President Biden is on a victory tour this week. The victory? Convincing a great number of our citizens they’re better off with borrowing money now and paying it back later, with an unknown interest rate. Very similar to what Democrats rail against payday lenders for doing. Many of those young adults are of the age that it will be their future earnings clipped to pay down the loans, and the government doing the borrowing can’t also do the forgiving. Towards the end of the law’s passage, there were a few moments of supposed drama as recounted by a faithful media. An unrelated minimum wage hike returned to being unrelated to the giveaway. There was some minor banter back and forth about similarly minor provisions that might’ve pulled in a left-leaning Republican or two, dismissed pretty quickly. Finally, there was a final volley around the cutoff time for unemployment benefits that could’ve, but didn’t, hold back Joe Manchin from voting for the bill in its current draft form and forcing another round of internal negotiations.
Yes, folks, that was the big political victory that Joe and Chuck celebrated. That they were able to keep their own party united enough to spend a bunch of your money. From the outset, there was no intent to bargain with the other party. So, Schumer’s finest moment, we’re told, was abandoning the now outmoded pretense of bipartisanship and being able to keep a rapidly left-moving party united in raiding the treasury.
Here’s what the takes over the past week are missing. What we’re actually celebrating is a bold approach to politics: Joe Biden is coming into Washington with the slimmest congressional margins in modern history, no identifiable mandate, and what is his takeaway? To spend historic amounts of money on a longtime wish list and openly ponder much, much worse. Put more simply, the American people have presented Joe with the most closely divided government in decades and he’s decided to force one-sided partisan change onto an unwilling nation.
How does a president convince himself of that? Is it through a sense of moral duty as Democrats tell us? Sure, but there’s a more cynical calculation at play. They know that poll numbers are favorable, and that they can insult the American people by proxy in a manner many will fall for. When you constantly castigate Republicans in Washington, what you’re really doing is insulting the very people who put them there, you know, barely 60 days ago and specifically to represent the beliefs they campaigned on. The utility in referring to poll numbers is it allows Biden to accomplish a balancing act: play to the majoritarian mood while minimizing the constraints of our federal system that would typically prevent this type of action. He doesn’t want to abandon long-standing norms you see, but the Republicans just won’t cooperate, says Joe. It’s simple politics, and Joe’s betting it will work for him.
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As you read articles showing poll numbers in favor of upcoming individual pieces of legislation, keep in mind that a bill truly popular across a wide swath of the people would not simultaneously require Democrats to consider changing major parliamentary rules or eliminate the 100-year-old filibuster to pass it. You can bet the articles in mainstream press will leave that part out. Last week’s bill may have deep support, it may be loved in the cities, but it does not have the breadth of support that used to be required for major domestic legislation pre-Obama. If the support were genuinely broad, Republicans accountable to their home districts would’ve been hearing about it at town halls and in letters. Biden is smart enough to know that Obama broke the model of bipartisan support for major domestic legislation, that he doesn’t need it. That’s why Senate Democrats were mad about not overriding the parliamentarian to jam through the minimum wage hike, they get the new rules of the game.
Something’s off here: the man coming into Washington with the weakest position in modern history intends to enact the most aggressive changes to our country. Consensus be damned. Yet, his political calculation is cynical, which is to say, solid. And a distracted and utterly unprepared Republican party is still slow to recognize the scope of what Biden and Chuck have planned. Democrats consider this moment like the civil rights movement. It’s their duty to force their version of populist change on an unwilling country. They see the instability that will inevitably follow from moving forward in this way as a feature, not a bug. It’s no longer their job to convince their brethren of their righteousness. They are relieved of that responsibility due to Republican intransigence, or because of the supposedly nefarious incentives created by a gerrymandering they soon hope to ban in a further consolidation of power.
Their goal is to force these abrupt changes on the country, shape our institutions to strengthen their hand permanently, and bet on the backend they can polish it enough to declare that history really was on their side the whole time. When I use the alarming terms above and talk about abrupt changes, I don’t mean the latest thing we’re all outraged about according to this particular news cycle. I mean that we need to recognize that setting a precedent of bailing out the blue states, spending trillions at a clip, or permanently changing our federal structure via HR1 are generational, in some cases systemic changes.
In other words, Biden’s plan is strength through force. So, he has himself or through allies censored his major political opponent, kept a speech-chilling troop presence directly accountable to him in Washington, and refused to answer direct questions from the press about his ambitious plans. But hey, he’s folksy, right?
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