Forget McConnell. Forget Pelosi. In a divided Congress, Biden needs to build his own coalition.
But with the exception of a coronavirus relief package and continuing budget resolutions to keep the government from shutting down, congressional leaders have neither the instinct nor the political headroom to engage in significant compromise.
Indeed, it is precisely this top-down model of high-stakes brinkmanship between the White House and a handful of party leaders that has created and perpetuated government dysfunction.
We have long since passed the point where Congress operates anything like you were taught in that middle school social studies unit on “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” You remember the drill: Committees hold hearings to study a problem, members draft bills that are reported to the full House and Senate, where they are further debated and amended before going to a conference committee to iron out differences between the two chambers. All that went out with long-distance phone rates and programming the VCR.
These days, nothing significant gets done without the approval of the caucus of the party in control of the House and Senate and party leaders. In today’s tribal political culture, members of both parties have convinced themselves that party unity is the only way to achieve the goal of running the table in the next election and gaining the power to impose their policies on the country without having to compromise. That unity is reinforced by party leaders who have gradually grabbed power from committee chairmen and from members who know they will lose plum assignments, campaign cash and funding for pet projects if they break with the leadership on important procedural votes and key issues.
Leaders, in turn, have increasingly become beholden to the more radical wings of their caucuses who threaten to disrupt that unity if any compromises are made, and threaten to mount primary challenges against any party members willing to break from ideological orthodoxy.
In short, the reason no legislation of consequence gets passed is because the leaders don’t want to jeopardize their own power, the unity of their caucus and their prospects of gaining more power in the next election by allowing the compromises necessary to get anything done in a divided Congress.
This broach-no-compromise obstructionism has been the strategy of congressional Republicans since the mid-1990s. Since then, two Republican House speakers have been run out of town for their lack of ideological purity, while members fear being ostracized and attacked on social media just for speaking with Democrats. In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) actually vowed that his goal was to make the Obama presidency a failure, and he spent eight years making good on that promise.
On McConnell’s watch, the Senate has refused to even consider climate change, drug pricing, infrastructure, gun violence, police reform, Internet privacy and just about any other pressing national issue you can name. And you can be sure that after playing nice on a new stimulus bill, McConnell will spend the next two years playing rope-a-dope with Biden, giving the impression of negotiating without any intention of actually agreeing to anything.
When it comes to partisan posturing and eschewing compromise, however, Democrats haven’t been a whole lot better. When the Senate was considering the Trump tax cuts in 2017, most Democrats joined with conservative Republicans to defeat an amendment to extend the earned income tax credit to millions of working poor — a measure they had sought for more than a decade — because it would have made it easier for Republicans to defend a terrible bill that was going to pass one way or the other. And just recently, when the House’s bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus hammered out a $2 trillion compromise on an urgently needed economic stimulus bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) quickly arranged for nine of her committee chairmen to issue an embarrassingly disingenuous letter dismissing it out of hand. Apparently, she and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) didn’t want to give President Trump anything he could claim as a pandemic-related accomplishment in the weeks before an election.
On Saturday, speaking to New York Democrats in the wake of Biden’s victory, striking deals with Republicans was the furthest thing from Schumer’s mind: “Now we take Georgia and we change the world.”
As a card-carrying policy wonk, I can assure you it isn’t all that hard to come up with compromises that could garner a bipartisan majority in both chambers if members felt they had the political headroom to accept some things they don’t like in exchange for things they do. A refundable carbon tax in exchange for job and pension guarantees for coal and petroleum workers. An infrastructure bank funded by user fees. Universal pre-K for greater support of charter schools in failing school districts. A minimum-wage increase to only $10, not $15, in exchange for expansion of the earned income tax credit.
I’ve talked with scores of members of Congress who, once they get past their rants about the partisan gamesmanship of the other side, admit anger and frustration with their growing irrelevance in a process that has them running around all day accomplishing nothing. Individually, most are hungry for the chance to be legislators again and put the interests of the country ahead of party. But that won’t happen as long as they fail to muster the collective courage to take back the power they have ceded to their causes and party leaders. And that’s where a President Biden could help.
Rather than negotiating with party leaders, the new president and his team would make better use of their time and political capital by working with backbenchers of both parties willing to hammer out common-sense proposals that actually have a chance of being embraced by the broad middle of each chamber. The 50-member Problem Solvers Caucus in the House, and the small but growing chapter in the Senate, offer the vehicle for such bipartisan collaboration. With encouragement, leadership and political cover provided by the White House, their numbers could grow to the point that constitute the core of a governing coalition.
Such an effort would find significant support from major business organizations frustrated by the lack of progress on important national issues. In the past few years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has moved from its lock-step support for Republican candidates to providing campaign support to moderates of both parties facing primary challenges from ideological purists. And the Business Roundtable has signaled its willingness to flex its lobbying muscle on behalf of liberal initiatives it once opposed. For Republican lawmakers, in particular, the business community can provide crucial political cover to make reasonable compromises with a Democratic president.
I’m not so naive as to think any of this would be easy, or even likely. In the current environment, the natural instinct will be for the new administration to hammer out its policy proposals with Democratic leaders and liberal activists, push those bills through the House on a straight-line party vote and hope that a wave of popular support will force Senate Republicans to strike an acceptable deal. When that fails, Plan B will be to try to use the Senate’s failure to act to recapture the Senate in the 2022 election, ratcheting up the hyper-partisanship even further.
Economies do not thrive when the national governments cannot respond in a timely manner to new challenges and competitive threats. For the past 20 years, this country has been driven to the brink of a political nervous breakdown by strategies that aim for total victory over the other side, no matter the effect on the long-term health of the economy or our political institutions. We are now at an inflection point. On one side lies restoring trust in each other and our institutions. On the other side lies permanent dysfunction, authoritarian rule and permanent economic decline.
