Are Democrats getting real about governing again?

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That strange new sound you hear from Washington isn’t the return of the cicadas from their 17-year cycle of underground hibernation; they’re due later this spring. No, the odd rumble of activity in the nation’s capital is the Democratic majority in Congress tentatively experimenting with the act of governing—a spectacle nearly as rare, and as upsetting to status quo arrangements, as billions of bright and buzzing insects burrowing upward into the light.

Fresh off the passage of a landmark $1.9 trillion package of Covid relief outlays, Democratic leaders seem to be quits, at long last, with the sucker’s dream of bipartisan cooperation with a GOP caucus bent on nihilist destruction. As New Republic staff writer Alex Pareene notes, the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act strongly indicates that the leaders of the recently convened 117th Congress seem to be heeding the grim lessons of the last cross-chamber Democratic majority on Capitol Hill, during Barack Obama’s first term. Back then, congressional Democrats were coaxed into seeking bipartisan accords on major legislation such as the Affordable Care Act and the 2009 stimulus so as to avoid the prospect of a Senate filibuster. As a result, however, the substantive provisions of such measures got fatally watered down—which in turn produced a yet more radicalized American right.

The upshot of that hard lesson, Pareene observes, is that the American Rescue Plan is both far more ambitious than its Obama-era predecessors and a monument to internal Democratic Party discipline over doomed overtures to an obstructionist, ideologically hidebound opposition party. Sure, “Senate moderates (as usual) made a theatrical show of making the bill a little bit worse,” he writes, but “the size of the package wasn’t arbitrarily reduced, and Republican support for the bill was not made a condition of moderate support.”

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Going forward, though, there’s still a good deal of uncertainty about how many of the remaining urgent items on the Democratic agenda will benefit from this newfound mood of political realism. Take, for example, the question of voting rights—an issue that threatens to undermine both the Democrats’ political base and small-d democracy in America. Congressional Democrats underlined the importance of ballot access by making voting rights reform their first order of business, in the rapid House endorsement of the For the People Act, also known as H.R. 1. Combined with the PRO Act—an allied measure seeking to greatly expedite union representation in American workplaces—voting rights reform suggests that Democrats understand the nature of our ailing democracy has to change, together with the policy priorities of an effective legislative majority. “The significance of these two measures,” Pareene writes,

is that they indicate that Democratic leaders have not just learned that they must deliver visible and tangible benefits to citizens, like the direct stimulus payments included in the American Rescue Plan. They must also try to create conditions that make it harder for the minoritarian right to keep power, by doing things like strengthening unions and making voter suppression more difficult.

But this, alas, is where congressional Democrats—in the Senate, to be precise—seem dangerously apt to revert to self-undercutting form. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona have declared their allegiance to keeping the filibuster in play over such measures (though Manchin’s support for the filibuster as it’s presently configured does appear to be at least provisionally wavering). Under those conditions, the best-case scenario for H.R. 1 would appear to involve reverting to a version of the dispiriting Obama-era playbook: slow-walking the bill out of committee, letting it run headlong into failed filibuster votes, and then trying to reverse-engineer the measure out of the whole mess somehow. This dilatory and lackluster prospect stands in alarmingly vivid contrast to the massive effort to roll back basic voter protections now underway in state legislatures throughout the country:

On electoral reform … one side is not waiting. The Brennan Center is currently tracking “253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states.” One American elections expert refers to the campaign as “the greatest rollback of voting rights in this country since the Jim Crow era.” Republicans nationwide are treating the fight as existential: Rather than change the party, they are changing the electorate. Democrats ought to understand the fight on similar terms. Voting rights need to be secured, and electoral procedure federalized, to stop Republicans from effectively rigging elections to make it nearly impossible for Democrats to control the government.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is already indicating that the Senate plans to tee up a legislative package ostensibly aimed at stemming China’s rise as a global economic power, since—wait for it—that objective can command some semblance of bipartisan cooperation in his chamber. Perhaps that one will be called the For the Pundit Optics Act.

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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