Biden seeks major spending to build “infrastructure,” but what is it?

Gordon L. Weil

It’s not a new “New Deal.”   It’s not even “big government.”

But President Biden is trying to do something big with his infrastructure plan.   Congressional Republicans oppose the scope of those plans.

What does “infrastructure” mean?  Originally a French word, it translates as “substructure.”  Does that mean only the most basic supports of the national economy, as the Republicans argue, or many underlying elements that contribute to economic strength, as Biden sees it?

Trump floated a $1 trillion infrastructure investment proposal. It would have needed more revenues from taxes or debt.  The GOP wasn’t in favor and the private sector did not come up with the cash. Nothing happened.

Roads and bridges have to be repaired.  Everybody agrees, making it difficult to argue against an infrastructure plan. The GOP wants it narrowly focused.  It’s almost as though if it isn’t made out of cement, it isn’t infrastructure.

Keep it a small bill, they say, to limit the necessary small tax increase and limited growth in the national debt.  Now that Trump, who liked debt, is gone, the Republicans have become deficit hawks. By spending less, they want to choke “big government.”

The 1930’s New Deal was big government, because the federal government itself created jobs and hired people.  It created and runs Social Security. Biden’s proposal would mostly send money to the private sector, just as did President Obama’s stimulus.  That’s public investment not big government.

The GOP may concede that Biden’s election victory entitles him to some action on infrastructure, but he must accept their version. That’s a Republican compromise. He suggests that if he gains support from average Republicans, that will be proof of compromise. And he must make some concessions to moderate Democrats who share some of the GOP’s restraint.

Biden promises to seek “good faith negotiations” with the Republicans. He would if he could, but he can’t. 

Former GOP House Speaker John Boehner now explains why the dominant, right-wing Republicans spurn compromise.  He wrote, “These guys wanted 100 percent every time. In fact, I don’t think that would satisfy them, because they didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.”

In Maine, something like that happened with this year’s supplemental budget.  Gov. Janet Mills gave GOP legislators 99 percent of what they wanted on business taxes, but they demanded 100 percent. When she gave them that, they demanded even more.

In short, politics is not about shared responsibility for governing the country, but a struggle between the Democrats, who make proposals, and the anti-Democrats who oppose them, good or bad.  

Republicans attack Biden’s big plan, but only propose severely trimming it without promising to vote for the reduced version. There is no GOP counterproposal.

If both sides were serious about compromise, they could successfully negotiate a deal. The Republicans would have to accept more spending and the Democrats less. Because the Democrats control the government, they should get more out of the deal than would the Republicans.

But that won’t happen.  Boehner found that the GOP right wing does not want to legislate; it wants to agitate.  Also, Biden can’t let the Republicans use compromise talks to delay action, giving them time to promote opposition to his bill.

Biden probably believes that the infrastructure bill plus the stimulus bill passed recently and planned health care reform legislation are the cornerstones of his presidency. With these bills, he can achieve most of what he set out to do. And his best chance for success comes now in the first year of his presidency.

He was an adept legislator, so he knows he must make some concessions to moderate Democrats and at least talk with Republicans.  His bill contains some spending on the progressive agenda to keep all Democrats on board, but he undoubtedly knew from the outset that he would have to drop parts of his proposal.

Yet some of his innovative items could prove popular with Republicans across the country.  For example, his proposed broadband expansion could bring real benefit to Maine’s rural areas, traditional Republican strongholds. 

The GOP leaders lined up for broadband, but Republicans oppose clean energy proposals and even fixing 100-year-old water systems.

The Republicans can block Biden from getting the 60 Senate votes to end debate on his bill.  One solution might be for the Democrats to eliminate the filibuster.  But Biden might not get swing Democrats to agree.

The more likely solution is budget “reconciliation.”  A simple majority can decide on spending and taxes under this procedure, used by both parties. Biden’s bill was drafted to permit it, and the Senate parliamentarian has issued a preliminary ruling allowing it.

Biden pits Republican governors and mayors, who could benefit from the bill, against the congressional GOP, largely still loyal to Trump.  The Democrats could not only pass the bill, but gain from the split.

This scenario reveals that the 2022 congressional election campaign has begun. 

Trump faces increasing legal pressure, even after Senate’s failure to convict him

Gordon L. Weil

If at first you don’t succeed, try again. 

If Trump’s critics couldn’t win in Congress, they want the courts to bring him to justice.  The legal complaints keep rolling in.

Trump’s serious problems began when Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a Republican, found ten “episodes” of his potential obstruction of justice. While Mueller found no direct link between the Trump campaign and Russian meddling on his behalf, he reported that Trump had tried to interfere with his investigation.

But Mueller could go no further, blocked by a Department of Justice opinion that a sitting president could not be forced to face criminal charges. 

Freed from any penalty from the Mueller investigation, Trump tried to get the Ukraine president to investigate the alleged involvement of Biden’s son in a potentially corrupt company there.  He added pressure for such help by delaying promised financial aid for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion.

House Democrats impeached Trump for his Ukraine move, though they skipped over any charges that might have come from Mueller’s obstruction of justice findings.  Only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney, voted to convict, and the effort to remove Trump from office failed to gain the Senate’s required two-thirds vote.

Next, House Democrats joined by 10 Republicans impeached Trump for inciting the January 6 Capitol insurrection aimed at getting Congress to overturn his election defeat.  

While GOP senators denounced Trump’s actions, they refused to convict him because he was no longer in office.  The same Justice Department opinion that had blocked Mueller clearly stated that an impeached federal official could be convicted after leaving office. A Senate majority voted to support that view.

Most Republican senators refused to honor that decision.  Seven Republicans, including Susan Collins, did accept it and voted to convict Trump, but the effort again failed.

The impeachment process is political. Conviction depends on the offense being so outrageous that members of the president’s own party will vote against him.  The second Senate trial vote revealed that convicting a president is probably impossible.

When the Senate’s unwillingness to act is coupled with protection from criminal charges while in office, a president likely enjoys complete immunity.

An ex-president might face a criminal trial, but the only punitive action is likely to be the verdict of history.  Trump’s record-setting two impeachments may be his main legacy.

But that outcome is not enough for his opponents and victims. Having failed to convict him when Trump was president, they continue to hope for him to be found guilty of a major offense. Such a decision might be seen as their vindication, because it would be judicial not political.

Democrats had intended that conviction in the second impeachment trial would lead to Trump being banned from ever again holding federal office.  That’s why the Senate trial began even after his term had ended.

Being found guilty in court now could serve the same purpose. He might be sufficiently discredited that his chances at election or perhaps even the GOP nomination would be undercut.   Much would depend on the reaction of traditional Republicans plus independents.

His partisans may believe that losing in court might not stop him. The party keeps working to suppress the Democratic vote in swing states so that he could win again with a smaller GOP turnout. 

Many federal cases have been brought against Trump, mostly by professional prosecutors not political figures. There’s a slim chance he could be tried for his January 6 actions.  Recently, two Capitol police officers injured by the mob sued Trump.

Though Biden should keep hands off, he might prefer the Justice Department not pursue him out of concern that they could appear overly political, especially in light of Trump’s investigation of his son, which the president has not halted.

Beyond the federal cases, Trump remains vulnerable. The ex-president is the subject of state investigations that are completely independent of the federal Justice Department.  Other cases in which he is not directly involved could also produce negative results for him.

Both the New York State Attorney-General and the Manhattan District Attorney are investigating his possible tax evasion and if he lied to obtain business loans.   Georgia is investigating his attempts to influence the presidential vote count through direct contacts with its election officials. Conviction in these cases, if they get to court, could be politically damaging.

Among the most serious cases are complaints brought by two companies against some Trump lawyers and his Fox News allies.  Trump endorsed their claims that the companies operated voting machines replacing Trump votes with Biden votes. There is no such evidence, and the companies say their businesses have suffered because of the claims.

If the companies win, the results will further discredit Trump’s false assertion that he won the election, his supporters’ justification for the Capitol insurrection.  That could harm his political prospects.

The campaign battles between Trump and his opponents continue. No longer is it only a matter of politics.  In the end, the courts may have as much to say about Trump’s presidency and his future as did the voters last November.

  

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.