Biden’s Deserved Kudos

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a sanguine piece about Joe Biden, celebrating our ability to unite around him, despite his myriad flaws. I was, perhaps, a less-reluctant supporter of Biden than many of my fellow Progressives. My primary reason for this lack of reluctance is that I believe deeply that the Presidency is, above all else, a job, not just a symbol; as such, it should be an office only held by those who are actually qualified for the job. I think I’m pretty damn smart, but I would have no idea how to be President, any more than I would know how to be a fashion designer or a veterinarian. DC is an incredibly complicated place. There are entrenched power structures, people and organizations who have been around for decades (if not centuries). Can you name the 100 most powerful people in DC? Because I definitely can’t. I can name the visible ones — long-tenured Congresspeople and Senators, and maybe some Joint Chiefs and Directors of Federal Agencies, and so on. But, like any massive corporation, you don’t really know how it works until you get inside.

And many of our recent Presidents have come from so far outside that I don’t believe they ever figured out how the actual machinery of government works, at least until it was too late. Trump is the obvious case here, and I don’t only mean that he was a corrupt fool; I mean that even his plans were foiled by a complex administrative state he never understood (let’s be honest, he’s too stupid to ever understand even if he tried, which he never did or would). That’s why he kept having to fire the people he brought in and expected to be loyal. Trump simply never understood how government worked, and that’s how he failed to pull off the coup that he planned.

But beyond Trump, in many ways this criticism also applies to Obama, and before him, to the Governors of Texas and Arkansas, who were not really power players in their own parties, or in DC at all, before rising to the Presidency. In the 80s, we hired an actor to play President, and then before that another small-time Southern Governor who was overwhelmed by the job. In all these cases, it’s easy to see that the real power brokers in DC, or one might argue the President’s “handlers” (ala Dick Cheney), had far more sway over the country’s agenda than the man elected to be the figurehead.

That’s inevitably what happens when someone with little-to-no inside-the-beltway experience comes to “power.” If you’ve ever worked for a large corporation, you know how difficult it can be when some MBA from a totally unrelated industry is brought in to be a new C-level executive; it takes them too long to figure out what’s really going on, and in the interim everyone under them is often stuck fending for themselves instead of following directives they are unlikely to respect.

The modern Presidents who had substantial experience in DC before becoming President have been: Johnson, Nixon, Bush, and Biden. None of whom served two terms … so I guess that my opinion isn’t particularly widely-held by voters. Yet it is my opinion, still. I don’t know how well someone like Bernie Sanders could actually manage the country, and I told my Progressive friends as much back in 2016 — that Clinton had a better chance of actually passing Progressive legislation than Sanders did, given how DC politics actually works. Not that it mattered, anyway.

So, my optimism around Biden stemmed from the hope that, as a long-tenured centrist Senator, he would know how to actually massage legislation through. And for over a year, that hope seemed incredibly naive, as the intransigence of the Republicans in the Senate proved that their goal remains only to obstruct and destroy. But now we’ve finally passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the watered-down version of Build Back Better, and it’s time to take some stock of what, if anything, that achievement means.

Here’s what it doesn’t mean: It doesn’t mean any substantial change in how this country functions. The major Progressive goals remain pipe-dreams. In no particular order, these are:

• The Green New Deal, that is to say, significant legislation geared towards transforming the U.S. into a post-fossil-fuels era;
• Immigration reform — including amnesty and a path-to-citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and an easing of the process of granting asylum and welcoming new immigrants (kind of a no-brainer in a country struggling with a labor shortage and an aging population and a declining birth rate, right?);
• Easing education costs — including student loan forgiveness, nationally free public college, permanently funding free-lunch-for-all, and massive increases in educational funding at all levels;
• Easing living costs — raising the Federal Minimum Wage to be in line with inflation (probably around $22/hr, at this point), while passing legislation to incentivize more affordable housing nationwide, to disincentivize the trend of massive entities cornering the housing market, to encourage new affordable home construction, and above all else, to massively increase funding for early childcare and neonatal care programs, including an expansion of rights to family leave and the closing of loopholes related to “part-time” workers, much of which was part of the original BBB bill;
• Healthcare reform — a single-payer system, be it national healthcare or national health insurance, which would by necessity drive down healthcare prices in the most expensive healthcare system in the world;
• Tax reform — a full repeal of both the Trump and Bush II tax cuts, and a reconfiguration of the tax code in order to properly incentivize pro-labor business practice, and to disincentivize overly risky financial shenanigans that benefit no one but the investor class;
• Cutting both the military and paramilitary budgets, probably the most important item on this list and the least likely to happen in the near future;
• Re-instituting Glass-Steagall, a Roosevelt-era law repealed in 1999 that prohibited deposit banks from behaving as investing banks, thus preventing runaway financial gambling like what we saw leading up to the crash of 2008;
• Re-enshrining voting rights, ala the John Lewis Act, and preventing States from disenfranchising millions of American voters through clever trickery and unnecessary obstacles to voting, let alone the terrifying idea of State Legislatures openly overturning the popular will;
• Passing the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution;
• Codifying the right to an abortion, at the very least through the first trimester and at any point in the pregnancy where the mother’s health is at risk, as an established right, even if it takes a Constitutional Amendment to do so;
• Ending the “War On Drugs” — Legalizing recreational marijuana usage at the federal level, decriminalizing personal use of narcotics and psychedelics, and investing in research-backed support for addicts, including addicts of legal opiates prescribed to them by drug dealers with MDs (while potentially increasing criminal penalties for American-based drug cartels such as Johnson & Johnson);
• Taking federal action to increase the influence of democratic majorities in the nation, whether by legislation or Constitutional Amendment. This would mean altering how Supreme Court terms and appointments are handled doing away with or altering the Electoral College, or at least the winner-takes-all system that disenfranchises voters in solidly-partisan states; and inhibiting gerrymandering, likely by requiring States to appoint nonpartisan bodies to approve of redistricting maps according to specific guidelines.

Wow, that’s quite a list, isn’t it? And I’m sure I left out some key pieces. So, we didn’t get much of that, but we did address two of the items on the list: significant investment to address climate change, and raising corporate taxes — the first tax hike in a long time, and a sorely needed one. The climate change aspects to this bill are really smart, actually: they are inherently Capitalistic, serving to put the thumb on the scale, as it were, of the free market. This has long been recognized as the best way to encourage change in this country: instead of mandating it from the top, creating a firestorm of debate and a complex federal bureaucracy to attempt to address the issue, we simply make it cheaper for Big Business to “go green” by offering economic incentives to do so. This is a really, really good thing.

But even more than that, it’s worth asking the question: When was the last time any progressive legislation, even something relatively pedestrian such as this bill, passed at the Federal level? If we look back at each Administration’s major legislative achievements, here is our list, going backwards:

• Biden (prior to this) — the Infrastructure bill, which was really championed by Republicans for decades;
• Trump — tax cuts for the wealthy and punitive tax hikes for “blue” states with high SALT taxes;
• Obama — the ACA, which was actually the Republican healthcare plan, and also bailouts of banks that had lost all their money;
• Bush II — the Patriot Act, and also bailout of banks that had lost all their money;
• Clinton — the Crime Bill, easily the most regressive item on this list;
• Bush I — really nothing;
• Reagan — tax cuts across the board and dramatic de-investment in social programs designed to help Americans;
• Carter — really nothing;
• Nixon — a number of pieces of important environmental legislation
• Johnson — the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Putting together this list was actually even more eye-opening than I had initially thought. The only major pieces of legislation we’ve seen for fifty years have been conservative, regardless of which party is in the Presidency. And I should point out that Nixon and Johnson both fit into my theory above: that the most effective Presidents are not Governors, but rather those who have extensive experience inside DC before becoming President.

So this modest victory of Biden’s is actually a tremendous rarity. The last Democratic President to pass a legitimately Liberal piece of major legislation was LBJ. This simply doesn’t happen often, and it’s worth noting, and even perhaps celebrating.

Meanwhile, the way this legislation passed its way through Congress is, actually, the way it’s supposed to work, although most Americans under the age of 30 can’t remember it. You have a left-wing extreme, represented best by “The Squad” in the House, and a right-wing extreme, represented mainly by Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema in the Senate. Neither side got exactly what it wanted: instead, we had a compromise bill, and as the maxim teaches, you know it’s a fair compromise when no one is happy with it. This is actually the correct process in a nation of almost 400,000,000 people: an awkward compromise that takes a year to reach, but still eventually happens. What’s confusing is that there are dozens of psychotic freaks in Congress who live so far outside of basic reality that it’s silly to even call them “far-right.” Manchin, in short, is what a functioning Republican Party is supposed to look like, in that he can operate within a functioning legislature, and in that he doesn’t live mostly in a world based on delusion, paranoia, bigotry, and just good old-fashioned stupidity.

So, do I want Biden to run for reelection? Honestly, still no. I think he’s such a liability, and I’d love to see someone under the age of 60 in the Oval Office. But if there is a new candidate, I do think it needs to be someone who knows how DC works. That means I’d prefer Harris or Buttigieg over Newsom or Whitmer, when it comes right down to it. Because it takes this kind of patience and cynicism to cut a back-room deal with Joe Manchin, to weather the constant nonsense of Christofascists at all levels of government without reacting, to ask for the moon and “settle” for something actually quite good. This is exactly the kind of smart, boring governance that we need, and that the Presidency is supposed to have, and it’s why I voted for Biden in the first place.

We don’t need a firebrand in charge of the country; we need executives and legislatures that can actually help. Each of the bullets on my list above is achievable, piecemeal, if we can simply hold together our coalition long enough to effect modest change at a steady pace.