Biden seeks big success quickly; three presidential models

 

Gordon L. Weil

Joe Biden is a president in a hurry.

Conventional wisdom says that President Joe Biden is unusually well versed in Washington’s ways, ready to govern without delay thanks to his long career in the Senate and as Vice President.

Perhaps even more importantly, his presidency may be influenced by three earlier chief executives – Franklin D. Roosevelt, who launched historic policies right after he took office, Barack Obama, with whom Biden served as Vice President, and James K. Polk, highly rated by historians but almost forgotten.

Roosevelt became president in 1933 in the midst of the nation’s worst ever economic crisis – the Great Depression.  Biden became president in the midst of the nation’s worst ever health crisis – the deadly coronavirus.

Roosevelt quickly led a Democratic Congress to adopt his bold proposals.  He brought about emergency relief, civilian work programs including immediate summer jobs, aid to agriculture, public works and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

He accomplished all this during what he soon labeled “the first 100 days.” Though this fast start was copied by later presidents, the range of achievements of Roosevelt’s “100 days” has never been equaled.

Biden set a goal of 100 million Americans vaccinated in his first 100 days, and the country reached that point even sooner.  He also insisted that immediate government spending was essential to restart the economy and help the jobless. A Democratic Congress voted $1.9 trillion with an unusually heavy focus on the poor.

Both Roosevelt and Biden faced a federal government mired in inaction when they took office. The Republicans thought the Depression would cure itself.  This year, the Trump administration, having successfully promoted vaccine development, left no plans for distribution.

Biden also learned from his experience with Obama, who had taken two major steps early in his administration.  To deal with the Great Recession that he found upon taking office, he got Congress to pass a major stimulus bill.  It worked, starting a gradual recovery that would last for a decade.

His greatest initiative was the Affordable Care Act, which would provide health insurance coverage for tens of millions of Americans.

Obama’s successes were undercut by what Biden saw as his “humility.”  The president refrained from taking credit for the stimulus, thinking such a claim would make his relationship with congressional Republicans even more difficult. Biden believes he could have accomplished more had he been more aggressive.

The Democrats, emphasizing local issues, left the 2010 national debate on the ACA almost entirely to the GOP.  The Republicans effectively campaigned nationally by attacking Obamacare.  Voters rejected many Democrats who had supported it.

In sharp contrast, Biden rejected GOP efforts to water down his economic stimulus, after they offered less than a third of what he saw as necessary without even committing to support the lower amount.  He immediately began campaigning nationally to support it, trying to protect congressional Democrats for their re-election races next year.

What makes Polk a model for Biden?

Polk is rated among the top presidents because he laid out an ambitious set of objectives and then accomplished them in a single term, in 1845-49. Some historians say he was the most successful president since Washington.

He brought about the annexation of Texas, through the controversial Mexican War, which he launched.  He also acquired massive new territory, ranging from New Mexico to California to the Pacific Northwest.  He established an independent Treasury, freeing it from dependence on outside banks.

Polk created the Department of the Interior, lowered tariffs in the belief America could compete, and strengthened the executive office of the president. His major drawback was his support for slavery, notably in Texas.

What made Polk special was that he accomplished his entire program in a single term as president.  He enjoyed a particularly good relationship with most of Congress though Abraham Lincoln, then a Whig Party representative from Illinois, strongly opposed him on the Mexican War. 

Biden almost certainly has a limited time to accomplish his goals.  His first priority has been to control Covid-19, mainly by the effective distribution of vaccines.  He is readying massive legislation on infrastructure, education, labor development, and climate change. He will also propose an immigration policy.

He wants to restore America’s standing in the world while resisting China and Russia. That means undertaking joint strategic action with friendly countries. 

Biden has limited time to achieve his goals, especially the domestic policies.  The Democrats narrowly control Congress until the end of 2022, just two years into his term.  Cooperation with Republicans seems impossible, so his success depends on early action with the support of loyal Democrats. 

Biden, the oldest president, is most likely to retire after only one term.  That allows him to focus on his policies not his next campaign or his image. Of course, he still needs public support, but more for what he does than who he is.

He understands that the GOP is in no mood to compromise, believing it can make a comeback next year.  He is picking up few GOP votes on most key issues. Unlike Obama, he won’t make one-sided concessions to them.

Biden recognizes that his broad agenda, like Polk’s, has a fleeting opportunity and depends on his maintaining momentum.  That makes for an unusual presidency.

 

 

 

 

 

Democratic dissenter opposes Pelosi, stimulus, gun checks, but leaves his motives unknown

 

Gordon L. Weil

President Biden’s coronavirus economic stimulus bill passed Congress on a straight party vote. Almost.

All of the Republicans in the House and Senate voted against it.  All of the Democrats voted for it, except one.  That was Jared Golden, the member of Congress from Maine’s Second District. His vote raises the historical question of the role of a legislator.

Golden said that he opposed the bill because it contained items that had little or nothing to do with economic recovery, the bill’s avowed purpose, but were elements of the Democratic Party’s broader legislative agenda. As a result, it cost too much. That was his personal conviction.

He may have been correct in his judgment, even though it pitted him against his party’s president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  But he had also voted against her for the top position in House, instead casting a meaningless vote for another Democrat.

Still, that vote helped the Democrats, who hold only a narrow majority in the House. It contributed to the majority allowing them to set the House agenda and control the chamber’s affairs. In effect, whatever his position, he enabled other Democrats.

Why does a member like Golden oppose a central policy of the Democratic president?   There are what might be called the “three Cs” to explain how a legislator votes.  It could be out of personal conviction, which is what any dissenter will claim. Or it could be to vote the will of their constituency. Or it might be conformity to the party position.

All three reasons have deep roots.  British parliamentarian Edmund Burke famously proclaimed that he was elected, not to represent the people of Bristol, but to use his judgment in the national interest. Conviction.

Almost any member of Congress says they represent their state or district not the nation. Democrat Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, a famous House Speaker, once said, “All politics is local.” Golden was the only Democrat to vote against expanded background checks for gun owners.  Was that to please his district? Constituency.

A party outlier may join in supporting that party’s positions once in office. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive who toppled a Democratic House leader on her way to office, now frequently adopts the party position, though, unlike Golden, she keeps trying to move it to the left.  Conformity.

That raises the fourth C, the consequences of opposing your party.

Golden is taking a difficult and even dangerous course. Criticizing Democrats who voted with Republicans, President Harry Truman said, “The people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat.”

Legislators acting out of conviction have a slim chance of gaining standing as a maverick, as did Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain. Though he often voted with his party, on some major issues he took an independent position. Nationally renowned as a war hero, he had broad support in his home state, thanks to Trump’s attacks on him for his independence.

As Truman suggested, an independent legislator could lose. Collin Peterson was a Minnesota Democrat in a district that voted for Trump.  He supported most GOP positions and was popular, but was finally trounced by a Republican in 2020.

Or, they could become the genuine article.  Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey Democrat in a Trump district, aligned often with the GOP and switched parties. He was re-elected as a Republican in 2020.

In 2018, 31 Democrats were elected in districts that Trump had carried in 2016.  In 2020, Van Drew switched, and only seven survived, including Golden.

The third option is tempering party loyalty with using your swing vote to influence policy.  West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, representing one of the most Republican states, obtained major changes to Biden’s stimulus bill, because his vote was essential to its passage.

Manchin, a former governor, has considered returning to that position. Could that be the office that Golden has in mind in opposing some Democratic policies?

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once made a remark later simplified as “Politics is the art of the possible.”  That could be the motto for party conformity allowing for just a touch of the maverick.

The final option is to regard holding public office as performing a public service, not as a career. A person contributes their knowledge and skills for a limited period, but recognizes that adherence to principle may not be the path to popularity.

Jeannette Rankin, a Montana Republican representative, served two widely separated terms, not seeking reelection either time, the second because of almost certain defeat resulting from her anti-war position. Though the first woman elected to Congress, her strong conviction overcame any ambition to hold her House seat.

The choice is up to Golden and the Second District, likely to become somewhat more Democratic after reapportionment.  Where is he coming from and where is he headed?

 

 

Majority rule just a vote away in Congress, but Biden opposes it

 

Gordon L. Weil

Majority rule is the law of the land. 

The Framers put that democratic idea into Constitution.  It didn’t happen. Despite their good intentions, from 1789 to 1917, a single U.S. senator could bar a congressional vote and, since then, a Senate minority can block Congress.

Now the Senate’s historic power grab to prevent majority rule is back for a new test.

Here’s the twisted story. The Framers provided for a simple majority – one vote more than half – in both the House and Senate.  They only allowed supermajority voting in a few cases, like impeachment or overriding a presidential veto. 

Because the House is elected every two years, they wanted to avoid rash decisions it might make and gave senators six-year terms and supposedly a more detached view. The Senate went further and gave itself the ability to kill a House bill by requiring all senators to agree to end debate and vote on it. A single senator could refuse to allow a vote.

That ended in 1917. President Woodrow Wilson was fed up with the Senate’s failure to act on measures relating to World War I.  He got it to agree that two-thirds of the senators present and voting could end debate. That would be 67 senators today, if all are present.

Only five times in the next 46 years did the Senate cut off debate, a process called cloture, and then vote.  Southern senators talked without a break, called a filibuster, making a cloture vote impossible on civil rights for African Americans.  Cloture was seldom even tried, because of the inevitable filibuster.

In 1964, cloture worked and the filibuster could not block major civil rights legislation.  The Senate would soon change the number of senators required to end debate to three-fifths of all senators, now 60 senators, not merely those present. That looked easier, but it could make cloture more difficult. 

Added to that, the filibuster talkathon was abandoned, so there was no need to debate endlessly to kill a bill. The filibuster threat itself was enough and making threats was easy.

The 60-vote requirement even to begin discussion of a bill meant that a supermajority, not a simple majority, was required to pass legislation.  That majority vote was almost always impossible without cooperation by both parties.  In effect, the rule should promote compromise, but the results were disappointing.

Congressional Republicans increasingly adopted strict party discipline.  GOP senators deployed the 60-vote requirement frequently when the Democrats controlled any other part of the federal government.  Why compromise, when you can control government even while in the minority?

Of course, the Democrats could do the same. As a result, they did not want to eliminate the cloture rule. The power of the minority loomed so large that Congress risked being unable to function at all. The tide had to turn.

In 1974, the Senate decided that the federal budget, which sets spending and revenue targets, would be decided by a simple majority.  Bills modifying spending or revenues, through a process known as reconciliation, also require only a simple majority.  One purpose was to allow a newly elected president, arriving in the middle of the budget year, to shape his own budget.

Majority rule had appeared for the first time in the history of Congress.  Every president from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden has used reconciliation.  Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Biden’s recent coronavirus stimulus relied on it to gain Senate passage.

When Obama was president, Republicans in the Senate minority blocked his appointments of federal judges by denying cloture.  The Democrats answered with the so-called “nuclear option” to end debate on presidential appointments, except for the Supreme Court, by a simple majority. More majority rule.

In 2017 the Democrats, by then in the minority, wanted to block Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court by refusing to end debate.  The GOP majority changed the rule to allow even Supreme Court appointments to require only a simple majority, and Gorsuch was confirmed. Still more majority rule.

Non-budget bills, like the current Democratic House bill to promote voter participation, continue to require 60 votes.  Such bills would only pass if a simple majority could end debate, creating total majority rule.

The voting rights bill, passed by the House, has now put the issue before the Senate.  The bill is a broad effort to counter GOP attempts to limit voter access. It deals with matters ranging from districting to ethics.  It faces new Republican efforts in many states to limit the access of traditional Democratic voters to the ballot box.

If Senate Democrats really wanted the pending voting rights bill to pass, they could end the minority veto.  But Biden, a long-term senator does not favor ending the filibuster. Instead of fighting out the House bill, the White House says he prefers to focus on infrastructure and immigration where he may hope for GOP support. If that’s lacking, he could reconsider.

The argument against majority rule is that the minority will lose any influence.  Biden agrees, though his dreams of compromise may not materialize. He may gamble that legislative success may help Democrats more than election reform.  That leaves the Senate minority all powerful; it keeps its veto.

Though it may be the time for constitutional “originalism,” the old political games are likely to continue.

 

Higher taxes sure to come to pay Covid-19 costs

 

Gordon L. Weil

Behind almost every action by government lurks a single question.  How do we pay for it?

The answer seems easy:  either by taxes or debt.  But taxes must pay off the debt, making the real question not “how” but “when” we ante up.  At the federal level, the answer is often “later.”

These days, the country is ringing up massive new government spending.  Think of Covid-19 economic recovery, including Maine’s struggle with taxing federal aid to business, plus the Texas energy collapse. 

The pain of Covid-19 will be long-lasting when it’s added to other debt and the bill has to be paid.

President Joe Biden has proposed $1.9 trillion as an economic stimulus to get out of the coronavirus slowdown.  Eventually, the cost will be close to that.  

Economists have widely agreed that federal government stimulus spending works in producing renewed economic activity.  They also agree that, with the slack economy yielding reduced tax revenues, the stimulus must be financed by borrowing.

The economic bet is that a newly restored economy will boost tax revenues to pay for the cost of borrowing.  Right now, with unusually low interest rates, the government can inexpensively take on more debt.  But, beyond the interest, the principal amount must also be repaid.

The argument against spending as much as Biden wants is that the government keeps piling on debt.  That’s traditionally the Republican position and where that party stands today.  Sen. Susan Collins and her GOP allies proposed $618 billion in stimulus spending, far removed from an ominous sounding “trillion.”

Yet when the GOP controlled Congress, it freely added to debt while cutting taxes.  That suggests that taking on new debt for an economic boost may be more a matter of politics than economics.

The public seems to favor Biden’s proposal, supporting short-term economic recovery and a return to work over the cost of later paying the bill with interest.  Trump himself wanted a bigger bill than many GOP senators.  Maybe, deep down, most people are crypto-Democrats.

In the U.K., the government just announced that it would move to seek higher taxes to being to pay the Covid-19 bill.

Then, there was the Paycheck Protection Program tax ploy.  The federal government made PPP loans to business, which did not have to repay them if they kept people at work.  The loan would than count as taxable business income but that could be entirely offset by deducting the payroll expense.  In short, the PPP would be taxable income, but it would be erased by payroll outlays.

In the December 2020 Covid relief bill, Congress switched the policy and decided that businesses would not have to count the forgiven loan as income.  That meant a company would get a tax deduction for doling out federal money. 

The PPP benefit suddenly doubled, including both the payroll funds and the tax break. The shortfall in tax revenue would be picked up by taxpayers.

Maine taxation usually tracks federal rules. At first, Gov. Janet Mills favored the original tax-neutral policy.  She did not like Maine going along with the free ride on PPP income.   The blowback from the GOP and business groups was immediate, and she retreated.  Companies with up to $1 million in PPP would get the new break.

Mills believes she can shield taxpayers from picking up the resulting $82 million tab for the state. The cost would be covered by federal funds and state reserves, all of which comes from taxpayers. Nothing really new here, though the tax trail may be difficult to follow.

Texas got into a lot of trouble when it was hit by real winter.  It faced electric blackouts and frozen natural gas pipelines. Even while the federal Covid-19 cost was mounting, Biden declared a state of emergency there, setting in motion a flow of federal aid to Texas.

Ironically, Biden aided Texas, which had asked the Supreme Court to block him from becoming president. The Republican governor thanked Biden, but wanted even more help.  The federal aid came from debt, which the GOP dislikes, and from taxes, which it wants to cut.

States must balance their budgets and could not take on debt fast enough to meet the Covid crisis. The federal government can pile on debt without knowing how to pay it off. That’s why states have turned to Washington, adding to the federal debt.

Also, relying on federal debt, states and individuals may feel that somebody else is paying the bill.  They fail to recognize they are “somebody else.”

People are constantly told that taxes take their hard-earned dollars. But just as they make household purchases with those dollars, they buy services they want, from stimulus aid for small business to emergency help for states, with their taxes.

In the end, we must pay for what we buy. Higher taxes are inevitable, not for a “socialist” government, but to pay for what we’ve already bought.