The Republican Party currently enjoys a 53-47 advantage in the U.S. Senate. There also seems to be little chance that Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama will be reelected next year. What this means is that the Democratic Party, if it wants to take control of Congress’s upper chamber, needs to pick off four GOP-held seats if they win they presidency, and five GOP-held seats if they don’t. The distinction between the two scenarios arises because the vice-president breaks 50-50 ties in the Senate.
For my purposes here, I am going to focus only on the situation where there will be a Democratic president in 2021, because I want to talk about the art of the possible.
If the Republicans maintain their majority in the Senate, the new Democratic president will not be enacting one iota of their top shelf legislative agenda. There will be nothing major on health care or college loans or immigration or climate change. Even judges will be only confirmed in the most belated and begrudging manner, and only if they’ve never said anything on the record that conservatives find irritating. All legislative progress that can be made will come as the result of leverage over must-pass bills, and the leverage will only be truly significant so long as the Democrats retain control of the House of Representatives. But navigating government shutdowns and threats of national default in order to attach a few things to appropriations bills is not going to turn many of a candidate’s campaign promises into reality.
If, however, the Democrats win control of the trifecta (White House, Senate and House), they will still be hamstrung by the Senate’s legislative filibuster and the limits of what vulnerable or conservative Democrats are willing to support. It’s actually becoming foreseeable that the Democrats will do away with the legislative filibuster, thus allowing them to pass bills with fifty instead of sixty votes. But that would require them to be completely united, or nearly so if they somehow win even more than four GOP-held seats in 2020. Because the Democratic caucus includes many institutionalists, it’s probable that they won’t kill the filibuster for good until they’ve given the Republicans most of the 2021 congressional calendar to provide some compromise. Only if they are frustrated in that effort (and they will be) does it seems possible that every Democratic senator will be ready to make the move. As a result, President Biden (or Warren or Harris or Sanders, etc.) will probably lose all the momentum normally enjoyed during the honeymoon period of a new chief executive.
Yet, even if the Democrats win the trifecta and eliminate the legislative filibuster, they’ll still have huge problems passing legislation. Even assuming that Nancy Pelosi can push the president’s agenda through her chamber (and this is doubtful for some of the policies the candidates are pushing), there are senators (like Michael Bennet of Colorado, for example) on the record opposing much of the progressive candidates’ agenda. There are senators like Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia who vote with the Republicans almost as often as they vote with the Democrats. Manchin, by the way, will probably be the chairman of the Energy Committee, making impactful climate legislation next to impossible to pass. And then there will be the freshman class. In order to get a net gain of four seats, the Democrats will have to win a seat or two in states like Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Kentucky and Tennessee. Even the seemingly easy pickings in Colorado, Arizona and (perhaps) Maine are going to bring in freshmen who won’t feel very safe in their seats.
In this scenario, the only things that will be legislatively possible are going to have to pass muster with the one or two most conservative/vulnerable Democrats in the Senate. And this is the rosy scenario. One way of putting it is that if Joe Manchin doesn’t want it to happen then it almost definitely is not going to happen.
So, what are the prospects for enacting Medicare for All, as many of the candidates have proposed? Could a President Biden or Bennet even hope to add a public option to Obamacare? How is President Inslee going to convince Manchin to pass a good climate bill through his committee? How can any of the candidates proposing that we decriminalize illegal border crossings get that through Congress? How about abolishing ICE or creating a slavery reparations program? Is Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren going to be able to deliver a massive trillion dollar college loan forgiveness program that isn’t even supported by many progressives? Will the DREAMERS get any relief? Will comprehensive immigration reform pass? Will Trump’s tax cuts get repealed? Any chance of closing Guantanamo?
As mentioned above, there will be some leverage points around must-pass legislation, so appropriations bills needed to keep the government operating can serve as vehicles to get a few things through. But, for the most part, even in the incredibly optimistic conditions I’ve set out here, the parties are too far apart and the Republicans are too implacable and resistant to pressure to allow me to predict any significant legislation will pass at all.
Notice, I make no distinction here between the Democratic candidates. It doesn’t matter who they are, how much they win by, what they’ve promised, how they get along with the Republicans in the Senate or what the people have to say during the process.
As far as I can tell, Congress is broken and nothing can fix it other than the Democrats winning 60 or maybe more Senate seats.
As if this isn’t bad enough, Trump has seeded the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, with so many far-right conservatives that it’s more likely that progress we’ve already made (like the Affordable Care Act) will be rolled back than that big new federal programs and regulations will be considered constitutional.
I absolutely understand that people are hungry for change. People are sick to death of Congress and want to break this gridlock. But it’s a problem that is beyond the power of any candidate or any rhetoric to fix.
So, I just cannot get interested in the differences between the Medicare for All programs proposed Sanders, Warren, Harris and Gillibrand, and I can’t get excited about free college or loan forgiveness or reparations or any of the other notable progressive ideas that are being bandied about. If people have ideas about how to accomplish things with their executive power (Obama’s famous “pen and a phone“) then I am all ears. A lot can be done through the agencies of the government. Ideas for how to break this gridlock are also welcome, so long as they don’t include the premise that we have “a revolution” in order to make it happen.
Under these circumstances, every promise a presidential candidate makes that requires Congress to act is likely to be a broken promise. I don’t think it’s a great idea to compile a large record of broken promises. But what really makes no sense is to propose things that are incredibly unpopular with the key groups the Democrats need to win that have no prospect of being enacted. Doing that gets you a general campaign liability and a broken promise if you nevertheless win, and the tradeoff is at best that you excite a segment of the electorate that is going to vote for you anyway, assuming they vote at all. And then you’ll disappoint this group and expect them to show up for the first midterm election.
I accept that no one wants to support a politician who tells you that there is no hope. I don’t expect the candidates to spend all their time talking about what cannot be done. But I wish they would please stop proposing things that people hate. It’s not smart politics.
Jeez, Martin, is it that hard to distinguish between an aspiration and a promise? And is there no value in having aspirations? In pointing out that “normal” isn’t working for many people?
Be careful, please, to distinguish between aspirational language and proposals that are popular, and slap-happy talk about shit that will never happen because even a significant part of the Democratic Party thinks it’s a shit idea. If people want to talk about fixing the climate and creating an economic boom in the process, that’s good politics. If they want to have a tow truck show up in every driveway to confiscate people’s cars, that’s bad politics.
We probably should confiscate all the cars and ground all the planes and limit people to two hours of electricity until we get the carbon under control. But that’s not a proposal that will survive contact with the electorate.
On the car ban, it’s true national candidates can’t do that. But mayors of major cities should start trying it.
Madrid’s Car Ban Flip-Flop Shows Just How Much People In Big Cities Love Banning Cars
After last night it seems the democrats are a long way from even having a united agenda. The health care debate sounded incoherent. Biden and Castro had the best plans. Reparations and loan forgiveness are definitely dead, I believe. Harris lost whatever she thought she had and her and Gillibrand started to look foolish to me when they attacked Joe seemingly to recover from their own lack of anything worthwhile to say. Joe was the clear winner for me followed by Castro or Booker.
So,yeah, there will be little to no chance to pass any of it. Still we need to make an effort. Somehow we need to break the grip the republicans have on us. We need to work on turn out, that seems the only path open to us.
I worry about the next debt ceiling under a Democrat, which the republicans are certain to hold over our heads demanding spending cuts. Maybe the best thing we can do is repeal the law. For that we need the senate.
Norm Ornstein has a good thread on Twitter about health care, saying the candidates should have said, “Trump and the Republicans want to repeal the ACA, bring back pre-existing conditions, cut Medicare and Medicaid, make your health insurance more expensive. Every Democrat here wants universal, affordable health care. We all have different ways of getting there. But I’m not going to argue about those. That’s what we’ll do in Congress; and then I’ll sign whatever bill moves us towards universal, affordable health care. Period.”
Precisely. The National Trumpalists’ (fka Repubs) only strategy in this area is to attack the overly specific proposal(s) of the policy-oriented Dems, while offering absolutely nothing on their own, except fear-mongering. They then “win” and do nothing except throw monkey wrenches into the existing ACA machinery.
The sooner Dems get out of this unintelligible health care loop, the better. That exactly NO Dem prez candidate could figure this dynamic out is dispiriting.
Somehow I think they will modify their proposals the closer we get. But they all want to excite the base and that is a good thing. We need turnout, lots of it.
Yes. We also need swing voters like: white, professional suburbanites who voted for Trump because they thought the “grownups” would control his ugly racism; white, working-class and middle-class rural and small town residents who felt abandoned by Democrats and radicalized by right-wing media and social networks; Obama voters who voted for Jill Stein (1%); and Obama & Romney voters who voted for Gary Johnson (3%) and Evan Falchuk (0.5%).
One advantage of swing voters over mobilized voters is that persuading a swing voter both adds 1 vote to your total and subtracts 1 vote from your opponent’s total (as opposed to turning out an occasional voter, who adds 1 vote to your total). It’s not an either/or; it’s a both/and (especially in well-funded presidential campaigns).
It’s the primaries, so candidates are putting out aggressive and/or fantastical proposals to stand out. That is good tactics. In order for it to be good strategy they will need to pivot in the general, specifically pinging the fear points that you highlighted.
Why and oh why wasn’t repeal of the debt limit the Democrat’s demand this time?
So “I’ll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it” is bad politics?
Nobody except the half-Vulcan pundits expect politicians to follow through on proposals. Everyone understands politics is broken. We get that! All we expect is for people to FIGHT for us. They can lose. That’s fine. They just need to fight like hell, even when–especially when–there’s no hope. This is what we want. If there’s no way to enact progressive, or even liberal, or even _adequate_ policies, and there probably isn’t, our choice as:
1) A candidate who seems just fine with the institutionalized disenfranchisement of Democrats, and the absolutely inability of our political system to grapple with the most important issues of our time, by trying to play small ball with teensy inadequate adjustments around the edges (which probably aren’t possible either).
2) A candidate who REVILES the institutional inequities and brokenness of our system and highlights it at every possibility, by fighting like a honey badger for impossible dreams.
Some of those dreams will be, initially, unpopular, because the media–and Even Liberal Commentators–endlessly engage in Republican faming. Some may stay unpopular! But we won’t know which are which until we fight like hell for our ideals. And maybe _just enough_ of the American people will surprise us. And conviction and institutional power can pull people in good direction, too, not just force an entire political movement to embrace racism and Russian interference even more closely.
I think we’re still scared and scarred from the Bush years. They said, “We can change reality” and we pointed and laughed. “Nobody can change reality! That’s not what politics is for, you idiots! It’s for … other things.”
So perhaps we need a democrat a little like Trump. Wake up every day and tweet about Moscow Mitch and how he is starving little children by holding the debt ceiling hostage or something. That would surely get our grievances in the public eye and keep it there. Now would be a good time for the candidates to show us what they got????
“Build a wall” was good politics for a very crazy political strategy that turned out to work. Yet, if you look back, way before Trump announced he was running, I predicted the Republicans would run the most racially polarizing election in modern history based on the idea that they were out of alternatives.
You need a theory to explain why Democrats in this cycle proposing toxic policies that won’t pass is a good way to win the general.
Here’s 3, if I stipulate that the policies are more toxic to Our Sweetheart Suburban Moms than ‘rewarding sexual assault and locking children in cages’.
1) Because it shows they’re unafraid. Nothing is more popular with the electorate than someone who stands up for what they believe and who loudly, emphatically, doesn’t give a shit about what the whiny talking heads say. You can’t do that if you’re crawling around looking for approval.
2) Because EVERY DEMOCRAT WILL INEVITABLY BE SADDLED WITH ‘TOXICITY’ IN THE GENERAL NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY! Kerry is a windsurfing war criminal, Clinton’s emails are an urgent threat to national security, Obama hates America. So they might as well get saddled with toxic shit they believe, instead of letting the media and Republican Party choose something for them. Set the terms of the battle.
3) Because we already tried a responsible, pragmatic, brilliant, experienced, _cautious_ candidate and she lost to a semi-sentient human pus sac _before_ he infected the entire Republican Party and seized the powers of the incumbency.
This is part of the reason that I think it is important to have a health plan that is scalable. With ObamaCare, they wanted a public option, but when Lieberman balked, they still got something. The grand plans out there seem more all-or-nothing, which means that they are more likely to 100% fail.
If you want scalable then why not open up Medicare to age 60. And instead of paying 80% up it to 85% and do something about drug prices like negotiate them.
Yes, something like that. I would like to see a whole combination of things (early medicare, medicare-buy-in, public option, increase regulation of insurance companies). That way, if we don’t get everything, at least we get something. As Brendan so cogently argued in his post the other day, people need some help, and something is better than nothing.
And, just in general, people vastly underestimate the value of having an administration that is trying to solve problems, instead of trying to make things worse. You know…an administration that has heard of the Enlightenment and think it was generally a good idea.
Every word of this is true. President Obama could only do as much as the most conservative member of his caucus could be persuaded to support, and that was only during that fleetingly short period when the Dems had a 60 vote majority in the Senate. The reality is that the Dems have little to no leverage over their most conservative members, who all come from red states and could easily switch parties. As a West Virginian, Manchin drives me nuts – but he is absolutely needed in the Dem camp if we have any chance of securing a majority, and he has been a key vote on many pieces of legislation. It is the frustrating reality, but it is reality.
I’m grateful to Martin for his persistence in, and skill at clarifying what we’re all up against. Here are a few thoughts towards continuing the conversation:
1 – We’ve been here before. This isn’t the first time we as a nation have had a “center-left” majority blocked from winning and exercising political power. It happened with the “Slave Power” in the 1850s. It happened with the nativists and prohibitionists in the 1920s. In both cases, those political struggles ultimately resulted in radical political and economic change. In both cases, those victories came at great cost in blood and treasure. In both cases, those victories were significant, and incomplete.
2 – We’re facing”One Battle, Many Fronts”, in the words of Myles Horton. That can be dispiriting because the task is so enormous and what any one of us (or any one organization, or candidate, or officeholder) can do is so small. All the more reason, therefore, for constant reminders of the important role each of us plays—whether as officeholder, candidate, campaign worker, volunteer, issue advocate, community leader, or citizen.
3 – It’s in all of our interests to find a candidate to defeat Trump next fall. We all have that in common; and that means a candidate who can win a majority of the electoral vote, and, at a minimum, a plurality of the popular vote. All of us are going to disagree with aspects of that candidate’s platform and priorities and rhetoric. And we need a presidential candidate who understands clearly that their job is to lead a center-left majority coalition to exercise as much power as it can. Obama, Clinton, FDR, and Lincoln are all good examples of presidents who succeeded reasonably well at that job. In this primary campaign, we’re looking for their successor.
4 – We don’t know where the “sweet spot” for a center-left majority in 2020 will be. We have some good ideas where it might be, including from the issue polling that Martin has used to sound the alarm about certain health care, immigration, climate, and economic issues that are popular in left-wing circles but lack majority support from the electorate. We also have some indications, as with some of Stan Greenberg’s (of McComb County “Reagan Democrats” fame) recent work, that there may be ways in which the electorate is shifting to the left as it experiences what right-wing rule looks like. None of that is an excuse for throwing up our hands and saying none of it matters. Even less is it an excuse for justifying our own individual political preferences. Rather, it’s all the more reason to dig deep, listen carefully (as Martin does with his neighbors), and work hard.
5 – Changing what’s politically possible in Washington will likely come from outside of Washington. Voting rights was not on Johnson’s agenda in 1965 until the March from Selma to Montgomery put it there. Car pollution standards are now effectively set in California. The growing number of members of Congress calling for an impeachment inquiry is driven more by public opinion polling in their districts than it is by the Mueller report. The state legislators and governors you elect in the next year are the ones who will redraw your state’s congressional districts after the 2020 census. Pick a battlefront where your skills and interests are best used, and start fighting.
Good post. I think it captures the the situation better than the original, which just sounds defeated and dejected. Appreciating the context of the Senate is good and important, but just as important to place it in the proper historical context and an understanding that things are in flux and that’s the point of the primary. “Issues” are simply not going to matter as much as Martin thinks, but I don’t think “lol nothing matters” is accurate either.
Col. Jessup: “You want answers?”
Maj. Kaffee: “I want the truth!”
Jessup: “You can’t handle the truth!”
No, this is not a post that the majority of Americans will be willing to read (let alone believe), although I suppose our country-destroying plutocrats derive some smug satisfaction from it. This is the kind of stuff our society (in its blind Constitution-worship) wants to deny.
The problem in the short term is that we have 25 Dems of varying stature who smell Der Trumper’s blood in the water and can see that this is THE chance of a century to be the Prez. Thus the need for all this (highly theoretical) “differentiation”, with its attendant risks.
The problem in the longer term is that the process of gridlock, paralysis and collapse has become so great as a result of the “conservative” (now National Trumpalist) movement that it is Pollyanna-ism to imagine light at the end of the tunnel, for the reasons you describe so well..
You spent most of your post saying Democrats shouldn’t propose legislation that cannot pass. This makes sense.
You end your post saying “But I wish they would please stop proposing things that people hate. It’s not smart politics.”
Sanders and Warren are not proposing things that “people” hate. They are proposing things that the base adores.
It’s still primary season. Unless you want to stick with 2016/2018 turnout, the Democratic candidates still need to be working on getting the base up and at ’em, because it’s the base who eventually becomes the volunteers getting out the vote.
No centrist Joe Manchin voter is going to be donating time driving poors and browns to the polls on election day to vote for whomever the Democratic nominee is.
The General Election has not started yet. We don’t need to be shutting down actual liberal voices just yet.
I don’t know. You paint a pretty depressing picture of our current political situation. While I certainly agree that that our aging constitution gives Republicans and conservative democrats disproportional power by giving each state two senators regardless of population and using the electoral collage to elect the president instead of, well just counting all of the votes, I’m not sure the current situation we are in is very static. For one thing, It is always possible that many of these blue dog conservadems could loose primaries, especially if Democratic leadership continues to twiddle their thumbs on impeachment and thus potentially generating credible primary challengers to the Republican lite crowd. I actually think a lot of these blue dogs are pretty horrible politicians, and use their “lean R” status just as an excuse to stuff their pockets with corporate cash, which ends up alienating voters on both sides of the aisle, so many of them may not be that hard to beat this election cycle. Most likely you also will have a large primary turnout of motivated Democrats, as well.
It is also possible that before the election, the Republican zealots on the Supreme Court will end up effectively killing the ACA (It just comes down to Roberts, apparently) If they do that, Democrats won’t have much choice but to argue for radical change, because incremental change isn’t going to happen with Moscow Mitch’s judges sitting on every level of the court anyways.
But the bigger picture is that the Republican party is morphing before our eyes into a pure fascist party. The whole idea of our democracy is under threat. I don’t think the best response to that is to keep Democrats from saying anything that might anger suburban insurance executives or the white working class or any of the other groups that we keep being told we can’t upset or they might vote Republican. Here is a clue… they already do vote for Republicans. How about those 7 million Obama voters that didn’t even show up for the last presidential election? What will motivate them? I say let Joe Manchin and Kyisten Sinema try to survive a Republican primary instead of continually dragging down the rest of the Democratic party. They probably would have zero chance of being elected as Republicans, stop being afraid of their nonsense. I think the next election will be a pretty straight forward choice, you are either with the white nationalist fascist party, or you are not. Everything else will pale in comparison. After that, we fight to reform the system. The current system isn’t going to hold, one way or the other and we aren’t returning to the way things used to be.
When it comes to the student loan problem, we already have student loan forgiveness. It’s called IBR or the REPAYE program. I’m currently on IBR. It’s far from perfect. But it certainly makes the monthly payments very manageable. For example if you’re out of work for an extended period of time and have no income your monthly payment is zero. The problem with both of these programs is that while yes your debt is forgiven after 20 or 25 years of payments, that debt being forgiven is taxed as income. And for many the monthly payments don’t cover the interest each month. Thus when your debt is Forgiven it’s likely to be a substantial amount and will be taxed as income.
That simply isn’t going to be manageable for a lot of people. When my debt is Forgiven 15 years from now it most likely is going to be something 50 or $60,000. I’m most likely not going to be able to pay taxes on that. So all the Dems really need to do is through the reconciliation process simply exempt student loan debts forgiven from being taxed. Once you do that the student loan problem is basically solved. At least for people who have federal government student loans
You only need 50 votes in the Senate (if you have the presidency) for health care reform. Ezra Klein put it best in a recent article:
“Sweeping health reform can be passed quickly, with only 51 votes in the Senate, and with no support from major industry actors.
The Senate can pass what many of them wanted to pass in the first place: a heavily subsidized buy-in program for Medicare or Medicaid, funded by a tax increase on the rich. A policy like that would fit smoothly through the 51-vote reconciliation process, and it will satisfy an angry party seeking the fastest, most defensible path to restoring the Affordable Care Act’s coverage gains.
This is a very different vision than the Affordable Care Act ultimately offered. The Obama administration’s hope with their law was to create private insurance marketplaces that eventually became the coverage option of choice for most Americans. Democrats’ hope with a program based on Medicare buy-in would be that Medicare becomes the coverage option of choice for most Americans. It might not be full single-payer, but it’s a lot closer than where Obamacare was headed.”
And again, the ACA was what could get passed through a 60 vote Senate, not “the Obama administration(‘s)” preferred bill. President Obama would have signed a bill that included a public option, or that included higher subsidies, or the power for the federal government to negotiate drug prices, or any number of additional policies you and others are suggesting in this thread.
But in the “world as it is”, none of those policies got (or were going to get) 60 votes in the Senate.
Wanker of the Day Booman’s Current Post
Well, aren’t you just a ray of fucking sunshine!
Of course, everything you say is 100 per cent correct. What is tripping up the Democratic debates is the conventional “wisdom” of the media moderators, who encourage “let’s you and him fight” as if it mattered at this stage exactly what everyone’s medicare plan says.
I am concerned that Trump will get reelected just because it seems to be extremely rare for a president/party NOT to get 8 years in office. It appears to take something extraordinary to convince American voters to switch in mid-stream and vote out a president after just four years, and it often seems to be caused by something external, like Ross Perot, or the Iran hostage crisis, rather than something internal like the president being unpopular.
Before Bushco, when the American electorate (and press) as a whole had democratic ideals, every popular-vote losing prez was annihilated in the following election. In the anti-democratic era manufactured by the “conservative” movement, the electoral college is touted as the Founders’ Greatest Achievement, of course, and Der Trumper and his minority faction don’t even pretend that he will be seeking to win the popular vote.
One might think that our crackerjack journalists would notice this rather aberrant fact, but no. It might help if some Dem prez candidate started pointing out this little inconvenience for Der Trumper, but that, too, appears beyond the realm of possibility.
If a Democrat is elected THEY CANNOT MAKE HEALTHCARE REFORM THEIR NUMBER ONE PRIORITY. It’s been the priority of the last two Democratic presidents and the party got destroyed in the midterms. Do some type of popular health thing like drug prices or a Medicare buy-in at age 50. BUT DON’T TRY SOME “MEDICARE FOR ALL” (OR SOMETHING SIMILAR) BULLSHIT!
As long as republicans control the senate, its a moot point anyway. The republicans, led by McConnell, will present massive resistance to ANY democrat ideas, even the “moderate” ones, because they’re democrat.
We’ve got decent candidates and building enthusiasm going after Collins and McConnell in ME and KY, respectively. But I would like to see more of a focus on setting a goal of taking back the senate as well. In order for any of these ideas, particularly on health care, to even have a chance, democrats need full control of all three branches.