WeeklyWorker

03.02.2022

Dangling in mid-air

Biden’s whole social programme has fallen victim to the undemocratic Senate. Daniel Lazare warns that there is a distinct danger of a minority regime

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden billed himself as the competence candidate. It’s not clear how he got away with it, since he admitted at the same time to being a “gaffe machine” who never allowed the facts to get in the way of a good story. He thus bragged about coming under fire during a visit to war-torn Iraq when he was merely “near where a shot landed”, as he later confessed; about meeting survivors of a 2018 Florida school shooting while vice president when in fact the incident occurred well after he left office; and about getting arrested on his way to visit Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa, when he was merely detained.1

He also referred to Barack Obama on the 2008 campaign trail as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”, a mega-gaffe in America’s highly-charged racial atmosphere and proof yet again that Biden is a non-stop talking machine whose mouth switches into high gear before his brain is fully engaged.

But after Donald Trump suggested that injecting disinfectant might be effective in combatting Covid-19, Americans were ready to believe anything, and so the moniker stuck. In fact, liberal dreams seemed to come true just a few months later when Biden succeeded in pushing through a $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus package shortly after taking office. A prominent Democrat, Barney Frank, announced that the end of “anti-government” had arrived, while New York Times columnist David Brooks declared that “the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting”.2

Happy days were here again - until, that is, reality asserted itself. In truth, Congress didn’t mind passing a stimulus because the Federal Reserve had already paved the way by opening wide the credit spigots at the start of the pandemic. It didn’t mind passing a $1.2 trillion infrastructure investment programme because it was chock full of the sort of pork-barrel giveaways that congressmen of all stripes can’t resist.

But it drew the line at a $2.2 trillion social-investment package featuring such items as free child care, free kindergarten, subsidized family and medical leave, and free tuition at two-year community colleges. For centrists and conservatives, benefitting the working class in that way was too socialist to bear. The bill’s modest gestures in favour of climate mitigation, meanwhile, stirred the ire of conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin, a millionaire coal-business owner from West Virginia. Its proposal to pay for such programmes by boosting the corporate tax rate from 21% to 25% aroused the enmity of Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, a centrist Democrat dependent on corporate campaign contributions in a pro-Trump state.

With both Sinema and Manchin defecting to the other side, the bill gave up the ghost in early January, when senate Democrats finally admitted that they were two votes shy of a majority. Democratic progressives who had supported the infrastructure programme only on the condition that Biden pushed ahead with the social-benefits package were left looking like fools. So was Biden, since the defeat left him without the climate plan he had endlessly touted on the campaign train and without any of the Franklin D Roosevelt-style welfare improvements that he had also promised.

More importantly, with Manchin and Sinema in open revolt, it meant that the man who had once celebrated the senate’s slow-moving ways as an essential part of checks and balances now found himself falling victim to the same forces. After hailing the advent of activist government, pundits now had to say hello to the return of institutionalized paralysis and incompetence.

But why now? Is America’s return to incompetence all Biden’s fault? Or are deeper forces at work?

The answer is the latter. Competence is contextual. Biden, for instance, has not always been a bumbler. To the contrary, he worked hard as chairman of the senate foreign relations committee after 9/11 to win approval for the back-to-back invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and succeeded handsomely at both - even if the invasions themselves turned out to be among the most disastrous decisions in the history of US imperialism. Despite doing poorly in the primaries, he showed no small skill on the campaign trail in 2008 by winning the approval of Barack Obama and catapulting himself into the vice presidency, an office previously beyond his reach. The same goes for the 2020 presidential campaign in which he pursued Trump relentlessly and ended up winning by an impressive 7 million popular votes.

Indeed, Biden has arguably shown no small amount of competence in the latest instance by successfully passing off the US senate as a model of democratic deliberation until the last possible moment. This is something the constitutional system demands of its servants, and it’s an assignment that good-soldier Biden therefore endeavoured to carry out in full. The problem is that the system was diverging so sharply from reality at this point that he was left dangling in mid-air.

The senate is not a model of anything, at least not anything good. Rather, it is a pseudo-democratic monstrosity that makes a mockery of the principle of one-person-one-vote by giving multi-racial California the same clout as lily-white Wyoming, even though its population is nearly 70 times greater. The principle of equal state representation means that the 54% majority of the country that lives in the 10 most populous states are outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other 40. Considering that 81% of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other minorities also live in the highly-urbanized top 10, it means that they are outvoted even more egregiously.

The filibuster, which has brought the senate to a standstill, is the icing on the cake. The hoary old document known as the US constitution abounds in supermajorities. It requires a two-thirds majority in both the house and senate to override a presidential veto or approve a constitutional amendment. It requires a two-thirds senate majority for treaty ratification or conviction in the case of impeachment. Senators no doubt thought they were following constitutional logic when, in the early 19th century, they decided that a filibuster rule requiring a supermajority to cut off debate so that legislation could proceed would be a good idea too.

The more supermajorities, in other words, the better, or so they assumed. The procedure fell into abeyance until the civil-rights era of the 1950s and 60s, when America’s rich history of racism again erupted into something approaching civil war. This was the golden age of the “talking filibuster” that Jimmy Stewart made famous in the 1939 movie, Mr Smith goes to Washington. Tired of individual members interrupting senate proceedings, reformers then came up with the bright idea of requiring them to provide written notice of intent to filibuster rather than monopolizing debate for days on end. The idea was to improve senate efficiency. But the reform backfired by making it easier to filibuster and thereby enabling individual members to gum up the works all the more thoroughly.

Democracy has been turned on its head as a consequence. Thanks to growing population discrepancies, a simple majority can be gleaned from 51 senators from states representing as little as 17.5% of the population. That’s less than one person in six. But the 60-vote supermajority needed to override a filibuster means that 41 senators representing as little as 11.2% now have untrammelled veto power. One person in nine can thus stop the rest of society in its tracks. With hundreds of filibusters filed per year, the proportion of bills obtaining senate approval has fallen from more than 25% in the 1950s to 2.8% as of 2010, roughly a 90% drop.3

The senate is no longer a legislative body in any meaningful sense, but a Bermuda Triangle in which the people’s initiatives disappear for good. Corporate interests love it because it allows them to run roughshod over the body politic. But workers and the poor are paying the price as a deepening minority dictatorship sends government galloping to the right. Since the senate must also approve supreme court nominees, the effect is to infect the judiciary with the same anti-democratic racism. Since the electoral college is also weighted in favour of white rural states, it infects the executive branch too.

Americans are beginning to sense that something is seriously amiss, which is why Biden’s approval rating has plunged to as low as 33%, why Congress’s ratings are less than half of what they were three or four decades ago, and why op-ed pages are now bulging with articles bemoaning the loss of democratic government.4 But no one has a clue as to what to do, because it is impossible to oppose a minority dictatorship within constitutional bounds when it is the constitution that instituted it in the first place.

Remarkably, attempts to loosen the bonds have caused them to tighten all the more. Efforts to prevent racial discrimination at the voting booth, for example, have led to a powerful Republican counteroffensive aimed at all but eliminating the popular vote as of 2024. By appointing party activists to serve as supposedly neutral observers in voting places, Republicans have introduced a spate of state-level legislation aimed at making it easier to disrupt election proceedings and easier to challenge the results in court. If neither candidate wins an electoral college majority because too many state results are tied up in litigation, the effect by early January 2025 could be to throw the contest into the house of representatives, where states must vote as individual units according to the 12th amendment, passed in 1803. If so, Republicans will enjoy a built-in advantage because they control a majority of state delegations in the house, even if they don’t control a majority of seats.

Hence, there will be no need for a repeat of last year’s Capitol Hill insurrection, since Republicans will be able to hijack the proceedings all the more effectively while supporters watch comfortably at home on TV. The goal, quite simply, is to see to it that a Democrat never enters the White House again, and it is almost within reach. If so, democracy will vanish as the minority party tightens its dictatorship.

But that’s not the end of the story. Americans will not stand quietly by if Republican plans go through. To the contrary, they will again erupt in something approaching civil war. But unless the working class takes charge, the result will not be democracy, but a further descent into anarchy and authoritarianism.

To be effective, the working class must pursue a strategy that is simultaneously offensive and defensive. It must defend political democracy, in other words, while recognizing that the only way to do so is by pushing through to socialism. Instead of returning to pseudo-democracy, they must advance to the new democracy of the proletariat. However far-fetched this may seem in present-day America, it’s the only way out of the bind.

  1. Jack Stanton and Jordan Muller ‘55 things you need to know about Joe Biden’ Politico May 3 2020: www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/05/biden-2020-president-facts-what-you-should-know-campaign-121422.↩︎

  2. Jeff Stein, ‘We need the government’ Washington Post March 7 2021: www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/03/07/stimulus-politics/; David Brooks ‘Joe Biden is a transformational president’ New York Times March 11 2021: www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/opinion/biden-covid-relief-bill.html.↩︎

  3. Mimi Marziani, Jonathan Backer and Diana Kasdan ‘Curbing Filibuster Abuse’ Brennan Center for Justice 2012: www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2019-08/Report_Curbing_Filibuster_Abuse.pdf.↩︎

  4. Brett Samuels ‘Quinnipiac poll shows Biden with 33 percent approval rating’ The Hill January 12 2022: thehill.com/homenews/administration/589450-quinnipiac-poll-shows-biden-with-33-percent-approval-rating; Tom Murse ‘Congress approval ratings though history’ ThoughtCo March 18 2017: www.thoughtco.com/congress-approval-ratings-through-history-3368257. For a recent example of op-ed despair, see Jedediah Britton-Purdy ‘The Republican Party is succeeding because we are not a true democracy’ New York Times January 3 2022: www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/us-democracy-constitution.html.↩︎