Congress Actually Seems to Be Working Again

Congress Actually Seems to Be Working Again

Across a broad range of policy areas, legislation is advancing, lawmakers are compromising and — strangest of all — bipartisanship is in the air.

Work in progress.

By Jonathan Bernstein

February 10, 2022, 9:30 PM GMT+9

I hate to shock you, but Congress is currently … legislating?

Item: A bipartisan group of senators has agreed to a new version of the

Violence Against Women Act. The 1994 law was one of President Joe Biden’s biggest achievements as a senator, but it had lapsed after the parties couldn’t agree on reauthorization language. Negotiations have been continuing for years, but now the bill has 10 Republican cosponsors in the Senate — enough to defeat a filibuster. It’s not expected to have difficulties in the House. The bill’s original supporters (including a few Republicans) secured the larger agreement by dropping a provision that would’ve prevented those convicted of violence against partners from owning guns. 

Item: The House passed a major Postal Service reform, with almost half of Republicans joining all the Democrats. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O’Brien has

all the details. This one, too, is something that has been kicking around for years but now appears to finally be moving toward the president’s desk.

Item: The badly needed restoration of the Voting Rights Act and another big Democratic elections-reform bill may be about as

dead as bills can be for this Congress, but one narrower measure appears to have a pretty good chance in the Senate. That bill would update the poorly written Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute that governs what happens in presidential elections after the polls close, when Congress needs to formally declare a winner. With any luck, the reform will also incorporate prohibitions against maladministration in the states, as well as protections for election workers and administrators. This one has a ways to go, but I suspect it has at least a 50-50 chance of passage.

Item: The House has

passed its version of what’s now billed as the “Competes Act,” an effort to help the U.S. gain advantages over China in trade and, in particular, to boost the domestic semiconductor industry. The Senate passed its version last year, easily defeating a Republican filibuster, but the bill had stalled in the House; a new version finally succeeded on a mostly party-line vote. Now there are two different bills heading to a conference committee. There’s no guarantee that a deal can be reached that qill get a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate. Still, this is how legislating is supposed to work: Both chambers act, and then try to compromise.

That’s not all. A long-overdue appropriations bills may finally be moving forward. So far, Congress has only been able to pass temporary spending bills, rather than proper appropriations bills. But now the parties have

agreed to a “framework” for completing their work. It’s still not clear how close they are to final deals. But it’s progress.

If all these bills actually pass, on top of the major relief and infrastructure bills that were signed into law last year, this will wind up being an unusually productive Congress. Still, Democrats won’t be happy unless they can pass at least some of the provisions in their biggest bill, which combined health care, climate measures, child care and more. That legislation, known as “Build Back Better,” has been declared dead plenty of times, but unlike the election reforms — which would require changes to Senate procedures that clearly don’t have the votes at the moment — Build Back Better may be only mostly or nearly dead. It’s still the case that Democrats are one vote short, while Senator Joe Manchin says that he is open to at least some aspects of the proposal.

As for the rest of these bills? Each would require bipartisan support, and each has gotten some already. Granted, it doesn’t count unless there’s a final deal that passes and leads to a White House signing ceremony. But this progress has already complicated the notion that I and others have pushed that Republicans are simply rejecting everything. It’s certainly true that Republicans are filibustering everything, forcing a threshold of 60 votes in the Senate rather than a simple majority. And Republican alternatives in many policy areas are vanishingly rare. At the same time, a rump group of Republicans — not always the same ones — have been willing to negotiate in good faith on many topics with the majority Democrats. So rejectionism, yes, but it’s a little more complicated. As for the Democrats? Yes, they’d surely pass everything on a party-line basis if they could, but as a party they’ve shown that Biden’s claims to be pragmatic and willing to work with any Republicans who come to the table isn’t empty talk.