By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, May 04,
2021
Pop quiz: How many times have Senate
Republicans used the filibuster to block legislation this year?
[Insert Jeopardy theme
music here.]
Answer: zero.
There was a little bit of talk about using
the filibuster on the hate-crimes bill, but that passed without many
fireworks.
Give credit to Bill Scher at
the Washington Monthly for recognizing that one part of the popular progressive narrative
is not actually supported by the facts:
Whatever
there is to say about Mitch McConnell’s soulless approach to politics, we
cannot say that today he has organized his party to filibuster everything he
can. In fact, McConnell has voted “Yea” on most of the 13 successful bills,
including legislation to authorize $35 billion for water infrastructure, strengthen the Justice
Department’s ability to prosecute hate crimes, extend a suspension of automatic Medicare cuts, extend the pandemic small business relief loan program and waive the law that would have prevented Lloyd Austin from becoming
Defense Secretary. Neera Tanden’s nomination tanked, but no major presidential
nomination has led to thermonuclear war.
[Interruption from Jim: Let’s remember it
was the opposition of West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin that really doomed
Tanden’s nomination.]
While
these bills are all minor, if Republicans were determined to make Biden’s life
miserable, they wouldn’t cooperate at all. They would deny him his choice to
lead the Pentagon. They would let lead flow from the tap. They would let
anti-Asian hate crimes go unanswered. They would let seniors suffer Medicare
cuts. They would let small businesses go under. And they would hypocritically
blame Biden for all the dysfunction.
Democrats
are understandably reluctant to give Republicans overt praise for helping pick
some very low-hanging legislative fruit. After all, allowing Republicans to
quickly gain credibility for being bipartisan makes it easier for Republicans
to claim that Democrats are asking for too much when it comes to big game like
infrastructure, climate, immigration, and gun control. Nevertheless, Democrats
should not dismiss this Republican cooperation or lack of recalcitrance. It’s
not proof that Republicans are committed to good governance, but it does mean
Republicans don’t believe they can escape all blame for any unpopular
obstruction. That should inform Democratic legislative strategy.
The Atlantic apparently missed the memo, because it’s on a one-publication
tirade painting the filibuster as the root of all problems in American
political life: “The Filibuster
and the Zone of Legislative Death.” “How to Stop
the Minority-Rule Doom Loop.” “How the
Filibuster Killed Accountability in Congress.” “We Already Got
Rid of the Filibuster Once Before.” (And that’s just the articles since March!)
We’re seeing all of these articles
denouncing the filibuster when the filibuster hasn’t been used in the first
four months of this year. Sometimes the dominant media narrative is set on
autopilot, and then you go up to the cockpit and realize no one’s flying the
plane.
The dirty little secret of American
politics right now is not that progressives can’t get 60 Senate votes to pass
their agenda; it’s that they often can’t get 50.
Manchin opposes statehood for the District
of Columbia, the Democrats’ big voting-reform bill (HR 1), and he also opposes
removing the filibuster. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona also wants to keep
the filibuster as-is and opposes raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour.
Senators Mark Kelly and Sinema of Arizona
and Mark Warner of Virginia are the remaining holdouts on the Protecting
the Right to Organize Act, the top legislative priority of organized labor that
would effectively eliminate right-to-work laws.
On expanding the Supreme Court, forget
Manchin or Sinema; Kelly, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Catherine Cortez Masto of
Nevada, and Tim Kaine of Virginia are also opposed or at minimum, wary.
Hawaii senator Brian Schatz said that, “This is in the category of things that
couldn’t muster 50 votes and probably couldn’t muster 40 votes.” Kelly’s
spokesman told National Review the senator would oppose expanding the court, even if Roe
v. Wade was overturned. (Also notice that Kelly, who represents a
border state, lamented that Biden’s address to Congress didn’t include “a plan
to address the immediate crisis at the border.”)
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is
considering adding
immigration-reform proposals to Democrats’ infrastructure plan, hoping the Senate parliamentarian buys the argument that they
count as a budget-related change and can thus be passed through the
reconciliation process..
Ramesh Ponnuru
wrote in the National Review a few
weeks ago:
Consider
some of the top progressive priorities of the recent past. A ban on assault
weapons. Statehood for the District of Columbia. Expansion of the Supreme Court
to make room for more progressives. Limits on carbon emissions. A $15 minimum
wage. A ban on state voter-ID requirements. An amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Measures to increase unionization. The Equality Act. What these policies have
in common, besides thrilling progressives, is that they are not on track to
become law. Some of them don’t have majority support in a Democratic Senate.
None of them has the supermajority support needed to break a filibuster. And
the Democrats don’t have a majority for weakening those supermajority
requirements, either.
Critics of the filibuster can somewhat
plausibly argue that the reason Republicans haven’t used the filibuster yet is
because the really controversial stuff hasn’t come up for a floor vote yet. But
the reason the really controversial stuff hasn’t come up for a floor vote yet
is because the Democrats themselves are not unified, and the 50–50 split
doesn’t allow them any room for error.
Passing legislation is harder than it
looks from the outside. Few senators see their job as being a yes-man, even if
they often do vote with the rest of their party. Every senator has local
constituencies and industries that need to be protected and placated. Those of
us who are outside the Democratic Party can see the contradictions within its
factions clearly: blue-collar union workers against environmentalists who want
to shut down existing industries; class-warfare socialists against the
limousine liberals and tech billionaires; African Americans who support school
choice and immigration enforcement against teachers’ unions and the amnesty-now
crowd. The grand façade of “intersectionality” is a unified-field-theory effort
to convince every faction within the Democratic coalition that their very real
policy differences don’t matter that much, compared to fighting the menace of
rich, white, heterosexual, capitalist, Christian males.
And if you read National Review, you know the GOP has its own deep divisions —
traditional conservatives, social conservatives, libertarians, the chamber-of-commerce
Republicans, the populists, the diehard Trump fans, the remaining wing of the
Establishment, the quasi-isolationists, the few remaining hawks. . . .
But you won’t hear much about this from
most political talking heads, I suspect. The message, “Both parties are
hamstrung by internal divisions, making it less likely they’ll find the votes
to pass their most sweeping proposals” is not exactly a galvanizing call to
arms. The dominant theme of political messaging these days is, “It has
never been this bad, democracy is hanging by a thread, the political party you
oppose is rampaging across the land, and all will soon be lost . . . unless you
donate/vote/tune in/click/call your Congressman right now.”
Meanwhile, the odds of Democrats’ keeping the
House keep getting worse. Post-census redistricting will help Republicans here
and there, and the retirements of Democratic incumbents from swing-y districts
keep piling up: Cheri Bustos’s retirement in a slightly Republican-leaning
district in Illinois; Charlie Crist leaving his seat in a swing district in St.
Petersburg to run for governor; Ann Kirkpatrick’s retirement from a swing
district in southeastern Arizona; Tim Ryan’s retirement from a swing district
in eastern Ohio. The National
Republican Congressional Committee is now targeting 57 seats.
This is what
happened in 2010; go back and check.
As I mentioned on yesterday’s Three
Martini Lunch podcast, what’s interesting about this weekend’s special House election in
Texas’s sixth congressional district is not that two Republicans advanced to
the runoff in a district that Joe Biden lost by three points in November.
What’s interesting is that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and
Democrat-aligned national political groups didn’t even
bother to spend a dime.
We knew Democrats would be mostly “on
defense” this cycle, trying to protect incumbents. But I don’t think we
realized how little they would be playing offense; an open-seat jungle primary
for a special election on a Saturday in May with 23 candidates in the suburbs
of Dallas-Fort Worth is pretty low-hanging fruit.
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