Biden scores first big bipartisan legislative victory
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When Joe Biden made his bid for the White House a year and a half ago, he had declared that he was not only willing to work across the aisle but that this would form a crucial part of his strategy for realizing his legislative agenda. It had seemed quite ludicrous at the time. After all, Congressional Republicans had successfully closed ranks in executing their uniformed opposition of the top agenda items of Democratic presidents for three decades. Firstly, none supported Clinton’s 1993 tax bill and secondly, only three Republicans voted to pass Obama’s stimulus bill, and thirdly, zero Republicans showed up to provide voting support for the Affordable Care Act, even though Democrats spent most of 2009 trying to court their support. Interestingly, despite its passage, none of the Republicans supported Biden’s pandemic relief bill.
In those circumstances, it is worthy of comment that in the small hours of Thursday, August 12, 2021, 19 Republican Senators walked across the line and voted with Democrats to pass Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The 19 Republicans who supported the bill, resulted in Biden accomplishing something that two previous Democratic presidents had not been able to do. Biden had carefully, and without ceremony, secured bipartisan support for his top legislative item.
Given the insidious nature of the American political divide in the last five to six years, no one could be faulted for thinking that Biden was embarking on a frolic of his own when he championed bipartisanship. That nearly eight months in, Biden had succeeded in getting 19 Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, to side with Democrats is worth mentioning.
To political pundits, McConnell’s position may have shifted the minute his political calculus exposed him to the nationwide popularity of the Bill. It appeared that McConnell may have decided that getting credit for helping to pass a popular bill would certainly boost Republicans’ chances of retaking Congress during next year’s mid-term elections. To this end, supporting this Bill would provide an appearance that he and his conference could say that they recognized the crumbling infrastructure all across America and were significantly involved in addressing the problem.
No doubt, too, that McConnell may also have wanted to give centrist Democrats sufficient ammunition to keep defending the filibuster (the 60-vote threshold) that lets Senate Republicans block other Democratic priorities from progressives agitating to change it. Both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have cited infrastructure as proof that the Senate can pass important bills with the filibuster intact. That underscored the fact that Biden’s 36-year tenure as a senator may have been of far more value than his critics had anticipated and in the final analysis it was his long tenure as a senator that appeared to have helped the bill pass.
Clearly, those years in the Senate taught Biden how important it was to put the work into his job. That work included making phone calls to senators and working the channels to the Oval Office, a necessary strategy to get Bills to pass. Such experience has now become the linchpin of the President’s governing strategy and in the process, he has shown that he is not unprepared to make significant concessions to win Republican votes. The Senate bill for example is just about $1 trillion less than the White House had initially proposed, and some of those concessions included reduced funding for electric vehicles, public transit, and water infrastructure.
Biden’s success sets up an interesting scenario as we roll towards the mid-term elections in 2022. His presidency has, so far, proved to be less progressive than was predicted but still progressive enough to keep them interested, while embracing critical aspects of the Sanders/Warren agenda. In the meantime, the voting rights fight looms and it will be interesting to see how Biden plays this hand once they resume in September.
Richard Hugh Blackford is a Jamaican creative artist residing in the United States.
