A Pyrrhic Victory in a Broken Senate

 

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

A Pyrrhic Victory in a Broken Senate

Aug. 6, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/opinion/senate-infrastructure-bill-bipartisan.html

By Alex Pareene

 

Mr. Pareene has covered politics and the Senate since 2004.

 

Around the time of the enactment of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, in March, the political commentariat devoted a lot of airtime and column inches to a telling question: What lessons had President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party learned from the Obama era? Congressional Democrats passed the relief bill on a party-line vote. Watering it down to achieve bipartisan support would have been a “mistake,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said at the time, one that Democrats would not be making again. The administration only had so much time, after all, to try to pass the most pro-worker labor reforms in a generation, or to put an end to congressional malapportionment.

 

Well, now it’s August, and Congress has not passed either of those things (or a serious climate bill, or major health care reform, or immigration reform). Instead, we might soon get a larger than usual bipartisan highway bill, if the Senate manages to pass it before heading off for recess.

 

What may appear to be an imminent victory for bipartisan deal-making was in fact a drawn-out demonstration of how broken the Senate is as an institution. The Senate (with the White House’s support) wasted months cajoling and rehabilitating a handful of key Republicans only to pass a smaller version of something Democrats could theoretically have passed entirely on their own. Moving the bill forward only looks like a victory if one accepts the sclerosis and dysfunction of the Senate as a natural obstacle to be overcome with cunning and patience, not a self-imposed limitation on effective and responsive governance.

 

The Democrats, of course, have the slimmest possible Senate vote margin, and the party’s right flank — Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in particular — made it clear that they did not support eliminating the Senate’s de facto 60 vote requirement for legislation. Mr. Biden’s full infrastructure plan would not have passed with 51 votes the day after the Covid relief bill even if he had tried to do it that way.

 

So the White House, early on, threw itself into trying to hash out a bipartisan bill (and then, they promise, a more ambitious reconciliation attempt) with the gusto of a group very used to brokering bipartisan megadeals that (more often than not, in recent history) fall apart at the last moment. Any White House effort to get two Democratic senators, Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, on board without also bringing along at least 10 of their Republican friends was quickly thrown aside. In fact, as White House insiders told political reporters last spring, holding extended bipartisan negotiations that fall apart at the last moment was the plan for winning the support of Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema.

 

From a policy perspective, splitting the proposal in two makes little sense. If the Democrats manage to carry out the second half of their plans, and pass a broader bill with even more funding for infrastructure later this fall, they will have achieved the same result — just a lot slower than if they had allowed these negotiations to die months ago and moved forward with reconciliation on their own. Keeping the two bills separate really only makes sense to those whose minds have been warped by spending multiple years in that strangest legislative body, the United States Senate. There politicians learn that the deal is the goal in and of itself, and whatever it does or doesn’t do is of secondary importance.

 

Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats set out to prove that their preferred way of doing business still works, and they did: The Senate can still function, not by just doing something but by taking a very long time to do half of something, on a bipartisan basis, with a dubious promise to finish the rest later.

 

This bipartisan infrastructure bill is popular (and much of the spending is urgently needed throughout the country). Infrastructure spending, like bipartisanship, usually is. But having to spend so much time tortuously wringing support from the minority party to spend money on things people need and want is not actually a sign of a healthy system of government. Doing what’s necessary and popular shouldn’t be the hard part of governing, requiring painful compromise.

 

As for whether the Biden administration has learned from past mistakes, it’s now clear that the urgency and speed shown in his first 100 days was not a sign of a definitive break with past Democratic-controlled governments. Whatever lessons the president and his team learned from the Obama years, “Don’t let the Senate hijack your entire legislative agenda with protracted bipartisan negotiations that constantly threaten to break down entirely” wasn’t one of them.

 

Welcome to ‘Healing Girl Summer’

If the reconciliation scheme fails, the price of bipartisanship will have been many of this infrastructure plan’s most important climate elements, like a federal clean energy standard to speed the national transition to zero-emission electricity. Even if the scheme works, the opportunity cost will end up being lost time that could have been spent trying to achieve all the other things Mr. Biden promised to get done if elected. The time spent finding a way to get 60 votes for the infrastructure bill was time not spent hashing out versions of an infrastructure bill, and the PRO Act, and the For the People Act, that could win 51 votes. A party that seemed briefly to understand the urgency of the moment abandoned any sense of it for the vanity of senators who seem to take pride in spending months trying to find an agreeable midpoint between a large number and a small number.

 

After all, that was the actual lesson of 2009. Laying the blame for the stimulus act’s inadequacy on the pursuit of bipartisan support, as Mr. Schumer did in March, was always unfair to both Barack Obama and Senator Susan Collins (and too kind to the person primarily responsible for the size of that stimulus, former White House economic adviser Larry Summers). Mr. Obama and the Democrats acted with plenty of urgency. The Recovery Act passed in February of 2009, a month earlier than Mr. Biden got his relief bill done. It was only after the stimulus that Mr. Obama’s entire first term agenda ran aground on the shoal of bipartisan negotiation. Then the Senate got to work.

 

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