax cuts, for Democratic spending programs their answer tends to be no.
The failure of bipartisan compromise need not quash Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, which in addition to infrastructure investments includes expensive new programs to help struggling families up the economic ladder. Biden could advance it through the special budget process known as “reconciliation,” which requires only a simple majority vote rather than a filibuster-proof 60 ayes in the Senate.
That route, which Democratic leaders have already set in motion, would not require any Republican votes. It would require every Senate Democrat and nearly every House Democrat to say yes.
But passing legislation that defends and uphold voting rights is even more critical than infrastructure when the infrastructure of the republic itself is crumbling. Senate Democrats who swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” etc., need to decide whether their fealty is to that rather than to their abstract notions of bipartisanship for bipartiship’s sake.
Their Republican colleagues have already declared their allegiance to the Constitution and to popular sovereignty conditional on their being able to predetermine the outcome of elections. In their favor, naturally.
“Who do you serve, who do you protect?” applies to more than policing. Recalling Franklin’s admonition about the founding of the republic, history will record whether today’s Democrats were up to the task of keeping it.