Biden’s shredded agenda and the lessons of history

President Biden was in Israel when the shocking news came late last Thursday night in Washington:  talks between Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, and Senator Joe Manchin, the champion of the coal industry from West Virginia, to reach agreement on what was left of President Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda on climate change, health and taxes had collapsed. 

SUMMIT COUNTY COLORADO — Manchin had had enough. He repeated his brutal termination of Biden’s transformative Build Back Better program – the centerpiece of his first term – last December.  

The Biden agenda has been shredded with a vengeance. 

Gone – with no hope for passage in Congress – are Biden programs across education, health care, seniors and income security to help working families cope with the costs of living.  Biden’s program offered universal pre-k, childcare, public housing, paid family leave, dental, vision care for seniors, free community college.

Gone are minimum taxes on super-billionaires to fund these social equity programs.  Gone is Biden’s proposed global minimum tax Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have asked global economic allies – including Australia – to adopt.  

And gone was any hope for any meaningful progress on climate change – a pillar of Biden’s presidency. 

The inability to pass any legislation to effectively fund the move towards renewables and electric vehicles means that the United States will not meet its 2030 climate targets of a 50% reduction in fossil fuel emissions by 2030.   It means that President Biden, for all his commitment on this issue, can offer only words on behalf of the United States – and not action.

Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts has been a warrior on clean energy and climate change for decades.  His anger was on display for the world:

“Rage keeps me from tears. Resolve keeps me from despair. We will not allow a future of climate disaster. I believe in the power of the Green New Deal. The power of young people. I am with you. We will not give up.”   

For all his work, Biden will be lucky, come September, to get the Democrats in the House and Senate to unite to pass legislation to lower the cost of prescription drugs, and extend health insurance premium under Obamacare. 

That’s it.  And that is not enough.

In January 2021, my co-author Bryan Marshall and I wrote a foreword for the new edition of our book, The Committee: A Study of Policy, Power, Politics and Obama’s Historic Legislative Agenda on Capitol Hill.  We saw some important lessons for Biden from the Obama-Biden years over a decade ago.  With the Democrats controlling both the House and Senate, and together with Biden in the White House, we wrote:

We therefore see the course of the first two years of President Biden’s historic legislative agenda on Capitol Hill as revisiting and operating with the benefits of lessons drawn from much of the history from the 111th Congress in 2009–10.

In 2021, the issues include addressing profound issues of economic inequality, racial justice and voting rights, gun control, forging a renewable energy economy, reforming immigration, and rebuilding America’s infrastructure.  

If the infrastructure program is enacted, on top of the rescue bill, and health care and education and income security programs are expanded, if real results are apparent by the end of 2021, then the killer midterm history for the incumbent party in the White House, where they lose on average two dozen seats, may not recur next year. This is why the Democrats are insistent this get done. Biden wants— and needs—to show the country, and the world, that American democracy can work again. And Democrats need to show that the Congress they lead can do big things. Because they cannot win the midterms if they cannot govern. 

Biden and the Democrats are paying a vicious political price from their failures in the context of this history

There are no deliverables from this Congress on economic inequality, racial justice, voting rights, gun control, and immigration.  And nothing on climate.  And for American women, their constitutional right to abortion has been lost. And Congress has failed to pass a law to restore it.

The midterm elections are less than four months away.  Biden’s approval rating is in the 30’s. Over 75% of the voters believe America is on the wrong track.  Inflation and interest rates are soaring.  Younger voters are massively turned off.

The lessons of history from a decade ago, with a 50-50 Senate requiring all Democrats to stick together – and Biden ensuring that they did – left no margin for error.  America’s democracy is not working.  Congress is unable to do big things. 

The whole world can see it. There is every risk the Democrats will lose their control of Congress in the midterms because they are not governing.