Biden came into office with an ambitious agenda, but he also campaigned on a promise to turn down the political heat, work with the other side, and use his 50 years’ of political experience and connections to bring Republicans — many of whom he knows personally — on board with getting things done, which implies give-and-take compromise. The progressive wing of his party isn’t especially happy with that, but that’s how this country’s political system functions — when it works.
But it takes two to tango. What can you do when one side acts in bad faith?
There were zero GOP votes for Biden’s Covid-19 relief bill, and this is becoming a pattern.
On Monday, June 8, 2021, Biden walked away from direct negotiations with Republicans over his infrastructure bill. The two sides, he said, are just too far apart. “Weeks of negotiations between the White House and Republicans failed to bring the two parties close to a deal. They remained far apart on a total price tag for a bill, which types of projects should be included and whether to raise any new taxes,” AOL News reported here.
The fact is, voters elected Democrats, not Republicans, to run the country for the next 2 years. Biden has offered Republicans a say, but they don’t get to rock the cradle. They don’t have to like what Biden is proposing. But refusing to meet him halfway is bad faith.
Biden had already made big concessions by coming down from $2.25 trillion (spread over 10 years, or roughly $225 billion a year, about a third of the Pentagon budget) to $1 trillion, roughly a 55% cut, but Republicans only offered a little over $250 billion of new appropriations — about one-tenth of Biden’s original request. When was a counteroffer of 10% of anything ever considered compromise? In legal negotiations, that kind of counteroffer says “sue me.”
However, although Biden has ended direct negotiations with GOP senators, infrastructure negotiations aren’t dead by any means. Democratic leaders need to negotiate with their own members just to get the 50 votes needed to pass a bill using the budget reconciliation process, which would sidestep the GOP’s filibuster veto (but only if every Democratic senator is on board). They’re also still pursuing a second track aimed at bringing a handful of Republicans aboard. To that end, the bill may be broken up: “It may well be that part of the bill that’ll pass will be bipartisan and part of it will be through reconciliation,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
But he added, “we’re not going to sacrifice the bigness and boldness in this bill,” which is exactly what Senate Republicans oppose. They recognize the need for infrastructure repairs and upgrades, but want to spend much less, don’t want to fund entire portions of Biden’s wishlist, and want to raise most of the money by diverting spending from other purposes.
Between those poles, there’s a bipartisan group of senators still working on a compromise. This group includes both of the Democratic senators opposed to changing the filibuster, and Republican Mitt Romney, who says, “We’ve pretty much agreed on the spending level.” According to him, they’re still working on “adjustments” and “pay-fors,” meaning users instead of taxpayers would pay for some items (toll bridges are a familiar example). There’s also a House group working with so-called Plan B senators, on a separate negotiation track. The White House is engaged with, and encouraging, both of these groups’ efforts toward a compromise. In other words, Biden is being reasonable.
“But questions persist about the viability of a bipartisan infrastructure plan,” AOL News said. There probably aren’t 10 GOP senate votes for any compromise that gets worked out. The most Democrats realistically can hope for is a couple GOP votes to offset the holdouts in their own caucus.
And if it’s this difficult to pass something everyone agrees is necessary, it’s going to be impossible to pass legislation on which Republicans aren’t even willing to negotiate, such as protecting voting rights.
The standard rap on majority rule is that it can be abused. For example, the majority could vote themselves a new car, and make the minority pay for it. Most reasonable people would agree this is a misuse of majority voting power and the minority should have a right to veto it. Not only because Americans in general have a strong sense of fair play, but also because they might find themselves in similar shoes someday.
But minority rights can be abused, too. The Democrats earned the right to govern at the ballot box, and did so despite the Republicans’ disproportionate representation under our “republican” (as distinguished from “democratic”) system of government. (The 50 GOP senators collectively received approximately 40 million fewer votes than the 50 Democratic senators.) “Minority rights” doesn’t imply an omnipotent minority, or a minority that gets to govern or completely stymie the majority from governing. Reasonable people also would agree that minority rights must have limits.
That’s what the debate over the filibuster is all about. When it prevents majority overreach, all well and good. The current argument for weakening or bypassing it is that the minority is overreaching. It certainly does so when it seeks to infringe the majority’s right to vote — or, even more egregiously, empower minority-controlled legislatures to overrule the majority of voters in their states.
If Republicans want Democrats to step back from pure majority rule, which is what abolishing the filibuster is, they need to compromise, not keep saying “no” to everything Democrats want. The American people elected the Democrats to govern, and if Republicans won’t let them govern, then Democrats should do whatever it takes to enforce our right to be governed by the people we elected to govern us. That means letting Republicans know that if they won’t negotiate in good faith, they will be pushed aside.
It’s a lot like someone blocking you from a place you have a right to be. You try reasoning with them, but if that doesn’t work, many of us would push past them. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it has some relevance to what’s going on in Washington D.C. In the video below, which went viral, most people agreed the woman was in the wrong (she ended up getting fired from her job, story here). If Republicans won’t let Democrats govern, they should push past the filibuster, whether by budget reconciliation or by suspending or eliminating it.
The voters did not give Democrats a majority in the Senate, and the voters returned fewer Democrats to the House. The election was far from an endorsement of Democratic priorities. For Biden and this congress to accomplish anything means compromise. They control the process, but they want things what are they going to give Republicans or give up to get some of their policies through. It has been a rough start if President Biden wants bipartisanship, maybe he and McConnell are quietly working on some things while in church.
Maybe Biden needs to tamp down Democrats expectations. He simply does not have the votes. And there are divisions among the Democrats, meaning a single Senator from West Virginia is the King maker. So what does King Coal get?
Our government is not a parliament where the majority party is expected to successfully implement their policies as they are in government. Our political parties are big tents, and not all elected members sing from the same sheet of music as European parties do. The organized loyal opposition exists in parliament, of course the goal is to screw the ruling party given the opportunity after the minimum time the majority is guaranteed to rule. In the House the minority party has much less power than in parliament, if only because of question time. When the numbers are close though in the House such as the current House with Republican’s within 10 seats it is possible for them to upset the apple cart due to mismanagement by Democratic leaders, loss of focus by Democrats, or good old defections because the voters at home in some districts are sorta or are conservative and might vot3e in a Republican.
What you’re omitting is Republicans (a) aren’t acting in good faith, and (b) aren’t meeting Democrats halfway. Their counteroffer to Biden’s infrastructure proposal wasn’t a compromise, it was a middle finger. And yes, the Democrats have a voting majority in the Senate; the Constitution doesn’t contemplate a deadlocked Senate, it provides a tiebreaker. Don’t even try to argue that the GOP’s efforts to prevent the Democrats from governing is responsible citizenship. It’s an attack on the basic rights of the majority of Americans to choose the government and policies they want.
In this CNN op-ed, Scott Jennings, a GOP campaign consultant, argues Biden is no better at dealmaking than “the former guy.” That’s a legitimate subject of inquiry and debate, but remember who Jennings is, and consider the source of that assertion.