By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, April 15, 2021
David Harsanyi wrote a couple of days ago about the endless
assumption that the Republican Party is about to die. To his argument I would
add this point: As usual, the Democrats are suicidal.
Had Joe Biden been what he pretended to be during last
year’s presidential election, he could have represented a real threat to the
GOP. If he wanted to, Biden could have pocketed the Democrats’ gains among the
affluent, picked off some of the working-class voters that Donald Trump
attracted, and tamped down the activist energy that tends to hurt presidents in
the midterms.
But he and his party have not done this. Yes, yes, yes,
Biden is currently doing fine in opinion polls. And yes, he’s managed to get
away with pretending that his expensive progressive wish-list was “COVID
relief.” But that won’t last forever, and, even if it does, the Democratic
Party is assiduously building up precisely the sort of brief that Republicans
need to make the case against unified control — irrespective of the president’s
popularity.
In the space of a month, the Democrats have proposed
blowing up the Supreme Court, sloppily federalizing the entire election system,
passing a slavery reparations bill, resuscitating the Green New Deal, and
prioritizing strict gun control — all while the crisis on the border worsens
and the president’s approval rating on that high-salience question hits disaster levels. Not only is this likely to prove toxic to
the party next time people get to vote — the most likely outcome of the call to
pack the Supreme Court will be to pack the House with Republicans — it’s also
likely to hurt its capacity to get anything substantial done.
Up until now, the Democrats’ playbook has been to insist
that if Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are unwilling to abolish the filibuster
then, in practice, they are unwilling to “save” democracy with the “must-pass”
HR1. In response to this, Manchin and Sinema have said that they believe in
collegiality and compromise — a good, even correct, answer, but one that lacks
teeth. Now, though, Manchin and Sinema can point to far more concrete reasons
for their reluctance. “The Democratic Party,” they can say, “is trying to
destroy the judicial branch. Of course we’re not going to take
the prerequisite step to make that possible.” Or, at least, their opponents can
say that when discussing the topic.
As of this moment, every moderate Democrat in the Senate
and the House is on notice. Immediately after the 2020 election, members of the
much-shrunken Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives began attacking each other:
“No one should say ‘defund the
police’ ever again,” Spanberger yelled on the leaked call. “Nobody should be
talking about socialism.”
Spanberger, who won re-election by
a narrow margin of 0.2 percentage points, called the election results “a
failure” and told other Democrats, “We lost races we shouldn’t have lost.”
She added that if progressives
continue to use this rhetoric, “We will get f—–g torn apart in 2022.”
The “defund the police” talk has mostly faded away. But
it has been replaced with talk that is just as destructive, just as radical,
and just as unwelcome to any politician whose margin of victory begins with a
zero. Worse still, with the exception of reparations, these ideas are not
coming from the likes of Rashida Tlaib; they are coming from the Democrats’
leadership. Further gun control was announced in person by President Biden
during a televised press conference in which he called upon Congress to
prohibit the most popular rifle in the country. Biden, too, takes direct
responsibility for the situation on the border, and he is implicated by the
plan to pack the Supreme Court, which was introduced by the Chair of the House
Judiciary Committee, and which sits alongside a committee the White House has
created to “study” the issue.
Aided by a compliant press, Democrats have
over-interpreted a narrow election win and a dispirited opposition as proof
that the country is finally ready for their policies and that the coalition of
the ascendant has finally arrived. This is incorrect. In 1937, when the last
attempt to destroy the judiciary was proposed, the party enjoyed
supermajorities in both houses and a president who had won reelection in a
landslide. Today, the Senate is split 50–50, and, at the time of this writing,
the Democrats have a 218–212 majority, which means that they can pass nothing
on a party-line basis if there are more than two defectors. As
the Washington Post points out, in 2020 the Republican Party came within 90,000
votes of controlling all of Washington. This really is no time for
a suicide charge.
And yet . . .
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