The dangerous passivity of the moderate Democrats

The dangerous passivity of the moderate Democrats

Smile less, talk more

I don’t find it remotely surprising that moderate members of both the House and Senate are balking at the size and scope of the budget reconciliation legislation that the Democratic leadership has put on the table. Nor does it seem surprising to me that the parliamentarian has ruled that a path to citizenship for the undocumented is beyond the scope of the Byrd Rule.

But beyond these small snags, the Biden legislative agenda is in peril, with centrist members objecting to huge swathes of Biden’s popular, poll-tested, revenue-raising ideas while also objecting to the idea of adding any debt. In essence, they are standing against any meaningful increase in the size of the American social safety net. And now Joe Manchin is saying the whole thing should be “paused” until 2022. Progressive members, seeking to avoid this outcome, have pre-committed themselves to the idea that they will sink the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework if centrists do this, and they may well feel they have to follow through on that threat.

So a once-promising 117th Congress may end up collapsing into a Covid relief bill and not much more.

I hesitate to leap to the conclusion that voters will punish Democrats for not getting anything done. “Do-nothing” policy regimes are often very popular (just ask Charlie Baker), especially if they can engineer good macroeconomic conditions (just ask Bill Clinton), and it’s not clear that the public is demanding sweeping changes to tax and spending policy. But it is nice to have something to put in your reelection ads. And beyond that, we’re simply at a dangerous moment in American politics, and the centrist members who’ve been given the power to determine what happens next are being frightfully passive and short-sighted.

A dangerously imbalanced political system

Beyond the pandemic, the dominant fact of politics in 2021 is that Democrats’ ability to govern rests on borrowed time. Joe Biden’s large popular vote victory in 2020 translated into only a tiny win in the Electoral College. Democrats’ Senate majority rested not only on paper-thin wins in Georgia (and, back in 2016, in New Hampshire and Nevada) but also on 2018 wins by incumbents in Montana and West Virginia that likely can’t be replicated in the 2024 presidential election.

The progressive answer to this — and I think a big part of the correct answer — is to create new states.

The residents of the District of Columbia have over and over again expressed our preference for statehood, and it should be granted. There should also be a process for binding statehood referenda in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and other territories. Outside of D.C., these new states wouldn’t necessarily be Democratic gimmes. Republicans are competitive in Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rican statehood has traditionally been a GOP platform commitment, while Democrats have seen it as potentially colonialist. But these would all be D-leaning states. At a minimum, Republicans looking to win representation would have to embrace the side of their brain that’s proud of Latino gains in 2020 rather than the side that enjoys fomenting white racial panic.

The other thing you could do is try to push hard against forces that are polarizing the political system along the lines of educational attainment and urbanization.

This is easier said than done. We see similar underlying dynamics in Germany and Canada and France and the UK, so don’t assume it’s all about some small idiosyncratic aspect of American politics. It seems that as countries become wealthier and better educated, people naturally prioritize material concerns less and symbolic ones more, and that’s driving politics all around the world. Still, you can try. Obama successfully depolarized on education a bit during his two runs. But the pivotal members don’t seem to want to do either of those things.

Squandering Democrats’ best issue

Radical health care reform tends to be unpopular, but Democrats are the more trusted party on health care, and plenty of their more modest proposals are very popular.

The way Democrats decided to implement this in their reconciliation proposal is to impose modest price regulations on prescription drugs across the board. That will make medicine cheaper for non-seniors, while also reducing Medicare expenditures. Then those Medicare savings can be plowed into supporting new healthcare programs, like making Medicare benefits more generous by including things like vision coverage.

That’s not even close to my ideal health policy agenda. But it’s politically very shrewd. Lowering prescription drug prices is the single most popular item on the entire progressive laundry list. Beyond that, “we want to give seniors dental coverage, they want to protect pharmaceutical company profits” is just about the best possible message I can imagine if you want to reshape the coalitions and make less-educated and rural people think of Democrats as offering them something.

Moderates campaigned on affordable health care

This is something Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema appreciated during her tough but ultimately successful race in 2018 when she ran as both a defender of the Affordable Care Act and a proponent of further steps to bring down families’ healthcare costs.

Sinema’s ads touted her independence, and she talked about being tough on crime, but her progressive issue was making health care — and especially prescription drugs — more affordable.

And in his 2018 campaign, Manchin obviously emphasized a lot of conservative themes like his support for the second amendment and his commitment to border security. If you’re winning in West Virginia, you need to make a fairly conservative pitch. But you also need to disagree with Republicans about something, and the issue of choice for Manchin was “affordable health care.”

He attacked his opponent as soft on pharmaceutical companies and promised to stand up for seniors.

There is genuinely a world of difference between these ad campaigns and the lofty ambitions of the progressive movement. No promise of a public option here or of any kind of radical change to the system. But these kinds of incremental changes in the reconciliation bill are exactly what these and other moderate Democrats campaigned on.

Now maybe they had some other mechanism in mind for more access to affordable health care than the one cooked up in this proposal. But then surely it should be on them to come up with some account of what it is that they would support.

Power without leadership

Of course, a reconciliation bill narrowly focused on healthcare affordability would be very different from the omnibus package touching on child care, elder care, higher education, poverty, and climate change. And I can certainly see the case against legislating in mega-bills like that. But again, the beloved filibuster essentially requires you to attempt legislating in that manner. And Manchin and Sinema aren’t calling for a bill focused on healthcare costs — Sinema is saying she’s against the healthcare provisions, and Manchin is now saying he’s against doing anything at all for the rest of calendar year 2021.

Note that when Manchin actually took the time to huddle with staff and outside advisors to decide what he favors on voting rights, it wasn’t hard to get other Democrats to sign onto that. The Manchin voting rights bill isn’t going to pass anyway because of the filibuster, but in a world where progressives want so much on so many fronts, and where he and Sinema have all the leverage, they are frustratingly unwilling to use that leverage to lay out an agenda. They’re wielding power without exercising any leadership, and it’s incredibly frustrating. Say what you want to do and make everyone else live with it.

Most of all, I wonder what the most vulnerable members would like citizens to think politics is all about.

Donald Trump wants politics to be all about diffuse cultural resentments that fill up the airwaves while he passes tax cuts. Joe Manchin, I think, does not want this. He wants to skirt cultural issues and talk about concrete actions to improve the lives of West Virginians. That’s what this reconciliation bill is fundamentally an effort to do — help people in tangible, material ways with their lives and suggest to the public that this is what politics is about, with the Democrats positioned as the party that wants to do more to help. If moderates kill it off, then the public is left with nothing to chew on but culture war chum, and the moderates themselves are the ones who’ll lose their seats over it.