After reading a few days worth of carping about Joe Biden’s performance, I decided enough’s enough and responded at New York:
Joe Biden has been president of the United States for 43 days. He inherited power from a predecessor who was trying to overturn the 2020 election results via insurrection just two weeks before Inaugural Day, and whose appointees refused the kind of routine transition cooperation other administrations took for granted. His party has a four-vote margin of control in the House, and only controls the Senate via the vice presidential tie-breaking vote (along with a power-sharing arrangement with Republicans). Democratic control of the Senate was not assured until the wee hours of January 6 when the results of the Georgia runoff were clear. Biden took office in the midst of a COVID-19 winter surge, a national crisis over vaccine distribution, and flagging economic indicators.
Biden named all his major appointees well before taking office, and as recommended by every expert, pushed for early confirmation of his national security team, which he quickly secured. After some preliminary discussions with Republicans that demonstrated no real possibility of GOP support for anything like the emergency $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief and stimulus package he had promised, and noting the votes weren’t there in the Senate for significant filibuster reform, Biden took the only avenue open to him. He instructed his congressional allies to pursue the budget reconciliation vehicle to enact his COVID package, with the goal of enacting it by mid-March, when federal supplemental unemployment insurance would run out. Going the reconciliation route meant exposing the package to scrutiny by the Senate parliamentarian, It also virtually guaranteed total opposition from congressional Republicans, which in turn meant Senate Democratic unanimity would be essential.
The House passed the massive and complex reconciliation bill on February 27, right on schedule, with just two Democratic defections, around the same time as the Senate parliamentarian, to no one’s great surprise, deemed a $15 minimum wage provision (already opposed by two Senate Democrats) out of bounds for reconciliation. The Senate is moving ahead with a modified reconciliation bill, and the confirmation of Biden’s Cabinet is chugging ahead slowly but steadily. Like every recent president, he’s had to withdraw at least one nominee – in his case Neera Tanden for the Office of Management and Budget, though the administration’s pick for deputy OMB director is winning bipartisan praise and may be substituted smoothly for Tanden.
Add in his efforts to goose vaccine distribution — which has more than doubled since he took office — and any fair assessment of Biden’s first 43 days should be very positive. But the man is currently being beset by criticism from multiple directions. Republicans, of course, have united in denouncing Biden’s refusal to surrender his agenda in order to secure bipartisan “unity” as a sign that he’s indeed the radical socialist – or perhaps the stooge of radical socialists – that Donald Trump always said he was. Progressives are incensed by what happened on the minimum wage, though it was very predictable. And media critics are treating his confirmation record as a rolling disaster rather than a mild annoyance, given the context of a federal executive branch that was all but running itself for much of the last four years.
To be clear, I found fault with Biden’s presidential candidacy early and often. I didn’t vote for him in California’s 2020 primary. I worried a lot about Biden’s fetish for bipartisanship. I support a $15 minimum wage, and as a former Senate employee, have minimal respect for the upper chamber’s self-important traditions. But c’mon: what, specifically, is the alternative path he could have pursued the last 43 days? Republican criticism is not worthy of any serious attention: the GOP is playing the same old tapes it recorded in 2009 when Barack Obama (and his sidekick Biden) spent far too much time chasing Republican senators around Washington in search of compromises they never intended to make. While they are entitled to oppose Biden’s agenda, they are not entitled to kill it.
Progressive criticism of Biden feels formulaic. Years and years of investment in the rhetoric of the eternal “fight” and the belief that outrage shapes outcomes in politics and government have led to the habit of seeing anything other than total subscription to the left’s views as a sell-out. Yes, Kamala Harris could theoretically overrule the Senate parliamentarian on the minimum wage issue, but to what end? So long as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose the $15 minimum wage, any Harris power play could easily be countered by a successful Republican amendment to strike the language in question, and perhaps other items as well. And if the idea is to play chicken with dissident Democrats over the fate of the entire reconciliation bill, is a $15 minimum wage really worth risking a $1.9 trillion package absolutely stuffed with subsidies for struggling low-income Americans? Are Fight for 15 hardliners perhaps conflating ends and means here?
Media carping about Biden’s legislative record so far is frankly just ridiculous. Presumably writing about the obscure and complicated details of reconciliation bills is hard and unexciting work that readers may find uninteresting, while treating Tanden’s travails as an existential crisis for the Biden administration provides drama, but isn’t at all true. The reality is that Biden’s Cabinet nominees are rolling through the Senate with strong confirmation votes (all but one received at least 64 votes), despite a steadily more partisan atmosphere for confirmations in recent presidencies. The COVID-19 bill is actually getting through Congress at a breakneck pace despite its unprecedented size and complexity. Trump’s first reconciliation bill (which was principally aimed at repealing Obamacare) didn’t pass the House until May 4, 2017, and never got through the Senate. Yes, Obama got a stimulus bill through Congress in February 2009, but it was less than half the size, much simpler, and more to the point, there were 59 Senate Democrats in office when it passed, which meant he didn’t even have to use reconciliation.
There’s really no exact precedent for Biden’s situation, particularly given the atmosphere of partisanship in Washington and the whole country right now, and the narrow window he and his party possess – in terms of political capital and time – to get important things done. He should not be judged on any one legislative provision or any one Cabinet nomination. So far the wins far outweigh the losses and omissions. Give the 46th president a break.
As a transplanted Yankee, I am amazed to see how low Louisiana political tactics go. Earlier in the year Breaux floated the race
issue for the Demo’s calling him his given Indian name rather then bobby. This effort fluttered off into space, since the use of nicknames is near as common as the use of given names among the general population.
But, the more important notion is that the Dem’s, given the performance of the current governor, did not have much to criticize Jindal on, especially because of his leadership on Katrina in the House.
another often overlooked point in LA politics, it seems that
many pols chose/switch parties as a matter of convenience, rather than an sort of principle.
One related issue that is entirely valid for Dems to point out to ordinary Catholics and Protestants is the profoundly dishonest way religious conservatives have been concealing their true theological feelings about each other in order to advance a common political agenda for a vaguely specified “Christian Nation”.
It is entirely legitimate for moderate and progressive Protestants and Catholics as well as others to insist that religious conservatives should openly spell out how they intend to treat their political “allies” – to ask at exactly what point Protestant Fundamentalists intend to come out and openly denounce their conservative Catholic allies for theological heresy and how they would use the power of the state to prevent distortions of true Christianity such as Catholicism if their coalition ever did take power.
…And furthermore, Dems would do doubly well to steer clear of doctrinal debates. That would be as dumb as, say, getting between the Sunnis and the Shia!
LA Dems should be wary of the rhetoric of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”, since it could motivate a beleaguered GOP base. Besides, Jindal could spin his tract as a play for new investment in the state–maybe he’s angling for Tom Monaghan to bankroll an Ave Maria West!
I shouldn’t think it would be a big deal if he called Protestants “heretical,” and “selfish” I’d want to see in context, but did he really say “depraved”? I come from a perspective where the fact that certain things have been said or done for hundreds of years is no excuse for saying and doing them now. The essay might seem quaint, since it’s so retrograde, but you can still hurt somebody with a catapult. As for trying to peel away Catholic voters by accusing Jindal of cherrypicking the Church’s teachings for political positions he happens to share, has that ever worked? Catholics do that every day. Most use birth control. Besides, it puts the Democratic party in the position of telling Catholics how to be good Catholics, which is kind of ridiculous. On the other hand, a lot of Catholics might feel their church is injured in the larger society when it doesn’t show tolerance for Protestants and calls them names. If they decide Jindal is an embarrassment to the team, they might consider him expendable.