President Joe Biden’s dream of passing an agenda that can be mentioned in the same breath as the New Deal and the Great Society has met a fearsome opponent: math.
The Democrats have much smaller majorities in both houses of Congress than when Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson ushered in the great liberal legislative accomplishments of the 20th century. Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice president, had bigger majorities when Obamacare was enacted.
With four vacancies, the Democrats have just two votes more than a bare majority in the House. The Senate is split 50-50, under the control of Biden’s party only because of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote as the chamber’s president.
Sometimes that isn’t even good enough, as Democrats were reminded when their sweeping election overhaul failed in the Senate on Tuesday.
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Democrats could not overcome a Republican filibuster as the Senate deadlocked. They are 10 votes shy of the 60-vote threshold they need to reach to shut down debate via cloture by themselves.
The defeat of the legislation, which Democrats had hoped would help them compete in next year’s midterm elections on more favorable terms, was a grim reminder of what could be in store for the rest of the Biden agenda. Most of the party’s plans hinge on passing the big-ticket items before 2022, after which lawmakers on both sides will be focused on the election and will want to avoid difficult votes.
If Democrats lose either house of Congress, it will be very difficult to legislate for the remainder of Biden’s term. Republicans need a net gain of one seat to take the Senate and seven seats to capture the House. In 1994, President Bill Clinton’s first midterm election, Republicans picked up 52 House seats. In 2010, the first midterm under Obama, the GOP added 63.
So far, Democrats have passed the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” through reconciliation. This allowed them to skirt the filibuster in the Senate and push the bill through without any Republican votes.
Democrats have been forced into lengthy infrastructure talks with Republicans, which the strongest liberals had hoped to avoid, to get a bipartisan bill that does not need to go through the reconciliation process. The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that Democrats only get one more bite at that apple this year.
There is a large amount of spending Biden and the Democrats would like to pass separately since they cannot put it in an infrastructure package that will need to get Republican votes. And that is before factoring in the social welfare spending in Biden’s “American Families Plan.”
Liberals, in particular, are steaming mad. “Call me radical, but I do not believe a minority of Senators should be able to block voting rights for millions of people,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat and progressive star. “But I guess I’m just from that far-left school of thought that legislation should pass when a majority of legislators vote for it.”
But with Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat and leading centrist, opposed to the bill on final passage and only siding with his party on the procedural vote, the Senate majority was likely to vote no.
Liberals have a similar problem when it comes to eliminating the Senate filibuster. Manchin and fellow centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, have reiterated they would like to keep the current rules in place.
As was the case on the $15-an-hour minimum wage, which has already failed in the Senate, it is likely that other Democrats don’t want to nuke the filibuster either. But these lawmakers are content to let Manchin, who hails from a state that voted twice for former President Donald Trump by about 40 points, and Sinema take the political heat.
“The House always complains that the Senate is holding up legislation,” said a Democratic strategist who requested anonymity to defend the filibuster. “Progressives always forget how the Senate rules help us when Republicans are in the majority.”
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Earlier this year, Biden huddled at the White House with historians to hear lessons from the legislative successes of iconic liberal presidents. He reportedly took notes in a black book during the more than two-hour discussion.
“Mitch has been nothing but ‘no’ for a long time,” Biden complained last week about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican with whom he served for 24 years. The president also called out Manchin and Sinema, though not by name, chiding them erroneously as “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”
