WHAT'S NEXT PART III

 The election is behind us and regime change has taken place in America, but the unease has not dissipated. We are finding out that even control of the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate in one hand is not enough to govern effectively. Obama found that out during his first two years in office, Trump found it out during his first two years in office, and now it is Biden’s turn to experience the same limitation.

We can justly argue that the country had to go through the Trump experience because, for decades, the conventional governance of Democrats and Republicans and the White House and Congress holding each other at bay had failed to produce results for the People and the voters were willing to give a populist authoritarian a chance to show that he could do better. That experiment did not exactly pan out as hoped for and so we are back to where we came from. But the fact that 47.8% of the voters were willing to give Trump a second chance and a second term shows that the voting public is still wondering if an authoritarian approach to governance isn’t needed to give them the results they are craving. Anne Applebaum’s 2020 book ‘Twilight of Democracy (the seductive lure of authoritarianism)’ has come alive in America. I don’t think that the viability of democracy per se is in doubt, but what is certainly in doubt is the effectiveness of the way America has interpreted, developed, and implemented the tenets of democracy in its political system. The system just has not produced for the large majority of Americans and allowed an untenable degree of inequality to take hold. Already in 2016, the top 1 percent of households accounted for 4 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent of households, and that disparity has only further increased under Trump and as a result of the Covid 19 induced economic downturn. And now we are about to find out that that same system stands in the way of Biden delivering on the campaign promises that got him elected.

The immediate hurdle to climb is that the existing system keeps any legislative initiative from clearing the Senate, unless it has the support of 3/5th of the Senate members. On paper that does not sound too bad, but in the real world of a closely balanced two party system, and with parties that refuse to see eye to eye, it has proven to be a recipe for unbreakable gridlock. Previous administrations have increasingly tried to work around this impediment by governing by executive order, but that only goes so far and is undesirable from a democracy point of view. The record shows that with the existing political system, and the relative parity in representation of the two parties, the legislative branch is incapable of crafting durable solutions to the nation’s major challenges. 

So, what’s going to give? If democracy isn’t delivering the goods, the likelihood is that the people will give authoritarianism another try. And there is enough extremist presence on both side of the aisle to jump on that opportunity. But it is not inevitable. 

The good news is that there is no lack of insight on ways in which the system can be improved, to make it work better, more democratically, for the people the government is supposed to serve. The presumption is that democratization of the system will lead to better outcomes for the people.

In my previous column, I have referenced the 2019 report ‘Our Common Purpose, Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century’ from the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This report provides an excellent blueprint for system improvements by proposing 6 strategies:

1. Achieve Equality of Voice and Representation

2. Empower Voters

3. Ensure Responsiveness of Government Institutions

4. Expand Civic Bridging Capacity

5. Build Civic Information Architecture

6. Inspire a Culture of Commitment to American Constitutional Democracy and One Another

If this sounds a little ethereal, the content is very pragmatic and includes rational suggestions like increasing the membership in the House of Representatives; ranked-choice voting in presidential, congressional, and state elections; independent citizen-redistricting commissions in all fifty states; elimination of undue influence of money in our political system; make voting in federal elections a requirement of citizenship; establish same-day registration and universal automatic voter registration; restore federal and state voting rights to citizens with felony convictions immediately and automatically upon release from prison; establish a universal expectation of a year of national service for young Americans; invest in civic education for all ages and in all communities. It deals with the curse of gerrymandering and voter suppression. 

Other suggestions come from the National Constitution Center, which asked three teams of scholars, conservative, progressive, and libertarian, to draft, from scratch, new Constitutions for the United States in 2020. All three teams agree on the need to limit presidential power, explicitly allow impeachment for non-criminal behavior, and strengthen Congress’ oversight powers of the President. And the progressive and conservative teams converge on the need to elect the president by a national popular vote (the libertarians keep the Electoral College); to resurrect Congress’ ability to veto executive actions by a majority vote; and to adopt 18-year term limits for Supreme Court Justices.

The openness of our democratic system is also held back because of the tight control that party leadership has over the organization of primary elections and the introduction of legislative proposals on the floor of each of the chambers of Congress.

Talk is cheap. In America, there is never a shortage of think tanks, public policy groups, or academic platforms debating and criticizing the status quo. But none of it translates into actionable initiatives. And the reason for this is clear: In the two-party system, every proposal for change in the political system, can be calculated to favor one or the other. In most instances, the suggested adaptations are favoring the Democrats who are likely beneficiaries of increased voter participation and representation (there is a reason why the Republican Party has a long history and record of voter suppression). Such adaptations are going nowhere as long the Republican Party can mobilize at least 40 of its Senators against them.

Case in point is the ‘For the People Act of 2019’ (H.R.1) that addresses many of the proposed system changes and passed the House of Representatives in 2019 only to get stranded in the Senate. Or the ‘Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2019’ (H.R.4) that suffered the same fate in the Republican controlled Senate of 2020.

Now that the leadership has shifted to the Democrats in the evenly divided Senate, both bills have been reintroduced in the Senate, but have no way of passing as long as the filibuster rule is in play and may even have trouble to attract a simple majority. The Biden administration has a tough, fateful, choice to make if/when it determines that there is no basis for compromise with the Republicans on these issues: give up on the legislative process and try to implement its agenda as much as it can by executive order, or execute a power play to impose its will on Congress. Such powerplay could consist of several elements: 1) killing the filibuster rule in the Senate; 2) expansion of the House of Representatives based on the 2020 Census; 3) Statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. As of the time of this writing, Biden himself appears reluctant to resort to such powerplay and at least two Democratic Senators, Manchin and Sinema, have already come out against killing the filibuster rule.

It does not look good for the American people. The Republicans will speculate that they will have a good chance of conquering the majority in both chambers of Congress in 2022 if they can keep the Biden administration from coming to the aid of the hard-hit American people. And the best, most innocuous, way of doing that is by standing in the way of any change in the convoluted political system as it exists today.

In a final segment of ‘WHAT’S NEXT’ I will try to put it all together and fill in some blanks. Stay tuned!

WHAT'S NEXT PART II

The election is behind us. The 46^th President has moved into the White House and the next election is less than two years away (which means that The House of Representatives is already again in election campaign mode). There is an awful lot of sorting out to do between now and November 8, 2022.

Joe Biden will have to sort out what he will have to do to be able to make good on his ambitious campaign promises, with only the slimmest margin of control over the legislative branch and a significant left-wing representation in his party nipping at his heels.

The Democrats will have to sort out if ideological purity and revolutionary activism is more important to them than pragmatism.

Mitch McConnell will have to sort out if he is better off working with-and putting restraints on- Biden policy making or obstructing Biden in every move, trying to set the stage for yet another one term presidency.

The Republicans have the most and hardest sorting out to do. They will have to decide if they want to go back to traditional republican conservatism or become the national populist party, much in the way Donald Trump has pushed it for the six years since the start of his campaign and presidency. Their decision may, or may not, cause the fissure within the GOP, which so far has been taped over, to lead to a break-up of the party.

In all of this, the most important sorting out to do is for each of these policy makers to decide if they will put the interest of the American people over their narrow personal and partisan interests. The question is, if the momentous events since November 3, 2020 have shocked the policy makers enough to force them into acceptance of the fact that the American people need to see action now, or that any policy making will be further deferred until after the 2022 election (and then possibly again until after the 2024 election). The answer to this question will have to come clear during the first 100 days of the Biden administration, with a likelihood that the named policy makers will not all come up with the same answer in this binary choice. The betting will be on whether they think that they can improve on their political fortunes in the next Congressional election, in 2022. The outcome will nevertheless be hugely consequential for the health of the nation and our democracy. The choice is between a positive role for an effective-be it limited- federal government in the shaping of the destiny of the nation and its people, or continuing governance paralysis.

Today, it is too early to tell which way it will go. The upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate, now set to begin the week of February 8, will give us a hint. In the meantime, we can make up the balance on what positives and negatives have come out of the 2020 election and its aftermath.

Let’s start with the positives:

·       A horribly and dangerously unqualified President has been voted out of the White House.

·       Against all odds, Mitch McConnell has been deprived of his Senate leadership.

·       The Republican Party will have to re-articulate what it stands for and may be splitting.

·       The January 6 storming of the Capitol and Trump’s actions leading up to that may instill in some Republicans political courage that otherwise would have been absent.

·       Large political donors, business and otherwise, are shunning the lawmakers who propagated the fallacy of a stolen election and voted against the certification of the Biden election victory.

·       Our democratic institutions held under the onslaught of conspiracy, blackmail, and misinformation originating with Trump, his sycophants, and media pundits.

·       New leadership at the Department of Justice, in tandem with the investigative powers of Congress, is likely to discover who, inside and outside the halls of power, were the instigators and ringleaders of the January 6 insurrection.

But it is not all good news. The negatives that we will have to wrestle with include:

·       We have allowed trust in our political leadership, process, and institutions to erode to the point of leading to an insurrection.

·       We have condoned for too long an assault, by our President, on the truth, the facts, and the empirical reality.

·       The COVID-19 pandemic has been allowed to go rampant in the absence of government attention and leadership causing hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths.

·       Fifty Democratic Senators represent 41.4 million more Americans than the 50 Republican Senators but have to rely on the Vice President to give these people a voice.

·       The election has failed to deliver a governable majority in Congress.

·       Too much energy will have to be devoted to ‘decontamination’.

·       The combination of seniority rules and absence of term limits has left us with Congressional leadership largely in the hands of septuagenarians and octogenarians.

·       The election has further dismantled the political center and boosted the presence and power of the extreme right and extreme left.

·       In summary: So much to do, so little time to do it, and not enough consensus to get it done.

At this point, it is entirely unclear if our politicians are capable of putting the People’s interest above their desire to get re-elected and hang on to power. Only time will tell.

There certainly is no shortage of challenges to address. Starting with the need to avoid further damage from the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic downturn that has, once again, hit the most vulnerable segments of society the hardest. Even before and without this crisis, our society has shown to be in urgent need of addressing the untenable inequality that puts too many Americans at an insurmountable disadvantage, in income, in wealth, in education, in healthcare, and in general welfare and wellbeing.

In a next segment of ‘WHAT’S NEXT’ I will explore the governance system changes that can be considered if America wants to clean up its act and become yet again a vibrant, functional, democracy. Much of that I wrote in my 2014 book ‘NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, a First-Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism’, but the recent events have surfaced many more inadequacies in the system that need to be addressed.

For that, we don’t have to start from scratch. A good starting point would be a reading of the 2019 report ‘Our Common Purpose, Reinventing American Democracy for the 21^st Century’ from the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/2020-Democratic-Citizenship_Our-Common-Purpose_0.pdf .

The blueprint is there. Will the political courage be mustered to put this, or a similar, playbook in action?

WHAT'S NEXT?

I have intentionally held my breath until after the inauguration of the Biden administration, controlling my urge to chronicle and provide context to the many dazzlingly cascading events that have occurred since I wrote my previous column, ‘No Man’s Land’ on December 21. I wanted to see how it all turned out, and now we have at least a new starting point and a new observation platform from which we can look into the future.

From this platform we look at a drastically changed landscape, affected by political earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions, that have all taken place in the last thirty days: Trump’s refusal to concede his defeat; his banishment from Twitter and Facebook; the stunning rebuke of the GOP in the special election for the two Georgia Senate seats resulting in Democratic control of the Senate; the storming of the Capitol in an effort to prevent the reading and confirmation of the Biden/Harris election by a joint session of Congress; the second impeachment of the 45^th President; and the rebuke of Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection by some prominent Republicans, notably Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Ben Sasse, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney.
What does this landscape tell us about what we can expect to happen next?

There is a lot more to this question than can be handled in a single column. So, expect a series of columns that will try to shine a search light on the future. I limit the time horizon to two years, because that is the time we have until the next national election, which will, once again, have the potential of drastically changing the political landscape.

The defining question of the moment is if the Biden administration can positively affect the lives of the large majority of the American population that has taken the brunt of decades long government neglect resulting in unbearable inequality and crises like the 2008 great recession, the Covid19 pandemic and the resulting death and devastation. And, if it can do so soon enough and with enough penetration that it can determine the outcome of the 2022 midterm election. As we know, midterm elections are notoriously challenging for the party in power, having had too little time to make good on the promises made during the previous election that brought it to power.

A column in today’s New York Times by Ezra Klein quotes Amy Lerman, a political scientist and author of the book “Good enough for Government Work”. She writes that the best thing we can do right now to reduce levels of anger and frustration is to give people the things they need to live better lives and Ezra Klein concludes: “What the Democrats need to do is simple: Just help people, and do it fast.”

So much to do, and so little time to do it.

What is the urgency? It stems from the fact that Trumpism was not defeated in the November 2020 election. In fact, it drew more support than at any time in the Trump era, with more than 74 million Americans voting in favor of a second term for the incumbent. Only an extraordinary ‘get out the votes’ effort by the Democrats, tilted the balance in favor of Biden/Harris ending up with more than 81 million votes, a 4.5% advantage over Trump/Pence. The 74 million Trump voters have been told by the right-wing pundits on TV, radio, internet media, and the President himself that they only lost the election because of massive fraud and that, if only legally cast votes were counted, they would have won – by a landslide. They are outraged, as we have seen on January 6, and are looking for revenge.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor in Chief of The Atlantic, wrote today in a letter to subscribers: “A catastrophic presidency is over.” And he quoted George Packer who summarizes the verdict: “America, under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, slicker, and deader.” But the appeal of authoritarianism, that has surfaced time and again in American political history, has not diminished in the wake of Trump defeat and can easily win the day again if the Biden administration can’t address the legitimate grievances that have driven millions of underprivileged, mostly working class, Americans away from the establishment politicians into the fold of an authoritarian populist demagogue.

It looks like a herculean task for the Biden team, given how hard it has proven to be to get a partisan, divided Congress, to agree on any substantive legislation, particularly under the current rules where sixty votes are required to pass non-budget related legislation in the Senate. It immediately raises the question for the Democrats, while they have a hold of the White House and slim majorities in the House and Senate, if they should take the widely discussed, but highly controversial, step to break with existing norms and nix the remaining application of the Senate filibuster rule (for non-budget related legislation). They will also be tempted to try and strengthen their electoral strength by considering statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, which would give Democrats four more ‘safe’ Senate seats.

The Democrats will realize that taking these unorthodox steps is likely to rule out cooperation with moderate Republicans, eliminate the possibility of a coalition of the center (moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans), and harden the opposition by Trump loyalists in Congress and among the voting public. All reasons why Biden so far has refused to voice support for these fateful steps.

It looks to me that the decision in these matter lies with the Republican Party. Will it stay together as a united block to Democratic policy proposals? The answer may come when the Senate Republicans will have to decide the verdict on Trump’s second impeachment. If a good number of Senate Republicans end up voting for impeachment and barring Trump from ever running for office again, the likelihood of a split in the GOP between Trump loyalists and traditional Republicans will increase exponentially. Trump himself has already hinted at leaving the GOP and creating his own ‘Patriot Party’. 

If that happens, a smart, time- and battle tested, Joe Biden could succeed in crafting a strong enough informal coalition of centrist Republicans and Democrats to advance major parts of his program and pry the working-class voters back from the MAGA charade, just in time for the 2022 midterm election. Wishful thinking? Yes, very possibly. GOP Senators can easily avoid the dilemma by arguing that you can’t impeach a President who has already been replaced or, like they have done before, that Trump was guilty as charged, but that the crime does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense. Stay tuned.

In a next column, I will address the positives and negatives of the outcome of the 2020 election from the perspective of a population that so badly requires to see its daunting challenges addressed by an effective, compassionate, disciplined federal government that does not unduly interfere with individual freedoms and responsibilities but puts teeth in the constitutional  mandate ‘to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity’.