Whither the Biden agenda?
A Joe Biden tweet from Thursday received a lot of attention and raised hopes that the Democratic president sees beyond prosaic “kitchen table” issues in his Build Back Better agenda. Democracy itself is on the line.
Voting, Biden tweeted, “is democracy’s threshold liberty. With it — anything is possible. Without it — nothing is.”
Fine words, Joe. But in the words of Untouchable Jim Malone, “What are you prepared to do?“
The New York Times reports more Biden words this morning:
President Biden said on Thursday that he was open to ending the Senate filibuster so Democrats could pass voting rights legislation, raise the federal debt limit and possibly enact other parts of his agenda that had been blocked by Republicans.
Speaking at a CNN town hall meeting, the president also expressed optimism about passage of his infrastructure and social safety net bills even as he offered candid descriptions of closed-door negotiations with two Democratic holdouts.
Mr. Biden had previously said that changing the filibuster rules to allow a debt limit vote was “a real possibility,” but his remarks on Thursday evening suggested that he was ready to pursue broader changes to bypass Republican opposition.
At the town hall, he said ending the filibuster — a Senate tradition that allows the minority party to kill legislation that fails to garner 60 votes — would have to wait until after he secured passage of his spending bills, which are under negotiation on Capitol Hill.
The president said he would lose “at least three votes” on his social policy bill if he pushed an end to the filibuster. He did not say which senators he would lose.
Biden here seems to be counting votes to lose that he hasn’t yet won.
But Mr. Biden was blunt about his intentions once the debate over the spending bills was over. He said the need to pass sweeping voting rights legislation favored by Democrats is “equally as consequential” as the debt limit vote, which protects the full faith and credit of the United States.
Asked by Anderson Cooper, the host of the event, whether that meant he would be open to ending the use of the filibuster so that Democrats could pass a voting rights bill, Mr. Biden said, “and maybe more.”
Talk is cheap. A vote will be even cheaper if Democrats fail to defend America from the UnAmericans in what was once the Republican Party. “Democracy itself is dying,” Ari Berman (“Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America“) told MSNBC ‘s Nicole Wallace this week.
Just as cinema’s Al Capone had police and juries in his pocket, Republicans have the courts in theirs. Public confidence in the Supreme Court is at a two-decade low. And Republicans are rapidly expanding their ability to decide the outcome of future elections no matter what the majority of the American public wants. We won’t even be able to measure what the public wants if Republicans have their way with elections and Democrats fail to stop them. And permanent, one-party, minority rule will be “legal” (in quotes) and “democratic” (also in quotes). Because Republicans will have done it using democracy to unmake democracy.
Talk is cheap, Democrats. What are you prepared to do?