It may be overbroad to say our long national nightmare is over, with a raging pandemic and ongoing economic, climate and racial justice crises, but at least this one specific nightmare is over. Donald Trump is not the president. Joe Biden is the president. Make sure to take a moment and appreciate that new reality.
Now, the work begins. The good news is that President Biden and his staff are incredibly well-prepared to assume the office of the Presidency. This isn’t always the case, even setting aside Trump. The early months of the Bill Clinton administration suffered numerous problems due to the lack of familiarity and experience around the presidency as Democrats had been out of power for 12 years. The bad news is, well, *waves arm around at everything else*.
Looking at the Democratic Party’s future is much more focused on policy and legislation than politics both because Democrats control the government and because they have actual policy goals rather than an ever-present rage over multiculturalism. And while Republicans have a broad sense of their future but a lot of different permutations within it, the Democratic outlook over the next few years is much more bifurcated.
If you’ve been following politics, you probably know that the big inflection point is the practical or actual elimination of the filibuster. First, we’ll touch on what will definitely happen and then we’ll look at two different paths for Democrats as they take unified power in Washington for the first time in a decade.
Certainties
This is a pretty fun section. Qualified judges! Progressive leaders of federal agencies! Rejoining global initiatives! Not being a laughingstock on the world stage! A federally-backed plan for vaccinating the population and ending the pandemic!
You can broadly think of this category as anything Democrats can do without passing a law and that they wouldn’t expect much political blowback for. And that’s a lot, particularly given all the messes of the last four years that the new administration will have to clean up. Congress and President Biden can also use the Congressional Review Act to get rid of many Trump regulations that were enacted in the past six months.
After dozens of Executive Orders are signed and hundreds of appointments are made and confirmed, the federal government will go back to working for us, the American people, and not as an extremely large subsidiary of the Trump Organization.
The Path With the Filibuster
This is the more likely of the two scenarios, given the Senate’s 50-50 margin and the fact that eight Democratic Senators have expressed opposition to reforming the filibuster. Now, politicians have been known to say one thing and then do another so this doesn’t rule anything out but it does make it less likely.
If the filibuster remains, two types of legislation can pass the Senate. The first is anything with the support of 10 GOP senators. This would be items such as additional COVID relief and infrastructure spending, legislation that isn’t controversial and crosses party lines. The other type of legislation is anything that can fit into a reconciliation bill. Without getting into the weeds, that means most legislation related to the federal budget.
So raising or cutting taxes or increasing or decreasing federal spending on programs can be passed with only 50 votes. That’s a big subset of what Congress does, and will allow Democrats to do things like make the tax code fairer, increase health care subsidies, support higher education, and invest in aspects of the Green New Deal. But that still leaves a ton of absolutely vital subjects out in the cold, purely due to a once-obscure procedural issue that has come to dominate American politics.
The Path Without the Filibuster
The modern Democratic party in power without the filibuster as an obstacle would be an unprecedented situation in American history. The closest comparison would be the very brief periods in 2009-2010 when Democrats held 60 Senate seats, but the 50 current Democratic senators are collectively more progressive than the 60 Democrats were back then. Remember Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson or Evan Bayh? Joe Manchin is more of a team player and more interested in helping regular people than any of them were back then.
The list of issues Democrats could tackle without the filibuster as an obstacle is almost unimaginably long. New health care programs, climate change regulations, housing reform, labor law reform, an end to gerrymandering, making D.C. and Puerto Rico states, making voting a civil right, criminal justice reform, immigration reform, the minimum wage, and the list goes on.
Would every progressive desire be passed in a world without a filibuster? Of course not, these bills would all still need Joe Manchin’s support, as well as every other moderate Democrat. But really big things would happen, on the scale of the creation of Medicare and Medicaid and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s. This potential burst of actual legislating would go a long way towards renewing our democracy and our country.
That said, do I expect this to happen? Probably not. While I believe there would be very limited public blowback to what is an obscure procedural change, a number of Democratic senators have made it clear they believe it would be unwise or too risky. Could a confluence of events push Democrats into doing it anyway? Possibly, and that’s the more likely scenario than just a flat rule change, but you wouldn’t bet on it at this point. And until that change happens (and it will eventually), we will continue to muddle through without addressing many of the core problems in our country.
I hate to end on a sour note but that is where we find ourselves. Go reread the certainties section real quick, it’s much more fun. Thanks for reading and make sure to sign up if you haven’t already!