As the GOP obstructs, Dems must ask: what would Bernie have done?
If Democrats want to continue delivering for the people – and win while doing it – they ought to remember what Sanders' campaign represented.
Senator and former Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders hugs a young supporter at a campaign rally in Los Angeles on March 23, 2019. | Mario Tama/Getty Images
The American Rescue Plan (ARP) passed the Senate by a vote of 50-49, and the House by a vote of 220-211. It’s been signed by the President. Help is on its way to millions of people – with no help from Republicans. To their credit, Democrats have passed one of the most people-serving pieces of legislation in recent American history. It’s a mixed bag, filled with both encouraging hints of a Democratically-led government warming up to being bolder, and discouraging marks of a twisted and out-of-touch D.C. Realpolitik logic that more or less follows the maxim that you should avoid helping too many people.
But it’s still $1.9 trillion. A familiar number – President Trump’s tax cuts in November 2017 were around the same figure. But that time, the money largely went to the highest income brackets, while everyone else got whatever was left. This time, the money is being more properly distributed to those who need it most.
The ARP is a reminder that the government can and should do more – especially given that some of its provisions only last a year. Here’s a brief sampling:
It extends unemployment benefits through Sept. 6, at $300 a week – on top of what people may obtain through their respective state unemployment programs. The first $10,200 in such benefits would be non-taxable for households with incomes under $150,000.
It expands Earned Income and Child Tax Credits, which will bring almost 10 million children out of poverty or closer to crossing over the poverty line. It will also benefit 17.3 million workers without children who have lower-paid jobs, such as home care aides, janitors, and food preparation workers.
It brings back long-needed direct payments, sending $1,400 to single taxpayers, or $2,800 to married couples filing jointly – plus $1,400 per dependent. Eligibility includes individuals earning up to $75,000, married couples earning up to $150,000, and heads of household earning up to $112,500. Unlike previous direct payments, all claimed dependents (including college students) will be eligible, making nearly 13.5 million more people eligible.
There are various limits – in a country that feeds off immigrant labor, undocumented immigrants will not be eligible to receive payments; the direct payments are $1,400 and not the $2,000 that Democrats ambiguously campaigned on; and others.
Moreover, this all comes after moderate Democrats undercut the party’s own position. Before taking the bill to the floor, moderates jostled to lower the income thresholds from $100,000 and $200,000 down to the current $75,000 and $160,000 limits. This means that nearly 12 million adults and 5 million children will be left out of receiving a check. It’s unclear why moderates took measures like this, given they didn’t win a single Republican vote from these self-imposed concessions, and the fiscal benefit in lowering the thresholds is negligible. As Eric Levitz wrote, it made the package about 0.63 % cheaper.
Regardless: the expanded unemployment, direct payments, and tax credits – alongside billions going to enhancing COVID-19 testing and vaccination, assisting schools and businesses in safely reopening and squaring away pandemic-related expenses, and more – displays Democrats’ willingness to use their power to pursue a society that does not insist on leaving every person for themself.
But how willing are Democrats, really? This uncertainty arose as Democrats failed to raise the minimum wage through budget reconciliation, after the unelected Senate Parliamentarian deemed it “merely incidental” to the budget.
Democrats had options in the face of this: Vice President Kamala Harris could’ve dismissed the parliamentarian’s ruling; the provision could have been modified to address murky conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to include some minimum wage increase in the bill. There’s precedent here. Just a few administrations ago, Republicans actually fired the Parliamentarian after he made it harder for Republicans to pass tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the rich.
The Democrats could also just get rid of the filibuster – the primary legislative barrier stopping them from enacting policies a majority of the country approves of. More on that a little later.
Nevertheless, Senator Bernie Sanders still brought the minimum wage battle to the Senate floor, arguing that the moment was a test of American democracy – an evaluation of whether or not the government would respond to the needs of the majority, or continue serving a select few. In doing so, Sanders put every senator on the record.
The push failed. 42-58. 8 Democrats sided with the Republicans. Or rather, 58 Senators voted against the 83% of people in this country who think the minimum wage is too low.
Some “democracy” we have here, folks:
After Democrats self-capitulated and removed the provision to enact a $15 minimum wage from the package, AP reporter Nick Riccardi posted a poll on Twitter, asking “Would a President Bernie Sanders have been able to get [a] $15 min wage through a 50-50 Senate?”
Counterfactuals can only suggest so much. But when things aren’t working, you need to figure out what else to try. And what the Sanders campaign represented offers crucial lessons for the Democrats moving forward, if they’re interested in taking them.
One of the fundamental ambitions of a Bernie Sanders presidency was to activate the masses to organize for policies that supported the people’s welfare. A reformation of democracy, in which all people feel empowered to play a role in government. Here’s Sanders in an interview just over a year ago:
Our campaign is a different type of campaign. Our campaign is not “vote for me, I'm a great guy.” Our campaign is a multiracial, multigenerational movement of working people, Black and white and Latino, Native American, Asian-American coming together in the fight for justice.
…if I'm elected president, I will be Organizer-in-chief. I will be going all over the country to put pressure on Senators like those from Kentucky, for example. Go to the people in Kentucky who are hurting right now and say “really, do you think we should raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour? You tell your Senators to do it. Should we make public colleges and universities tuition-free? You tell your Senators to do that.”
I think I will be a very different type of president rallying the American people around an agenda that they support and telling Congress that they've got to represent ordinary Americans, not just their wealthy campaign contributors.
Integral to this formula is both what constitutes “rallying the American people around an agenda they support,” and how to actually encourage that to happen. Writer, policy analyst, and co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast Sam Adler-Bell says that even in a Sanders presidency, “the government was going to be the government, the Democratic party was still going to be the one that it is.” What would make Sanders distinct is how he would use the presidential platform.
After all, we have just witnessed four years of a man wreaking havoc and deepening social fissures through the presidency. “Trump’s biggest effect on our political culture seemed to be using the bully pulpit to polarize the public around particular issues, usually racial ones,” Adler-Bell notes. Imagine that same platform instead being used to organize people into a politics that believes in building a stronger society together.
Further, the “Organizer-in-chief” would aim to not only galvanize people around a popular agenda, but hold the rest of the party to a standard that aligns with that agenda. Adler-Bell says such an Organizer-in-chief would need to make the claim that “Democrats support working people, we support the jobless, and anybody who is a part of this party and this caucus should be doing everything in their power to make working people whole during this crisis, as opposed to trying to make their lives worse.”
The goal then would be to mobilize people around a popular agenda of economic and social betterment, activating those same people to hold officials – both opposition and fellow party-members – accountable to carrying this agenda forward. And if this mobilization is successful, then actualizing the agenda is politically easier for amenable members of congress to execute, as the will of the people would reward them come election time.
This formulation contrasts with Biden’s prior insistence of a forthcoming awakening among the Republican party. As Biden claimed, “with Donald Trump out of the White House — not a joke — you will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.” This aim to appear agreeable enough to Republican politicians – with the chummy senatorial spirit of a West Wing episode – is evidently not functional in achieving goals. Republicans continue stonewalling policies that have broad support in this country, ranging from wage increases and government-provided healthcare to stronger environmental regulation and revitalized, green infrastructure – and of course the American Rescue Package.
But since most mainstream Democrats have seldom exhibited a focused philosophy oriented around activating people a la Sanders, Republicans have been content continuing to obstruct popular policy – because they don’t sense much risk behaving contrary to the majority’s interests. They rely on politics as usual, where Republicans can be the “party of no,” offering no actual solutions to systemic societal problems as they benefit from an undemocratic political system; meanwhile Democrats drift right-ward attempting to maintain any grip to power, one election cycle at a time.
To Biden’s credit, he has utilized the heightened contradictions of the moment to potentially challenge this tired cycle. The American Rescue Plan is proof enough of the dam cracking. Perry Bacon Jr. wrote on why Biden is so publicly insistent on seeking unity with the Republicans, and his conclusion of the most likely reason indeed seems plausible: “Biden is being more optimistic about the prospects of bipartisanship in his public statements than he truly believes and is fully prepared to govern facing basically unified GOP opposition.”
And frankly, that strategy does not seem wholly wrong. When asked about the fact that no Republicans voted for the American Rescue Plan, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki flipped the question:
Well, first, bipartisanship is not determined by a single ZIP code in Washington, D.C. It’s about where the American people sit and stand. And the vast majority of the American people support the American Rescue Plan, including Republicans.
And so, I think, really, the question is: Why are Republicans in Congress who aren’t supporting this package outliers in where the American public is in moving this forward?
Psaki’s answer is solid, but it underscores an issue Democrats will need to reconcile: how can Biden continue this public-facing eagerness for bipartisanship – and pursuit of policies that do indeed have bipartisan support from the people – when confronting bills that need more than 50+1 votes in a Senate full of Republicans with no interest in cooperating?
The answer is twofold: the filibuster must go, and its abolishment must be joined with a massive empowerment of voters and workers in this country. And it’ll be easier to get rid of the filibuster by clearly exhibiting to people how its stopping widely-approved of policies from materializing. Fortunately, there are two popular people-empowering proposals Democrats can enact while highlighting the toxicity of the filibuster: The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) and the For the People Act (H.R.1).
We have an undemocratic electoral system – rampant voter suppression; states with hundreds of thousands of people holding the same sway as states with millions (effectively erasing political minorities’ voices within every state and ensuring candidates only visit the small handful of swing states, rather than making a pitch to every individual in this country). This all manifests into political asymmetry. Willem Morris, Columbia undergraduate and organizer for the school’s Democratic Socialists for America chapter (which is currently leading one of the most historic tuition strikes in recent memory), speaks to some of this asymmetry – and how the left can respond:
“Each election, people on the left face a poor choice between a Democrat unable and unwilling to make radical changes to adequately meet the problems of today, and a Republican actively making the problems worse. Democrats know that most on the left are unwilling to withhold their votes and risk a Republican victory, and thus the left is held captive. This situation is obviously made worse by the undemocratic nature of the Senate. But withholding votes is not the most powerful tactic on the left; that tactic is the ability to withhold labor.”
Morris is encouraged by Biden’s early reforms of the National Labor Relations Board and support of trail-blazing unionization efforts at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama. But Morris too recalls Sanders’ promise to serve as Organizer-in-chief, and believes Biden needs to push further in order to take on that mantle. Morris cites workers packing Montana’s capital, successfully influencing the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to vote down right-to-work laws as an example of the impact organized labor could have, particularly if it was empowered. To that end, Morris believes “real political change will not be won as long as organized labor is weak in this country,” and that “the revitalization is a long-term project that may not result in the passage of new legislation today, but will create an environment to ensure radical change in the future.”
These Montanan workers embody a microcosm of something stirring more broadly. It would be remiss to forget that something as expansive as the ARP would likely not have happened without the relentlessness of those long advocating for economic and racial justice, and the many who have more clearly seen our society’s deep contradictions within the past year and felt called to rally for justice. In the same way Morris imagines how strong labor could be if it had a champion in the White House, we can imagine how strong the people’s demands broadly would be if they had someone willing to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to fight for people-serving policies, and empower the people to successfully join that fight.
A pivotal step towards this scale of empowerment is the passage of the PRO Act, legislation that will make it easier to join a union and meaningfully challenge employers that violate workers’ rights. Morris believes it “will do more to revitalize organized labor than any other proposed legislation in the past 75 years.” Biden did come out in support of the PRO Act ahead of the successful House vote – but its full passage will require 60 votes in the Senate.
Another solution to this asymmetry is simply addressing it head on – which brings us to H.R.1.
Recent Data for Progress polling shows that the sweeping electoral reform bill – including expanding voting access and combatting money in politics – enjoys 68% support among the public. “All across the country, we’re seeing alarming efforts by Republican legislatures in states to restrict voter access, including passing provisions to eliminate voting on weekends, reduce early voting periods, restrict voter registration access, and more,” says Data for Progress polling analyst Evangel Penumaka. “Our polling shows that Americans across the political spectrum are ready to unify around this package and do whatever it takes to pass these reforms — even if this means doing so without the support of Republican lawmakers.”
Ultimately, the Democrats – and the public – are at a democratic impasse. There are things most people in this country want. Our institutions aren’t allowing those things to happen. And the filibuster is one of the main barriers in the way. It’s as simple as that.
Fortunately, Democrats can finally upend this dynamic. The messaging is basic transitive math here, friends. The existence of the filibuster prevents our democracy from getting stronger and our workers from having a voice. In order to rectify the latter two, we need to eliminate the former.
If Democrats want to serve the people and win while doing it, they have to embrace the wing of the party that vies to get things done on behalf of the people, rather than the one insistent on being constrained by Republicans who have no interest in collaboration, no matter how much watering down the Democrats commit to. Ultimately, this is about learning and adapting. Heck, even Bernie Sanders has historically been hesitant to support getting rid of the filibuster, but he’s come around too.
Democrats have the White House and congressional numbers to pass monumental legislation that, most importantly, helps people. Bills such as H.R. 1 and the PRO Act would bring America closer to being the democracy it imagines itself to be, enfranchising millions whose voices are constantly under siege. This empowerment, coupled with the subsequent potential to enact further popular policies, would codify progressive power for years to come. The fruition of all this would accordingly show voters that the party and government can indeed care for them, cementing these people’s support.
Contrary to moderate doomsayers and cynical armchair pundits, material progress and good politics are not mutually exclusive. It turns out that earnestly advocating for and then enacting people-serving policy is politically popular. The pathway to deliver for the people – and to win while doing it – is open, if Democrats choose to pursue it.
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