everything he wants to do. And unless new majority leader Chuck Schumer can convince his caucus to eliminate the filibuster – the procedural quirk that makes it necessary for most pieces of legislation to secure the support of 60 senators just to get it to a vote on the floor – Republican recalcitrance will stay Democratic ambitions. That is likely to be the case since Joe Manchin, the West Virginia senator who is the most conservative Democrat in the chamber, has already said flatly he will not agree to kill the filibuster. The fact that Biden’s party holds the levers of power in the Senate functions as a kind of inoculation against the persistent, low-grade, political fever that unfriendly Hill investigations can impose on the executive branch. So any notion that Biden will “get things done” by signing bills is pretty much a fantasy. His only way to get his desiderata through Congress will come with those policies he can somehow attach to legislation involving the federal budget. Those “budget reconciliation” bills are the only ones that escape the current filibuster rules and can be voted into law with a simple majority of the Senate. Still, the fact that Biden’s party holds the levers of power in the Senate functions as a kind of inoculation against the persistent, low-grade, political fever that unfriendly Hill
investigations can impose on the executive branch. The second blessing for Biden is that, with the Senate in Democratic hands, he can largely depend on his nominees for those Cabinet and agency posts and commissions that require Senate confirmation to get through the Capitol Hill gauntlet. To be sure, a few will surely have to withdraw. One or two may get rejected when controversies arise... Those things always happen. But the vast majority of the 1,200 appointees that the Senate must approve will be approved. This will keep the White House from obsessing over the confirmation process and allow it to focus on other matters. What we do not know – what we cannot know – is what the Biden administration will be up to when they take their positions and begin their work. Biden himself ran a brilliant and largely idea-free campaign promising only that he would not be Donald Trump and that he would restore some form of normality to American politics. He doesn’t really have a mandate that legislation must handle for much besides some form of raising taxes on the very wealthy and shoring up Obamacare. But if that were all the president could do, it wouldn’t matter very much who he was, would it? The fact is that we’ve had an ideological overhaul in Washington and Biden is at the head of it. But will it mean a rise in Democratic populism to counter the Republican populism of the Trump years – or something more fascinatingly corporate?
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January 2021
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