What Joe Manchin's Senate can deliver. By Matthew Yglesias.

What Joe Manchin's Senate can deliver. By Matthew Yglesias. 

A bigger deal than you might think. 

Matthew Yglesias. 

January 6, 2021. 

Happy Thursday, folks!

As I predicted in my predictions post, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock both won their races for United States Senate in Georgia. These races are interesting on their own terms, most superficially for the weird role Ossoff has played in Trump-era politics but I think more fundamentally because of Warnock. For a long time in American politics, the view was that African-American candidates faced really big obstacles to winning in majority-white constituencies. In the post-Obama era, it’s time for Democrats to change their thinking on this. Black Democrats like Warnock (but also Obama and Cory Booker before him) are more likely than white ones to be rooted in institutions like churches that give them a better chance than white Dems of breaking out of the BA Bubble.

Just look at the patriotic framing (“… because this is America…”) that Warnock gave to his family story in this speech.

For future statewide candidates, I think Democrats should be searching for more Warnocks — people of color with working-class roots who deliver unifying messages and don’t call themselves socialists. This is the way.

But in policy terms, the big deal here is that Chuck Schumer is going to be majority leader and Joe Manchin is now going to be the pivotal senator.

One should temper one’s expectations in terms of what this means. Joe Biden is no Bernie Sanders, and Biden himself is well to Manchin’s left. One should also note that Nancy Pelosi’s majority in the House is very slim, and — like Schumer’s majority in the Senate — dependent on the votes of members representing districts Trump won. But I also think it’s easy to underrate how big a deal this is. Even a slim Senate majority ensures that Biden can staff up the government, lead an economic recovery, and make the GOP feel real pain by appointing non-conservative judges. There’s also scope for meaningful policy change via the reconciliation process that could improve the lives of millions.

A functioning federal government

I think this was the most underrated stakes of the Senate races in Georgia. The United States has not had the inauguration of a newly elected president paired with a Senate controlled by the opposition since 1989. That was centuries ago in terms of the development of partisan polarization, and even then it was a partial transition from Ronald Reagan to the Reagan Administration’s VP.

Staffing up in the face of a McConnell-led Senate would have been agonizing.

Even if you assume he’d want to project reasonableness and not just block literally everybody Biden put forward, his ability to control the floor would have meant anyone with the vaguest whiff of controversy around them would be blocked. Worse, any kind of noteworthy ambition in the administrative arena would end up getting litigated during the confirmation process, greatly reducing the scope of practical action.

And in a practical sense, the nature of the federal government is that large swathes of it involve agencies whose basic functioning Republicans don’t care about. US Attorney and DOD subcabinet nominations would move through the Senate, but at a snail’s pace, and you’d just never get time on the calendar to address the regulatory agencies.

A 51-50 Senate is sure to have some confirmation battles and some Biden nominations that won’t go through. But that happens with any presidency. Manchin can and will deliver a basically “normal” presidency in which jobs get filled and executive orders begin to flow.

The judiciary

Happenstance gave Donald Trump three Supreme Court appointments in a single four-year term, which is probably his biggest legacy. A 51-50 Senate is not going to expand the Supreme Court unless some kind of really wild rulings start happening.

But Trump also had a large influence on the federal district and appellate courts. This, though, is the kind of thing that swings back and forth. Right now, the active judges on federal appeals courts look like this:

Ronald Reagan: 6

George H.W. Bush: 5

Bill Clinton: 31

George W. Bush: 32

Barack Obama: 50

Donald Trump: 53

With the Senate in Democratic hands, those Clinton judges can safely retire and some number of the Reagan/Bush judges will probably end up stepping down.

A McConnell-led Senate would have simply blockaded all appointments here — he’s done it before and it’s seen as a big success on his part — so this makes a huge difference. I think it’s particularly important because we know the judiciary is very important to Republicans. As long as it looked like it would be easy to stop Biden from appointing judges, Republicans could shrug off the 2020 election result as no big deal. Being able to appoint judges changes that calculus. It alters policy on its own terms, but it also forces Republicans to consider trying to actually do better in the future.

Budget reconciliation

The Senate majority can pass a budget reconciliation bill. The rules governing exactly what can and can’t go into these things are complicated, but to oversimplify it a bit, you can do tax stuff, and you can alter existing programs and funding flows.

You can do the $2,000 checks this way, for example.

Just looking at things that Biden ran on, all of this should be eligible for reconciliation treatment:

I’m not sure that Manchin and other moderate Democrats would vote for all of this, but none of it is stuff that he’s ruled out or ideas that are obviously toxic in West Virginia, Montana, Arizona, or Georgia. Relative to some of the big ideas that have been discussed in left-wing intellectual circles, this stuff is maybe not so thrilling. But it would cut child poverty in half (pretty good!) and be a fairly transformative change to American education. Again, it’s less clear what will happen here than on the executive or judicial appointment fronts. But there’s no obvious red flags — I would strongly make the case to Manchin, Sinema, Tester, and others that they should sign onto these ideas with perhaps a small tweak or two to show clear wins for their home states.

The future of the filibuster

Manchin is stridently pro-filibuster, and other moderate and cross-pressured Democrats more quietly also favor the filibuster. They see it as largely protecting them from needing to take votes on controversial issues relating to immigration, gun control, and the environment where they fear a “yes” vote would kill them with their constituents but a “no” vote would so inflame the base as to make trouble.

On the other hand, Joe Manchin wants to raise the minimum wage, which you can’t do in a budget reconciliation bill.

And the debt ceiling is expiring in August, which also can’t be lifted in a reconciliation bill.

It’s not obvious to me what will happen here. Obviously, the best-case scenario for Manchin is that something like a dozen Republican senators agree to raise the federal minimum wage to something like $12, and then he gets to be a bipartisan dealmaker. But it’s easy to imagine Republicans blocking all action on a super popular $15/hour minimum wage bill that even the most conservative Democrats support. It’s also easy to imagine Republicans returning to their Obama-era hostage tactics with the debt ceiling. In either case, that starts to change the calculus for Manchin and other moderate members.

I don’t have a strong prediction of which way that will break, just a caution against taking other people’s strong predictions too seriously. There was very little support in the Democratic caucus for using the nuclear option on nominations until suddenly there was. I will say that if you do want to see filibuster reform happen, the best way to make it happen is for Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi to promise the red state Democrats that the issues they’re not comfortable with will stay off the legislative agenda.

Two years of success

This is in some ways the biggest thing.

To an unusual extent, Biden is taking office at a time where he has the wind at his back. The country is living through a very difficult moment. But the simple reality that the weather will be more pleasant in April than in January gives us a big leg up in terms of maintaining living standards in the face of the virus. And people are getting vaccinated. An additional vaccine candidate from Johnson & Johnson will hopefully become available in February.

Congress just passed a new round of stimulus, and the Senate now seems set to do a third round. The bond market is projecting good things for the economy in 2021. And as Paul Krugman explains, there’s lots of reasons to be optimistic about the post-virus economy. This is different from 2009 when foreclosures and debt overhangs crippled growth for years to come. The personal savings rate is unusually high, and folks have been paying off their credit card debts.

None of this is to minimize the pain millions of people have been living through (though the new bonus UI should help); it’s simply to say that the economy is poised to bounce back like a spring rather than stumble forward. Stock prices are up, home values are up, consumer debt is down, savings are up, and if it’s safe to travel and eat out and throw huge parties, people are going to do that stuff.

All these headwinds would be in place even if Mitch McConnell were majority leader. But I would constantly worry about sabotage potentially derailing them. Now, I don’t. I’m not sure what Senate Democrats will do, but they won’t do that. If you pair a growing economy with an improving public health situation, some historic reductions in poverty, and a basically functional government that’s able to press forward with environmental, labor, and civil rights regulations, that’s a formula for a pretty successful presidency.

Then the question becomes how badly do you get punished in the midterms? I think Democrat should take history seriously here (incumbent parties usually do badly) but not be fatalistic about it. “We’re going to get wiped out in the midterms” can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as parties ignore public opinion. The upside of a constrained legislative majority is that Democrats should be largely unable to repeat the 2010/2018 cycle of overreach and backlash. But there is the risk of simply doing nothing and frustrating people. Democrats shouldn’t walk off any political cliffs, but they do need to be consistently delivering some things for people. Nothing is easy in politics, but I definitely think this is possible.