THE LOYAL OPPOSITION

Whatever happened to the notion of ‘the loyal opposition’? In our system of government, the loyal opposition is the opposition party in the legislature. The word loyal indicates that the non-governing party may oppose the proposals and actions of the President and his cabinet while remaining loyal to the national interest and the formal source(s) of the government's power, such as the republican form of government and the constitution.

If it were not for the fact that the next national election is only 17 months away, and that we will have another Presidential election in 2024, there is little doubt that creating and funding an independent commission to investigate the events of January 6, 2021 would have been a routine, non-controversial, matter for Congress to decide, as long as the commission would be bi-partisan and consisting of people with established authority and integrity. But there will be elections in November of 2022 and November of 2024 and the maneuvering, jockeying for position, for these elections is already in full swing. So, this commission is unlikely to ever see the light of day, at least until after the next set of elections is behind us.

The Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has made no bones about it when he stated earlier this month: “One hundred percent of my focus is standing up to this administration” and “It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could lay on top of the existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress.” Little surprise for someone who had earlier, in 2012, declared to move heaven and earth to make sure that Barack Obama would be a one-term President. This is no longer a loyal opposition.

The Republican party has seen that the existing rules of the game have not allowed them to alter the outcome of the 2021 election in the heavily contested races in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that went against them, and the party is working hard to bend the rules in its favor. The instruments at its disposal are the gerrymandering of voting districts, the tightening of voting rules and voting access, and the freedom of State legislations to appoint members of the Electoral College in deviation of the outcome of the popular vote in States with a Republican majority. And the party leaders are hell-bent on using all these instruments to secure a more favorable outcome in the next set of elections.

They know that, typically, midterm elections favor the party that missed out on the White House, but they are not about to take any chances, so they block Congressional action on the change of any rule they like, e.g. the filibuster rule, the number of members of the House of Representatives, and the denial of Statehood to the citizens of the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other American Territories, while, at the same time, using their dominance in the majority of State legislatures to change the rules they don’t like.

This is no longer loyal opposition. Purely partisan interest is taking precedence over the national interest and the most basic principles of democracy are being flaunted in the process. All the Republican positioning and action is directed towards denying the Biden administration to implement its, admittedly ambitious, leftist agenda in the hope that a failed administration will hand them control of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024.  

This is no longer a tug of war between two ideologies, both firmly rooted in fundamental democracy, one left of center and the other one right of center, both fighting for the favor of a larger share of the voting public. The party at the right has been hijacked by people who are in the game only to protect their own perceived interest and are no longer encumbered by the guardrails of democracy. For today’s Republican party, the end justifies the means, and the end is to stay in power even if it represents only a minority of the population. It follows the abhorrent path charted by the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, which grabbed power from a minority position based on lies, conspiracy theories, and racism, enforced by terror and intimidation. Here at home, an estimated 14% of Americans believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and is still the legitimate President of the United States. But their reach is much longer than the number suggests, because of fear and intimidation. The fear of being 'primaried' if stepping out of line with the Trumpian gospel; the fear of not winning the next election and, maybe, never winning an election again; and the intimidation of being censured, ridiculed, and threatened by hordes of delusional fanatics like on January 6, 2021.

The principled, democracy loving, traditional Republicans who refuse to bend to this populist pressure have a hard choice to make. Will they put principle above power, the people above party and deny the disloyal opposition the power grab it is after? Will they go as far as creating a third party that is solidly positioned right of center and faithful to true conservatism and long-established democratic principles and rules? A tough choice to make, because it would most likely condemn both the Republican party and the third-party spin-off to minority status in Congress for a long time, even though they could viably contend for the White House with a strong and popular candidate. But a loyal opposition party could possibly find ways to reign in and contain the leftist impulses of the Democratic Party and cooperate on a bi-partisan agenda of all steps the nation so desperately needs: reduced inequality, voting right protection, social justice, economic stability, fiscal responsibility, and infrastructure enhancement.

OVER THEIR HEADS

The 46^th President of the United States has a problem, in fact several problems. He got his job, arguably the hardest job in the world, while he is 78 years old, an age at which most Americans are comfortably retired, trying to make the most out of their ‘golden years’ or what is left of those. The only reason why he took the job, in fact pursued it, is out of a sense of urgency, an urgency created by decades of benign neglect of the plight of the ordinary American citizens and the dereliction of duty by his predecessor, compounded by the worst pandemic inflicted on the nation in over a hundred years. The problem is that he is under extreme time pressure and that democracy denies him the tools to simply impose his will and agenda on a divided nation. The time pressure stems less from his advanced age than from the fact that he is at serious risk of losing his majority in Congress in the midterm elections of November next year.

President Biden has concluded that he needs to avoid losing control of Congress if he wants to have a full four years to make good on his campaign promises and he has chosen to make this happen by using the full force of the government to come to the aid of hard-pressed lower income Americans who have been disproportionally hit by decades of governmental neglect and by the devastating effects of the corona pandemic. He made his pitch Wednesday night, at the eve of his first 100 days in office, at a joint session of Congress, but really over the heads of the 200 legislators permitted in the chambers. He bets heavily on the premise that, ultimately, his Republican opposition cannot keep swimming against the tide of public opinion that heavily favors the main components of his agenda. In this he has a distinct advantage in the fact that the Republican party, under Trump, has decided to go without a platform and agenda, other than to oppose anything the Democrats want to get done.

At the heart of his pitch on Wednesday night was this appeal to his audience: “Look, we can’t be so busy competing with one another that we forget the competition that we have with the rest of the world to win the 21^st century.” Biden is keenly aware that the world, friend and foe alike, is watching to see if America can demonstrate that democracy is still the governing principle that can deliver for the people. And, in the prototypically Democratic style of FDR and Lyndon Johnson before him, he is unapologetically moving to use government as an instrument of social and economic transformation. His Republican critics are right in arguing that Covid relief and infrastructure improvements do not have to cost as much as the roughly $6 trillion that the Biden package amounts to. Calling a spade a spade, the Biden package is an ill disguised initiative to disperse the inequality cloud hanging over American society, by using the full force of the government to transform what our market economy and polarized partisan politics have not been able to correct. The economy seems to be recovering nicely with the stimulus put in place by Congress in five increments, starting under the Trump presidency, and does not require the proposed level of further spending, but restoring social equilibrium and peace does, at least in the judgment of President Biden.

He bets on the premise that if he cannot get sixty votes, sixty percent of the Senate, to agree with him on policy, he can still prevail by getting sixty percent or more of the voting public on his side. As it stands, the Monmouth University Poll indicates that with respect to his main initiatives, particularly his proposals for infrastructure investment, expanded healthcare and childcare, paid leave, and college tuition support, he garners more than 60% support from his constituents. The same poll suggests that a large majority also supports paying for these plans by raising taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals making more than $400,000/year.

The question is if this support will last and carry over into the only polls that really matter, the midterm elections of 2022. That, in turn, is likely to depend on how much of the plan can be implemented and provide tangible relief to the people who need it, before the people are called to the polls again.

Herein lies the Gordian knot that President Biden will have to unwind. I think he is right in arguing that America cannot win the competition with China, and democracy cannot win the competition with autocracy, if we continue to compete with ourselves. I also think that America cannot regain its status as the beacon of guidance to the world if it cannot demonstrate that it can overcome its own inequities, specifically its racial issues, its xenophobia, and, most of all, its rising inequality. As President Biden likes to say: “Our greatest strength is not the example of our power, but the power of our example.” He is right when he warns us that the autocrats of this day and age, and no one more that China’s president Xi, think that democracy cannot compete in the 21^st century with autocracies, because it takes too long, or proves impossible, to get consensus. We can only prove them wrong if we stop quarreling among ourselves and either vote to give one of our parties a popular mandate to govern or agree on a compromise agenda that can pass in an evenly divided congress, regardless who carries the majority.

Claiming, as President Biden does, that ‘America is back’ does not convince anyone unless we can demonstrate that we have regained control of a democratic (lower case) agenda. Otherwise, we will wonder, as world leaders do today, ‘yes, America is back, but for how long?’ Will the next election blow us off course again?

What the Biden proposals bring to the surface is that a chasm has developed between the political preferences of the members of Congress and the population at large. Not only, but mostly, on the Republican side of the aisle. This chasm is the result of primary driven moves towards the extreme wings of our two parties. The polls covering the Biden proposals bear out that the population at large is much less ideologically driven, much more practical, than its representatives in Congress would suggest. That is what Joe Biden is banking on and that is why, in his speech outlining and promoting his plan, he went over the heads of the parliamentarians, directly to the people, the people deciding who get to represent them in the legislative and executive branches of government. Will we listen? We will see the answer to that question the day after the November 2022 election.

WILL THE REAL AMERICA PLEASE STAND UP

I am old enough and have lived long enough in the USA to remember the TV show ‘To tell the truth’ and, almost 100 hundred days into the Biden administration, I keep asking myself the question that concluded every episode of the show: ‘Will the real America please stand up’?

The electoral process has put Joe Biden in the White House as the 46^th President, but the 45^th still claims that he won the election and many Americans, a large majority of Republicans, side with him. We knew that the nation was polarized, but to such extent? The President may be the titular head of the nation, but it cannot be said that the occupant of the White House is representative of the nation and what it stands for. Otherwise, how to explain the contrast in character between #45 and #46?

What will we see when the real America stands up? Will it look like a Trumpian America, an Obama-like America, a traditional establishment America, or still something else? The world, Americans included, is thoroughly confused about the true American identity.  And when the real America stands up, when will it be, and will we like what we see?

What we hope to see is a determined, tenacious America willing to assert its world leadership in every respect, economically, militarily, scientifically, democratically, and morally. Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, in a 2013 National Affairs article, reminded us that “Great powers are rarely brought down by outside adversaries; they destroy themselves from within. Very often, they do it by falling victim to economic imbalances and the decay of once-vibrant governing institutions that prove unable to adapt to changing circumstances.”

America, today, is at risk of internal strife, paralysis, and decay that its adversaries and competitors, China most of all, will only be too glad to take advantage of. America finds itself in this situation because it has been lacking, for decades now, a clear national strategy and competent administrations to execute. America has put itself deep in debt, without gaining anything, without addressing and solving any of the major challenges that put its hegemony in jeopardy. Its Congress has debased itself to becoming a platform for grandstanding, and a showcase for partisanship. It has proven to be incapable of legislating in a bi-partisan manner as demonstrated by the fact that all major legislative measures of the past three administrations, the Affordable Care Act, the Trump Tax Cuts, and Biden’s American Rescue Plan, have passed with only single party support. Congress has yet to demonstrate that it can pass meaningful, substantive, legislation unless the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives are all controlled by the same party. 

The onus is now on the Biden administration. It has until November of next year, only 17 months, to show that an effective, problem solving, administration can make a difference in the lives of ordinary Americans and fend off the traditional curse of a losing mid-term election after its first two years in office.

In the 21^st century, only George W. Bush has pulled this off, arguably only because of the afterglow of his handling of 9/11 and only in his first term.

All the political chatter today is about the Republican push to tighten voting access laws and gerrymandering voting districts as a means to enhance their electoral chances in November of 2022. The Democrats plan on countering these moves by trying to bring the HR-1 Voting Law, that has passed the House of Representatives in 2020, up for a vote in the Senate, while it still has control of the Senate and the White House. Both parties understand how crucial the outcome of the 2022 mid-term election is in determining their political fortunes and it is revealing for their current stance that they are pushing in opposite directions, for and against the widest possible access to the voting booth. The resulting stand-off cannot be resolved without congressional action, and that fact places the filibuster question front and center of the equation.

The Republicans are all too aware that the proposed changes in the voting rights laws, particularly as they relate to voting access, gerrymandering, mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, and campaign financing, will make it harder for them to compete for the White House and majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives. After all, according to the latest Gallup poll, Republicans represent only 25% of the population, versus 32% for Democrats and 41% for Independents.

This is not lost on President Biden, who has come up with a novel definition of bi-partisanship when he claims that his overly broad and expensive proposal for infrastructure is bi-partisan, because it seemingly has the support of a large majority of the population, including Republicans. This stance hints at a strategy to pursue between now and November of next year. The strategy seeks to drive a wedge between the Republican Congressional delegation and the Republican voters, claiming in effect that the Republican Congressional stance is not representatives of the preferences of Republican constituency at large. It might work if Biden’s infrastructure proposal, which he has dubbed the ‘American Jobs Plan’, can be carried through Congress under the reconciliation rule that does not require a 3/5^th majority vote in the Senate. It would still require negotiation and arm twisting to keep all Democrats, including Joe Manchin, in line. But that is a good thing, because there is little doubt that the proposal on the table is too rich and too broad to be effectively passed and implemented. If Biden manages to steer a sanitized American Jobs Plan through congress, and if it will be perceived to improve American lives, Republicans will have a hard time explaining to their constituencies why they voted against it. 

Passing a comprehensive voting rights bill is another matter. Here, Biden may have no choice but to negotiate with Joe Manchin cum suis for an exception from the filibuster rule, because this type of legislation certainly cannot pass under the reconciliation rule and there is no chance for him to pick up 10 Republican votes for the legislation on the table.

The best effort Biden can make for a win in November of 2022 is to convince the voters that the government has a role to play in improving their personal circumstances. He has done that by signing the American Rescue Plan that deals with the negative impact of the Covid19 pandemic, and he proposes to do (much) more of the same by his infrastructure proposal, dubbed the American Jobs Plan.

A Democrat loss in November of 2022 is not inevitable, if Biden manages to get the American public on his side by taking for most Americans the sting out of the Covid recession, by reducing the inequities in pay, taxation, housing, education, healthcare, and the criminal justice system, by revamping infrastructure in an environmentally conscious way, and by addressing family needs with respect to childcare and eldercare. That is a formidable task to be accomplished in very short order after decades of inaction. It will still require for the Democrats to put up strong candidates in the congressional races, candidates who wholeheartedly support the Biden agenda and appeal to the public at large. And it will require legislative discipline of not trying to do too much at once and avoiding ‘third rail’ issues like killing the filibuster rule and court packing. They may get help from the Republican party if, in their primaries, they give the upper hand to Trump fanatics. Ultimately, turn-out in response to recognition of what is at stake will be the deciding factor, much like it was in 2020. Which is why the battle about voting rights rages.

A wild card in this strategizing of domestic policy and tactics is what happens beyond our borders. Any plan can be derailed by foreign threats like China moving on Taiwan, Russia moving on Ukraine, a Middle East conflict, or a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. All bets are off when the USA gets embroiled in yet another foreign conflict. God help us if that happens.

The truth is that America is in desperate need of domestic problem resolution. It has lost tremendous respect in the world by seriously flawed and inconsistent leadership and by failure to acknowledge and correct its societal shortcomings. One may, or may not agree, with all aspects of the Biden agenda, but denying the Biden administration a governable majority in Congress will only be a recipe for further stalemate and inaction. I hold out hope that, by the process of deliberate, targeted, government action and public response, we will see the real America stand up and reveal itself by the end of 2022. May it be an America that we can all believe in, be proud of, and stand behind.

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.

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!