Maybe not. Brian Beutler has an astute column in his newsletter today. He is probably one of the fiercest critics of Democratic passivity out there and yet he’s not completely pessimistic, which gives me some hope:
When it passed, and because of the way it passed, the American Rescue Plan stood as the antithesis of the harder-won achievements of the Obama years. I don’t mean political writers, reaching for symbolism, came to see it that way; that’s how the bill’s authors described it. It was a testament to the fact that they’d learned from recent history and wouldn’t allow Republicans to once again drown their ambitions in bad-faith dealing. The “thank u, next” of emergency-relief legislation.It now stands as one archetype of how to govern in a world shaped by GOP nihilism, in contrast to the old way.
And just about everything that’s come since has served as a kind of test of whether Democrats intend to apply those lessons consistently, or whether the ARP was a one-off, too far from the party’s comfort zone to serve as a model for high-stakes times.It’s frustrating, because from the outside the choice seems so obvious; ARP was big and good and enduringly popular, and everyone who voted for it was and remains proud of what they accomplished.
The fact that they aren’t itching to relive that moment makes it tempting to conclude that the party didn’t meaningfully adapt, that relatively little has changed, that it is back together with Pete Davidson. I think the jury’s actually still out on that question, though. And while I won’t pretend to be optimistic about the rest of the Biden agenda or the state of democracy, it’s not all bad news; we should at the very least know how the whole story ends before summer’s out.
That story proceeds along two tracks (or maybe more like two and a half). Democrats’ top priority is passing Biden’s economic agenda; and they’ve divided that goal (for reasons that don’t make logical sense but are seemingly integral to maintaining party unity) between a small, bipartisan, hard-infrastructure bill, and a big omnibus jobs-and-families plan that they hope to pass on a party-line basis through the budget-reconciliation process.
The decision to bifurcate this flank of the agenda has mired it in process fights and allowed Republicans to string things along in a way that’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the 2009 Affordable Care Act negotiations. And at the end of the line, we may conclude history indeed repeated itself. But we shouldn’t sleep on the differences. In 2009, Democrats played patsy to Republicans until autumn; they showed little interest in using the budget-reconciliation process to speed things along, even after Ted Kennedy died, and only relented after they lost his seat in a special election that winter. The whole thing took over a year.
This time around Democrats are much more willing to force the issue, make shit-or-get-off-the-pot demands, so that Republicans know they can’t delay indefinitely. Republicans start to waffle or make excuses for why they maybe can’t support the deal they already cut, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announces the Senate will hold a test vote this coming Wednesday, which will require them to commit one way or another. Dems have credibly threatened to pass everything on their own anyhow, and most of them would be happy to use evidence of GOP obstructionism and bad-faith dealing to build a case to reform the filibuster.
And the upshot is the bipartisan bill might pass! It might not, too, of course; but Democrats have managed to scramble Republican incentives, so that they’re at least torn between the allure of sinking the bill and letting it sail through. If they sink it, they’ll deny Democrats the bipartisanship proof point they want to bring to voters in the midterms, but Dems will press ahead unilaterally anyhow, while building a case for stripping Republicans of their filibuster powers. If they vote for it, it’ll make some Dems very happy, but it’ll also knock the wind out of the filibuster-reform effort, and might even derail the bigger piece of Biden’s economic agenda.So that’s one-and-a-half of the tracks.
The other main track is democracy protection, and…it is clearly not Democrats’ top priority. This becomes obvious simply by watching how Dem leaders and Biden have treated it relative to their attentiveness to the infrastructure agenda. And as a matter of national need, I think this is a mistake; to evaluate everything on a single basis, I’d say our country’s democracy infrastructure is ricketier and in more urgent need of repair than its transportation infrastructure or even its patchwork “human infrastructure” system. If you have to pick one, pick that one.
But ideally you do both! And if that is your intent, you can at least see the argument for making sure nothing derails the economic agenda. Just thinking ahead to all the wailing indignation it would elicit, it’s easy to imagine democracy reform wrecking the jobs-and-families legislation; by contrast it’s at least theoretically conceivable to imagine Dems passing democracy protection once Biden’s signature plans to rebuild the country are already law. I think democracy protection is the more important priority, but in a world where both are going to happen, I’m agnostic as to which should go first, and can at least see the argument for stacking things this way.The problem for democracy protection isn’t that it might get passed out of order; it’s that key party actors are blocking it.
Biden gave a big public speech about democracy this week. It left many of his natural allies unsatisfied, because he didn’t use it as an occasion to advocate filibuster reform, and because some of the language, read out of context, seemed to suggest a call for frightened Americans to simply vote their way out of a GOP election-stealing crisis.
Again, I won’t pretend to be optimistic about the democracy-reform outlook, but I thought the speech was very good on its own terms, and a good omen, too. It’s easy to dismiss tough rhetoric as cheap talk, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. When a president describes the ongoing GOP assault on voting and truth as “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,” he makes it hard for himself to abandon the issue; if he walks away, it means he was either exaggerating the threat or that he failed in the face of it.
Meanwhile, democracy-protection supporters have begun their inside push in earnest: Texas state Democrats broke quorum to block the election-subversion bill Republicans there want to pass and flew to DC to buttonhole the Democrats standing in the way of the For the People Act. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), who has a great deal of clout with Biden, has made it clear to the White House he views this as a make-or-break issue. He’s proposed a filibuster exemption for legislation pertaining to constitutional rights, and Vice President Kamala Harris has hinted that she’s taken the idea up with Senate Dems.
They see the challenge, correctly, not as a choice between the two main flanks of the agenda, where one will necessarily crowd out the other, but as a matter of prevailing on the Democrats who are blocking democracy reform to get out of the way. If they do, it will pass. If they don’t, then it won’t, and we’ll have to hope there’s a Plan B.
I obviously think it’d be better if they could all stop squirming and just act. The country would be better off and their interests as politicians would be better served, and we’d know they’d heeded the lessons of 2009-2010 completely rather than partially.ARP is a great example of the general case for a more dynamic Democratic Party, because they actually broke form and it worked out great. But there are no shortage of examples over the past several years where the party remained hidebound, chased polls, feared backlash…and the case for dynamism looks great in hindsight, when it’s too late.
Just this week, we learned senior military leaders were so concerned President Trump might try to steal an unelected second term with a “Reichstag moment” that they made contingency plans for thwarting a coup attempt. But this horrifying revelation, about a country on the precipice of democratic collapse, didn’t come to us through a process of truth and reconciliation established by a confident, winning party. It landed in a news article as part of a book rollout during the long interregnum between when Democrats abruptly reversed their decision to call witnesses at Trump’s impeachment trial and when they finally convened their special insurrection committee.
It’s worth recounting and dwelling on missed opportunities like this, because the party leadership’s natural state is one of impassivity, and they are confirmed in this kind of politics by tons of influential party strategists and intellectuals who counsel them to embrace moderation, stick to what’s predictable and what polls well.I see the party on a knife’s edge between doing what’s needed to save the country, and succumbing to old ways, which makes these next few weeks especially critical. The last-best time to avoid fatalism, treat nothing as a foregone conclusion, and rekindle the collective sense of accomplishment Democrats felt when they passed the ARP.Otherwise the last voices they hear before the moment of truth will be ones echoing the failed logic of the past.
Looking back on the mistakes of the early Obama years, it seemed inconceivable that Democratic leaders—the very same people in fact!—would once again allow themselves to become mired in bipartisan negotiations rigged to go nowhere; would succumb to the temptation to look forward, at the expense of accountability; would allow Republican storylines (about debt or inflation or critical race theory or crime or anything else) to mindfuck them.
But it can happen. It may be the case that those who can not remember the past are doomed to relive it, but it doesn’t follow from there that those who do remember the past are immune to repeating its mistakes. The longer Democrats apply the lessons of 2009-2010 partially, the greater the risk they’ll slip back into their old ways altogether.
Beutler’s writing can be found at Big Tent. It’s always worth reading. He is a very close observer of the Democratic party and always has an informed take on how it operates. I opened the email today expecting to read something depressing about the Biden agenda. This was a welcome analysis — realistic but not entirely pessimistic.