RANDOM THOUGHTS

The midterm elections of 2022 are only 20 months away and already show up to be equally pivotal as the 2020 elections purported and proved to be. The reason is that the presidential election of 2020 produced only one determinative outcome, in that it removed a dangerously incompetent pretender and seriously flawed person from the White House. But it created, at the Congressional level, a state of parity between two internally conflicted parties that have their eyes already set on the next election in the hope that they can prevail at that time. Notwithstanding the fact that Donald Trump is now a member of a rather exclusive club of one-term Presidents, his tenure and his words, tweets, actions, and omissions, have had an outsize effect on both domestic and foreign policy for our nation. Jonathan Kirshner, professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston University, in an article in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs, has focused on the foreign relations aspect of this new reality and warns us that “By producing a Trump presidency and calling attention to the underlying domestic dysfunction that allowed a previously inconceivable development to occur, the United States is now looked at far differently than it once was.” And he concludes: “A second Trump administration would have done irretrievable damage to the United States as an actor in world politics. But even with Trump’s defeat, the rest of the world cannot ignore the country’s deep and disfiguring scars. They will not soon heal.” (The March/April edition of Foreign Policy is headlined: “Decline and Fall. Can America Ever Lead Again?”)

Domestically, the scene is not hugely different. Trump may have lost the election, but he has not lost the Republican Party. According to a new Quinnipiac poll, 75% of Republicans would like to see him play a prominent role in the party. This fealty to a person, rather than republican principles and policy, precludes any Congressional ‘reaching across the aisle’, particular for Republican members of Congress who are up for re-election in 2022. Biden now must make the fateful choice between playing by the established rules or pressing his tenuous advantage in Congressional seats to advance his agenda. Time is not in his favor. Given his age, he is almost certain to declare himself yet another one-term President, and−more importantly−he runs the risk of losing control of Congress in 20 months. As we all know, midterm elections are notoriously unfriendly to the ruling administration.

The fateful decision to make is, of course, pertaining to the ‘filibuster rule’ (Senate Rule XXII) that requires 60 of the 100 Senate votes to close debate and bring a law proposal to a vote. That rule stands in the way of any Biden legislative initiative that cannot be passed under the rules for ‘reconciliation’, where only 51 votes are required. With a Republican Party more interested in seeing the Biden administration fail than in addressing the urgent needs of the nation, staying with the filibuster rule means that passing any substantive legislation with respect to voting rights and other democracy reforms, immigration reform, expanding healthcare coverage, climate protection, or gun control will be out of the question.

It would force President Biden to rule, where he can, by executive order, which is politically undesirable, constitutionally questionable, and subject to reversal at the next regime change.

Yet, doing away with Senate Rule XXII is politically risky as well and, as it stands, not achievable, because of principled resistance inside the Democratic Party, particularly from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. However, there may be an ‘in between’ way out of this impasse. It was suggested by Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute in an article published September 3, 2020 in The Atlantic. He proposes not to do away with the ‘filibuster rule’, but to amend it so that in stead of 60 votes required to end a filibuster, the rule would require 40 votes to continue it. It would mean that, if at any time the minority cannot muster 40 votes to sustain the filibuster, debate ends, cloture is invoked, and the bill can be passed by the votes of a simple majority. Ornstein leaves open for discussion if the threshold vote in his proposal should be 40 or 45. Will the Democrats give this creative bypass serious consideration? If they do, they should think of its effect in a certain to come situation where they would be in the minority in Congress.

Without significant Congressional action on the Biden legislative agenda and tangible positive effect of these measures on the lives of American voters, another regime change will be in the cards for 2024. Particularly, if Biden will have to deal with a Republican majority in Congress for his last two years in office. He would not be able to get anything done. That is why he cannot avoid making his fateful decision, now. But, as Ornstein has pointed out, it does not have to be an ‘all or nothing’ deal.

Whatever you may think of the merits of the Biden agenda, the country is in desperate need of policy making and effective governance. There used to be a time when foreign policy was a bipartisan arena and a change in administration had little effect on the pursuit of primary strategies. This consistency in foreign policy was driven by the presence of a universally identified adversary to American interests, whether it was the Axis in WWII, or communism during the Cold War era, and by the universally shared belief in the need for international institutions and alliances to promote democracy, peace, and development. The fall of the Soviet Union has shattered one of these two pillars of consistency and predictability and Trump, by himself and in only four years, has destroyed the last pillar, that had been holding up the structure of the democratic alliance.

As looked upon from the outside by other nations, friend or foe, America can no longer be relied upon to be consistently strategic and predictable in its foreign policy. As Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations put it: “If you know that whatever you’re doing will at most last until the next election, you look at everything in a more contingent way.” How can America be a global leader for peace and prosperity if it cannot build internal consensus on its basic foreign policy strategies?

The same absence of consistency hampers good governance at the domestic level. Here too, the Trump interregnum has inflicted serious damage. Think of all the misguided executive orders, aimed at establishing his warped views on the environment, immigration, trade, justice, and the perceived existence of the ‘swamp’ and the ‘deep state’ that now must be reversed. And think of all the civil service professionals at the Justice Department, the State Department, the Intelligence Services, and all matter of other federal departments and agencies, who have either been replaced by political hacks or simply given up and resigned and now must be re-recruited or replaced again. What a waste of time, talent, and competency!

The nation simply cannot afford to see this whipsaw effect of changing administrations perpetuated. It needs the time and stability required to provide lasting solutions for the main challenges it faces. That is why the 2022 midterms are so crucial. The country needs stability. It needs to recover from a traumatic episode in its political history and it needs the tranquility provided by smart, effective, governance. For that reason alone, it is desirable that the Biden administration and the Senate work out an arrangement with respect to Senate Rule XXII that will allow Congress to pass legislation on the highest priority issues facing the nation.

MONEY REVISITED

(Parts of this column have appeared before in my 2014 book “Neither here nor there” and in a 2015 column titled “Money Speaks.”)

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, we spent $14 billion trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. What did that money get us? We got a desperately needed eviction from the White House and a Congress that is almost equally divided between the two parties that have now dominated the scene in Washington DC for well over a century. Would the outcome have been any different if no money, or only a fraction of $14 billion had been spent in the process? And what could have been done with that money, had it not been spent on campaigning?

The first question is impossible to answer with any degree of certainty, but, given the fact that both parties received billions of dollars in support of their causes and candidates, it is doubtful that money decided the outcome overall. The other question is easier to answer. We need to realize that we are talking about private, not public funds. The source of the money is campaign donors, political action committees, and special interest groups and if the money had not been spent on the political campaigns, it would have been invested elsewhere or put into savings where it would have benefitted the general economy. It could have been donated to good-cause charities, of which there is no shortage in our capitalistic system, where the role of the government in financing societal needs is limited by design.

Between the doubtful effectiveness of money in politics, given the fact that it serves all sides in roughly equal proportion, and the opportunity cost of this expenditure, it should be clear that the nearly unrestrained flow of money into our political process is one of the reasons why our political system has stopped working as intended by our founding fathers. This money is not merely supporting candidates, but also causes, policy, that should be decided by discourse rather than money. Discourse has almost entirely vanished from the halls of Congress, where our representatives have settled for making statements, grandstanding, that can be used for media coverage, which, in turn, support the case for re-election. Where money can decide policy, the need for reasoning, debate and compromise evaporates. It is very unlikely to happen with the current composition of the Supreme Court, but if, for the good of the country, any legal precedent should be reversed by SCOTUS, it should be the case of Citizens United vs FEC, that opened the floodgates for money flowing into political campaigns.

Money, not competency, is now the critical success factor for any national elected office and for most of the high-profile state and municipal elected offices. In 1950, senators could get elected by spending 100,000 dollars on their campaigns; by 1980, that number was typically several million dollars; by 2010, many senate candidates spent 20-30 million dollars to win or retain their seats. And in the 2020 election even a $106 million war chest could not buy Jaime Harrison a Senate seat for South Carolina.

Combined with the freedom of speech, which allows any interest group or political action committee (PAC) to craft any commercial, pro or con a candidate for office, without regard to truth or material content, money has taken control of the political process in the USA, starting with the election process.

Only in America! Nowhere else in the democratic realm of nations has money taken such a commanding control of the political process and its outcomes. Nicholas Stephanopoulos of the University of Chicago wrote in the 2013 Columbia Law Review: “There is near consensus in the empirical literature that politicians’ positions more accurately reflect the views of their donors than those of their constituents.” We are so far along this corrupting road that it is hard to imagine that we can free ourselves from the influence of money on the outcome of our political system. But we should try with all of our might. And the following steps would go a long way towards removing the controlling influence of money:

·        Limit the period during which the media are allowed to run political advertisements in similar ways as currently practiced in Canada and the U.K.

·        Prohibit private funding of election campaigns and replace it with a system of public funding in equal amounts for each candidate.

·        Pay members of congress an honorarium of a million dollars per year and prohibit them from earning or accepting any money (other than from existing investments) from private sources for the time of their tenure.

·        Prohibit members of congress from lobbying the government for a period of five years from leaving congress.

The voting public should be the boss, but its influence has been hijacked by individuals and institutions with pockets deep enough to buy the subservience and vote of the peoples’ representatives. The net result is that the nation’s business no longer gets done. The federal government can no longer proclaim that it sets the rules of the game by which all constituents must play. As long as money rules, Congress is prevented from creating optimum conditions for free enterprise and citizens to shape conditions for a brilliant, sustainably competitive future.

Only Congress itself can lift us out of this morass. It can do so by changing the election laws to only permit public financing of election campaigns. But that would require for the Congress to pull itself out of the morass by its own bootstraps, which—as we all know—is one of the hardest things to do. Admittedly, the hurdles for the members of Congress to effect the required change are phenomenal. First, it would have to overcome its current implacable polarization. Then it would have to muster the courage and moral fortitude to ignore what the moneymen and special interests want them to do. And, if they can pull that off, they would have to have the courage of conviction—in defiance of the Supreme Court— that cutting the moneymen out of the election process can be done without infringing upon citizens’ rights under the First Amendment.

WHAT'S NEXT (CONCLUSION)

 What is government for? 

The United States of America has more than 330 million people living within its borders and it can’t rely on people’s comity, the market, religious institutions, or businesses to serve all of their interests, and serve them well, efficiently, and equitably. It needs an organizing system, a ‘higher power’ if you will, to keep it all together and moving forward. In America, that system consists of laws (including a constitution) and institutions that each provide stability to the structure. The purpose, of course, is to preserve the sovereignty and security of the nation, but right behind that, to advance the prosperity of the community at large as a complement to the collective pursuits of the individuals that, together, form this community. It is, in fact, pretty well described in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States: “In order 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.”

Sometimes, the system fails us. This is one of those times. Today, you would think that government is there for the purpose of providing a job and a soapbox to 435 politicians in the House of Representatives and 100 more in the Senate. And to allow them to spend their days being busy to get re-elected. It does not help that they keep themselves organized in only two parties that no longer reflect the diversity of creed and aspiration within the American population. It does not help that these parties and their leadership, not the individual lawmakers, dictate what causes get advanced and what causes get smothered before they get to the floor of the House or the Senate. Because of the relative parity of the two parties and the rules of order of the two chambers of Congress, nothing of substance gets advanced, everything smothered.

The bottom-line is that, for decades now, the existing political system has failed to offer durable solutions to the most pressing issues confronting the nation and its people. As a result, the most prosperous nation on earth has not found a way to keep its fiscal house in order; to upgrade and secure for the future a social safety net that protects vulnerable people from poverty and despair; to offer (all of) its people affordable education and healthcare of universal quality and universal accessibility; to articulate and maintain an immigration policy that allows it to draw on the best globally available talent and serves equally the needs of the economy, of a greying population, and of national security; to invest in an infrastructure for the future; to articulate a comprehensive approach to combat the challenges presented by climate change; and to combat the rise in racist and extreme anti-democratic sentiment.

In this four piece essay on the impact of the 2020 election, I have explored if, in the aftermath of the Trump defeat and the Democratic takeover of control of the Senate, there are any chances for a break in the impasse and I have come to the conclusion that such chances are slim. The voters have handed the reins to a 78 year old veteran without giving him a mandate in the form of a resounding defeat of Trumpism in Congress. His task is clear: He needs to give the American people what they need most now, control of the Covid-19 virus and revival of the pandemic ravaged economy and he has less than 2 years to do it or run the risk (near certainty) of annihilation in the 2022 midterm election, handing control of Congress right back to the GOP which is still under the spell of Trump.

Some conditions work in his favor. Vaccines against Covid-19 virus are available in increasing numbers and variations, and mask wearing and social distancing have become a way of life for most Americans. After a year of hesitation and denial, the conditions for getting the pandemic under control are in place and leadership from the top of the government is now assured. Also, both parties are ready to stimulate economic revival with a large additional relief package (even though there are significant differences of opinion about how large it should be). What is lacking though is a political landscape that is conducive to effective governance. The GOP smells blood in the water after making gains in both chambers of Congress in 2020 and gathering 74 million voters behind the top of their ticket. They will do just about anything to regain control of Congress in 2022, which would render the Biden administration handcuffed for the remainder of its first term in office. The Democrats smell blood in the water as well as they see the GOP fracturing in a populist, QAnon conspiracy inspired faction fighting for control of the party with a traditional republican, conservative, faction. Under these conditions, only an open, irreparable, split between the factions in the GOP can provide a chance for a centrist coalition of moderate Democrats and traditional Republicans to emerge as a dominating force in Congress that would allow the Biden administration to govern other than by executive order. If the next election would be 4 years away, that might happen, but with midterm elections now only 21 months away, I think we can rule out that scenario from coming into play.

Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, spelled it out in a tweet on January 29:”As difficult as it will be to get the pandemic under control and the economy growing again, it will prove far more difficult to make our politics functional, civil, rational, and safe again.”

The political system as it exists in America today is broken, and we know it. In this series of essays, I have outlined where it fails us and I have shared many of the thoughts brought forward by supporters of democracy on how to fix it. It comes down to making the process more democratic by getting all people engaged and making sure that voters get to pick their politicians rather than politicians, through gerrymandering, getting to pick their voters. It should not be that complicated. The problem is obvious and the solutions to the problem are known, available, and workable. The only issue is that it is no longer indisputable that the people, all of them, want democracy to function. 

There is no cure for that. You thought that four years of an anti-democratic experiment would have killed that beast, but many of our fellow citizens have thought, and are still thinking, differently.

America believed, with good reason, that the 2020 election would be exceptionally consequential. In one way it was. It removed a blatantly anti-democratic President from office. But it failed to create conditions for a re-set of the political system necessary to give America a government that is tooled and empowered to provide the nation with real and lasting solutions to the main challenges it faces and have been swept under the rug or kicked down the road for too long.

It is now clear that the 2022 and 2024 elections are going to be no less consequential than the election of 2020. God have mercy on America.