The Democratic Civil War Has a Winner: Donald Trump

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First, the good news. The government did not shut down at midnight. New covid infections in the United States have fallen twenty-five per cent over the past couple of weeks. Vaccine mandates by large companies and government agencies, many of them imposed at President Biden’s behest, seem to be working—without vaccine-refusenik workers quitting en masse, as threatened. As recent weeks go for the Biden Administration, this one was not terrible.

Then again, not shutting down the government because you managed to pass and sign a bill pushing the problem off until early December is hardly an accomplishment for the ages. President Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have promised—and not yet delivered—a House vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate this summer. That vote was blocked by members of their own party, which cannot agree on the size and specifics of the three-and-a-half-trillion-dollar budget-reconciliation-and-everything-else bill that Biden has proposed as the centerpiece of his Presidency. The long-predicted Democratic civil war between progressives and moderates has begun.

The two leaders threw all the political capital they had at reaching a deal by their own self-imposed deadline, and couldn’t get there. Biden personally involved himself in hours of talks with the feuding Democratic factions, and gave extraordinary time to a lone senator, Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, who never publicly explained her position. A surprise Presidential visit to the annual Congressional Baseball Game did not close the deal, nor did an absolute insistence on a Thursday vote that never took place.

It’s sure to get nastier before the deal gets done. Representative Steve Cohen, of Tennessee, a Democratic moderate, said, on CNN, that his car was older than some of the progressives holding up the vote on the infrastructure bill. The progressives, meanwhile, were not in an accommodating mood. “We’re pushing back and saying, ‘Hell, no,’ ” Jamaal Bowman, a first-year congressman from New York, said. At the end of it all, Democrats were still negotiating with themselves. Fighting with themselves. Getting mad at one another. It’s as if they never really accepted until this week the idea that a fifty-fifty Senate means that any one Democratic senator—or two, in this case—can have extraordinary power to dictate the outcome of legislation.

The reality of life in Biden’s Presidency is a Democratic Party in which the center has moved left but hasn’t figured out what to do about its remaining centrists. But math is math. Biden needs every Democrat’s support to get anything significant through this Congress.

Most of the week’s frenzy was about trying to figure out Manchin’s bottom line. It was revealed on Thursday that it had started out as one and a half trillion dollars over the summer, and that Pelosi hoped to get it up to $2.1 trillion by the day’s end, in order to satisfy progressives enough to get them to proceed with the infrastructure bill. It’s worth noting that either number represents an extraordinarily large investment in a progressive agenda advanced by Biden—with significant new spending on everything from climate to education to health care. Such vast changes would not be possible but for the unlikely Democratic victories in two Senate runoffs in Georgia in January. The outsized expectations fuelled by Biden’s outsized promises in his “Build Back Better” agenda have made it hard to remember the tenuous origins of this tenuously small congressional majority.

What got lost amid all the talking this week was another kind of bottom line: while Democrats were fighting about liberal spending priorities in debates that at times resembled a congressional version of fantasy football, they were neither passing Biden’s agenda nor bolstering the case for his Presidency. The stakes for Biden are about as existential as they come in politics; his approval ratings are dropping, and his time is running out to get anything done in Congress before the midterm elections—when the Party’s majorities may disappear. And they may not last even that long, given the actuarial tables in the Senate, where a single sick or retiring senator could overnight end Biden’s Presidency when it comes to major legislative initiatives.

Trump’s entire premise is that Biden is doomed to failure—a personal political imperative that is as close to a Republican ideology as the Party has at the moment. Biden is weak; Biden must fail. Therefore, Republicans must simply oppose everything, in order to make sure that he does fail. Whatever Biden does, it will be wrong. Trump has become the permanent heckler of our democracy.

It’s about the central premise of Biden’s Presidency, the thing he sold America on: that government could actually get things done. That democracy works, that competence and calm could produce better outcomes than the chaos and craziness of the past four years. Biden’s success in getting things through Congress would be not just a policy victory but a vindication of the idea of his Presidency. But Biden isn’t there yet, nor is it clear that he will get there.