Why has Biden's bipartisanship worked?

Why has Biden's bipartisanship worked?

(Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

Most political scientists, journalists, progressive activists, and Democratic Party staffers were deeply puzzled by Joe Biden’s repeated pledges during the 2020 campaign to bring a spirit of bipartisanship back to Washington. Speaking personally, I am cynical about politics and never had a problem with Biden saying that stuff, but I did worry that he might actually believe it and found it reassuring when he brushed Republicans aside and just wrote a partisan American Rescue Plan.

And yet now Biden appears to be on the cusp of delivering a significant bipartisan infrastructure plan, raising the prospect that we all overlearned the lessons of the Obama years and there are situations where bipartisanship is possible.

Slow Boring readers will already be familiar with the Secret Congress Hypothesis which states that bipartisan progress is more possible on lower salience issues. And I think some of the factors at play in Secret Congress are relevant to the infrastructure deal. But this was not a Secret Congress play per se. It did get onto the front pages of the newspapers, Biden was seen as personally involved, and it is in some sense clearly a “win for Biden” of the sort Republicans are supposed to be determined not to deliver.

I think there are a few factors we can see in play here, including a potentially successful use of arbitrary anchoring by the White House, a veteran senator’s savvy about how to give the legislators room to legislate, and a trend toward policy moderation in the GOP caucus. But fundamentally I think one strength Biden has on Capitol Hill in 2021 compared to Obama in 2009 is that he seems so much weaker. Nobody is talking about Biden cementing a new permanent Democratic majority. Republicans are actually super-confident that they can take the House in the midterms without needing to catch any particularly lucky breaks. So while they’re obviously not going to roll over and start greenlighting legislation they hate, they don’t have quite the backs-against-the-wall determination to stop Biden at all costs.

What Biden didn’t do — sell out

There is of course one classic pattern for a president to achieve bipartisan legislation that we saw a lot of during Donald Trump’s final year in office — you just sell out to the opposition party.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, taking an infographic that compares what was in Biden’s original proposal to what’s in the BIF, sort of offers that interpretation of what happened. He gained bipartisanship at hefty substantive cost.

But that’s not really what happened here at all. Progressives never had $400 billion in subsidies for home and community-based care. And they never had $363 billion in clean energy tax credits. They hypothetically could have gotten those things on a party-line vote if they persuaded moderates it was a good idea, but progressives haven’t given up their ability to persuade moderates that those things are a good idea. The optionality of throwing stuff in a future reconciliation package remains. Now, how much of this stuff will they in fact be able to convince moderates to do? I’d hesitate to make any strong predictions. But it’s clear that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are both fully open to doing some of this in a reconciliation bill.

And that’s really the genius of the BIF from the White House’s point of view. The legislation itself is non-trivial, and I recommend Joshua Freed’s breakdown of the billions of dollars in important climate programming here. It’s also not an earth-shattering piece of legislation. But in the NFL when you score a safety, it’s not just that you get two points (which isn’t that many) — you also get the ball back.

Now contrast this with Trump’s legislating during the Plague Year where he got stuff like the Families First Coronavirus Act and the CARES Act done by basically just agreeing to Democratic ideas. He didn’t let Democrats run the table of course, and lots of stuff progressives favored didn’t make it into those bills. But the White House didn’t get Democrats to throw in a capital gains tax cut or anything. The nature of the bipartisanship was “Trump wanted Covid relief bills to pass so he could get re-elected, so Nancy Pelosi got Trump to agree to a lot of spending Republicans would normally oppose.” This worked out great for America and is a real template for getting things done in Washington.

But it’s not what Biden did. The BIF is like the CARES Act in terms of substance rather than in terms of process — it’s recognizably a Democratic bill as edited by Republicans rather than something with big wins for the GOP.

One thing that worked — anchoring

The Obama administration frequently annoyed progressives by coming to the table with proposals that seemed pre-compromised. He wouldn’t just say “we want to spend a bunch of money to expand health insurance” and then be willing to reshape that to try to secure Republican votes.

He would start out by offering something that was designed to sound like a reasonable bipartisan compromise. This was highly effective at making Barack Obama seem like a reasonable person, but it never once caused a dozen Republican senators to jump up and say “that sounds great, Mr. President, let’s do it!”

Biden, by contrast, has been throwing long bombs. He followed up a very expansive American Rescue Plan with two different proposals — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — that were both enormous. The BIF, as Rep. Bowman was saying, is tiny compared to the original Jobs Plan proposal. This means Republicans can hold their head high and say that by negotiating in good faith and preempting the idea of an AJP reconciliation bill, they really accomplished something.

Now one way I would distinguish this from sloppy invocations of the Overton Window is that while Biden’s proposals were very large, they were defensible on their own terms. The policies he outlined make sense, the tax increases he proposed to pay for them are carefully crafted to be politically popular, and while some of his ideas poll better (clean water infrastructure) than others (electric vehicle subsidies), none of them are politically toxic. Anchoring on the big number worked in part because the content was reasonable and popular. If Biden had proposed a big carbon tax and used it to fund unconditional student debt relief, that would have generated a backlash. But rolling a whole bunch of popular ideas together let him bargain down in the way that Obama’s critics had hoped.

Extreme flexibility

The other difference between the approach Biden took here and the way Obama dealt with bipartisan negotiations is that Obama was a lot more opinionated.

Obama was quite open to compromise, and in some ways was willing to make bigger ideological concessions than Biden was. But he also had pretty specific ideas of what it was he was trying to accomplish. Indeed, just as liberals have complained for years that Obama would do too much to pre-compromise his proposals, something I hear from Republicans who worked on these processes is an annoyance that Obama would essentially tell them what he thought they should want out of a deal.

And if you accept the premise that Republicans care about long-term deficits and the incentive effects of marginal tax rates, the grand bargain he was offering them was super-reasonable. It just turns out that they don’t, in fact, really care that much about that stuff.

Compared to that, the BIF is a total mess conceptually that pays for new spending mostly with gimmicks and handwaving. This does not “achieve conservative ends” in a high-minded sense, but it achieves the (apparent) actual goals of Republican Party politicians. What’s more, while there is progressive stuff in here, I wouldn’t say that it represents either the best progressive ideas or the most popular progressive ideas. It’s basically “the progressive ideas that Republicans didn’t insist on killing.”

Which is to say it’s a true triumph of backroom dealmaking where nobody really knows exactly what went down or why, but everyone was evidently able to level and say what they really want.

That’s the part where I think you should look if you want to credit Biden’s legislative experience or see the value of having a veteran lobbyist like Steve Richetti on the team. You don’t get a deal by being the smartest person in the room; you get a deal by making deals.

Half a dose of Secret Congress

For the sake of personal vindication, I’d like to say this deal is part of the Secret Congress trend, but to be honest I don’t think that’s a defensible interpretation. This was a reasonably high-profile initiative that Biden was associated with.

However, I do think we saw a few Secret Congress themes.

One of them is that the actual work here did seem pretty secretive. We didn’t have the hype and hoopla of the Super Committee and the key negotiators didn’t do much public position-taking. The other is that while the process was hardly secret, it also wasn’t all that high-profile. The news environment has been plenty full of Covid news, Republican messaging is mostly about crime and immigration, Twitter fights are mostly about whatever people think critical race theory is, and in general we haven’t seen BIF-focused content going viral or doing great numbers for cable news hosts.

And I do think it’s relevant that a few weeks ago the deal seemed to come together, Biden took a huge victory lap, and then the deal immediately collapsed.

It continues to be the case that bipartisan dealmaking is a good news cycle for the incumbent president, but that makes it inherently difficult for members of the other party to agree to anything. You don’t necessarily need to operate in secret, but you do need to work around that fundamental mismatch.

This brings us to the paradoxical virtue of Biden’s seemingly weak position.

Republicans were terrified of Obama

In 2008, Barack Obama beat a celebrated war hero 53-46 and carried Ohio, Iowa, Indiana (!), Florida, and North Carolina. John McCain won Missouri by a narrower margin than Biden won Arizona or Georgia. Democrats had 59 and then eventually 60 Senate seats and huge majorities in the House.

Republicans were legitimately terrified that Obama might put together a two-year run that included a V-shaped economic recovery, new laws strengthening labor unions, an immigration amnesty that accelerated the demographic transformation of the electorate, and then kind of leave them in the dust. Nobody was so foolish as to think the laws of politics were repealed and Democrats could sustain those 2009 majorities forever. But the point is their majorities were so big that you could have easily had Republicans gain seats in 2010 while Democrats stayed in charge of Congress.

So much of what’s happened in the subsequent years of American politics stems from the fact that Obama didn’t pass those pro-union laws, didn’t get the comprehensive immigration reform done, didn’t get the V-shaped economic recovery, and got drubbed specifically in a critical redistricting year.

Biden is not scary in the same way. Democrats could put up one of the best incumbent party midterm performances ever and still lose the House over redistricting. The current iteration of the Democratic Party coalition is at a hopeless disadvantage in the Senate. Republicans have an entrenched majority on the Supreme Court. And the pivotal Democratic senators are crystal clear that they have no intention of changing the filibuster in order to create new states. Biden himself is old, and Republicans believe (likely correctly) that his successor will be much easier to beat.

None of this means they are eager to work with him and cut deals. But the reluctance to deal is driven more by sincere differences of opinion and less by a sense of a desperate need to treat everything like a fight to the death. The GOP has what they think is a viable road to victory, and that road doesn’t preclude them from passing a few bipartisan bills.