As Democratic presidential candidates approach the first set of debates of the 2020 election cycle, none of them has outlined a realistic plan to actually pass their ambitious agenda.
Joe Biden’s controversial comments touting his working relationship with segregationist senators were an outgrowth of a broader case he’s been trying to make about his ability to find common ground, even with political adversaries, to advance liberal goals.
His pollyannaish notion that he’ll be able to cut deals with Republicans in a post-Trump era has been rightly mocked by those who witnessed Republican opposition to President Barack Obama’s legislative plans. But Biden’s leading rivals have presented no better path to enact their sweeping ideas.
For instance, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has argued that the passage of his socialist vision would require a “revolution” against the rich and powerful. And Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren insists that by running and winning on a swath of plans, reluctant senators will simply be forced to get behind her agenda.
None of these views recognize modern political reality, or grapple with the, at best, narrow Senate majority a future Democratic president would have.
In Biden’s case, before his polarizing remarks mentioning his dealings with the late pro-segregation Democratic Sens. James Eastland and Herman Talmadge, he said that even though he’s viewed as “old fashioned” by the Left, he believes that “you have to be able to reach consensus under our system — our constitutional system of separation of powers.”
His comments followed many similar statements, such as his insistence last month that things will change when President Trump leaves office because “you will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”
The problem with Biden is that his past experience of working with Republicans and political opponents has no relevance to the modern world.
Since Biden’s Senate days, parties have become separated more by ideology than by region, so there are fewer northeastern liberal Republicans in office. The digital revolution has made it easier for the more ideological base of each party to pressure members of Congress, which has made incumbents more fearful of primary challenges and more reluctant to compromise with the other party. Most importantly politically, denying legislative accomplishments to a president has proven the surest route back to power for a minority party.
Sanders is certainly less sanguine than Biden about getting cooperation from Republicans, but in outlining his vision for socialism, he said, “The only way we achieve these goals is through a political revolution — where millions of people get involved in the political process and reclaim our democracy by having the courage to take on the powerful corporate interests whose greed is destroying the social and economic fabric of our country.”
While the rhetoric may be more radical sounding, the concept of a popular movement rising up to demand sweeping change is not significantly different from Obama’s theory that he’d be able to marshal his impressive campaign organization into a tool to pressure lawmakers to enact his policies once elected. Obama was much more charismatic than Sanders, and he came into power in 2009 during an economic crisis, at one point enjoying a filibuster-proof majority. Yet he spent over a year to pass a healthcare law that would be dwarfed by the $32 trillion plan Sanders has proposed. And by 2011, when Republicans took over the House of Representatives, he was done passing major legislation.
When Vox’s Ezra Klein tried to pin down Warren about how she would get her agenda passed assuming Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., didn’t want to deal, she said, “I think this is one of the reasons to run on plans because if I get elected on those plans, it gives me the capacity to turn around and say to my colleagues, ‘Hey, that’s what I ran on, that’s what the majority of the American people voted for, that’s what they got out and fought for. So as the Democratic Party, that’s what we got to do.’”
The problem with this idea is that not all Democrats will be running on her plans, especially given that to recapture the Senate, the party is going to have to win seats in traditionally red states that Trump carried in 2016. If senators are elected in such states, they are not going to be easily swayed to endorse her costly and far-reaching proposals, regardless of what other states she won. And that’s even if Warren gets rid of the filibuster, which is a tall order given that even Sanders opposes doing so.
To the extent that the next president is going to have an effect on policy, it’s much more likely to be through executive action than the passage of massive legislation.
The idea of making wild promises that have little chance of being adopted is as old as campaigning itself, and certainly didn’t hurt Trump last time around. What’s unique about the 2020 Democratic field is that the size and scope of the promises has been dramatically expanding at a time when the political system’s ability to adopt major legislation keeps narrowing.
