Wasting a Crisis?

Back when I was in school in the now ancient history of mid-20th-century America, it was widely thought that an American president's most effective year was typically his third  - given the time it takes to adjust to the job (consider, for example, JFK's disastrous first year) and given the need to campaign for re-election in the fourth year. Since then, of course, campaigns are permanent, not just reserved for the fourth year; and the increased likelihood of losing control of Congress at the mid-term have moved the most promising period for presidential success to the very beginning of an administration. Correctly or not, it seems almost axiomatic now that President Biden has at most a matter of months to implement his agenda. What that means, of course, is that the Democrats need to maximize whatever benefits their 'control" of Congress gives them not only before losing that control at the mid-term election but also while the current atmosphere of crisis remains center stage. As Rahm Emmanuel is alleged to have said, one should never let a crisis go to waste, which, however, may be exactly what the Democrats appear to be doing.

Now, given the Biden Administration's incredible success in passing the monumentally transformative ARP, I may seem to be exaggerating to make my point. So what is the point? As I see it, the Biden Administration and the Democrats face two particularly powerful threats. The first is the persistence of immigration as an issue - not immigration per se but immigration as an issue, exacerbated by the media's obsession with seeing it as a "crisis" at the border. Policy considerations aside, immigration as an issue can help only Republicans, who (aided and abetted by sensation-seeking media) stand to exploit and benefit from it. The other is that, in addition to the ARP, Biden and the Democrats must continue to be seen as actually improving people's lives, which, however, is hard to do under our system. Unlike most democratic polities, which benefit from parliamentary political systems, winning elections does not automatically enable a party to implement its program. Hence the electorate gets disappointed and loses faith in government, which always works to the advantage of Republicans, who instead of offering to improve people's lives successfully exploit people's perceived grievances, both real and imagined.

However, to implement much of a program that may actually improve people's lives and the overall condition of the country, both the President and his party must finally shed vestigial illusions about the chimera of bipartisanship and about the institution of the Senate. They must abandon their fondness for the storied traditions (which are actually relatively recent and hardly all that traditional) of that anti-democratic and drastically dysfunctional body. While the inherently unjust character of the Senate itself, rooted in the unfortunate equality irrevocably accorded by the Constitution to the states - Madison famously described the equality of states in the Senate as a departure from justice - cannot be undone, some of the Senate's more modern failures, like the infamous filibuster, could be undone, were there a will to make the Senate serve its proper legislative purpose.

In theory, Democrats see government action as a solution to many of the social and political problems which afflict American society. On the other hand, despite their ostensible desire to accomplish things through government action, many Democrats do seem unduly susceptible to the misguided popular affection for "bipartisanship" (an ideal many in the public profess but few if any are willing to support or reward) and to the fantasy that maintaining manifestly obstructionist tactics like the filibuster somehow promotes bipartisan debate and compromise (the very things that the filibuster in fact functions to prevent). In fact, the filibuster has proved to be precisely the "poison," which Hamilton in Federalist 22 predicted any supermajority requirement would be.

It is all good and well to denounce voter suppression efforts in Georgia and elsewhere as "Jim Crow," but the analogy is ominous. The last time we had "Jim Crow" in this country, the federal government did nothing about it for decades. A misguided affection for non-existent "bipartisanship" and an even more misguided affection for such dysfunctional Senate traditions as the filibuster would once again guarantee a repetition of that history of inaction.