Voters are a fickle bunch. They want what they want, and they want it yesterday. Especially liberal ones. With the thinnest of margins in the House and none whatsoever in the Senate, Democrats are expected to pass transformational legislation over lockstep Republican opposition on the Senate side of the Capitol. The hardening story line is that President Joe Biden is old and ineffective. Democratic leaders on the Hill are too. And what’s Attorney General Merrick Garland’s problem? Why isn’t TFG in handcuffs by now?
The frustration is understandable. But a seven-million popular-vote margin and 74-vote margin in the Electoral College did carry with them legislative muscle sufficient to manifest Biden’s governing vision. The Senate’s Jim Crow-era filibuster rule remains a barrier two Democrats will not relinquish for reasons that are unintelligible. And Biden, for all his years in the Senate and eight (now nine) in the White House, is not LBJ.
“The bottom is falling out” for Democrats because they “refuse to govern and refuse to solve problems,” one social-media pundit wrote. How then? By fiat? With magical thinking? Democrats are apparently struggling like hell to govern and solve problems with majorities far too small, stymied by Republicans for whom no one demands accountability, as Greg Sargent observed again Monday:
Progressives instinctively know condemning Republicans is as useless as trying to fly by flapping their arms. Democrats might at least wince. We want Democrats to stand by small-D democratic principles and American ideals while complaining they are not as strategic, ruthless, and duplicitous as norm-crushing Republicans. Even with more seats, it’s a no-win.
Granted, there are a few Democratic leaders on the Hill who should have passed the torch long ago to a new generation not yet as institutionalized to the Beltway.
But doomed or not, today Democrats in the Senate will at least get caught trying to deliver for their base (NYT):
The Senate on Tuesday will begin to debate legislation that combines two separate bills already passed by the House — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — and folds them into an unrelated measure. The move would allow the Senate to bring the bill directly to the floor, avoiding an initial filibuster.
But that strategy would still allow Republicans to block it from coming to a final vote, and Democrats lack the unanimous support needed in their party to change Senate rules to muscle through the legislation themselves. Still, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said late last week that Democrats would forge ahead anyway, forcing Republicans to publicly declare their opposition to the bill.
The vote, if it goes as expected, will put Democratic defectors in the history books as two who were willing to give lip service to defending voting rights, but who abandoned voters when the time came to do any actual defending. Fifty Republicans, too, will write themselves into history as opponents of guaranteeing “a Republican Form of Government” to which they are pledged.
The Freedom to Vote Act contains a slate of proposals to establish nationwide standards for ballot access, in an effort to counteract the wave of new restrictions in states. It would require states to allow a minimum of 15 consecutive days of early voting and that all voters are able to request to vote by mail; establish new automatic voter registration programs; and make Election Day a national holiday.
A second measure, named for Representative John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died in 2020, would restore parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act weakened by Supreme Court rulings. Among the provisions was one mandating that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination win prior approval — or “preclearance” — from the Justice Department or federal courts in Washington before changing their voting rules.
Republicans have uniformly opposed the legislation, casting it as inappropriate federal intervention in state voting operations and a partisan exercise intended to give Democrats an unfair advantage.
Because inappropriate intervention in state voting operations Republicans reserve to themselves.