A return to unity and normalcy. This was the promise President Joe Biden made at his inauguration and throughout his campaign. However, if the gridlocked political climate we’ve seen as of recent is the normal he dreamed of presiding over, it could spell some trouble for his party come 2022. Polling by Gallup has shown a generally downward trend among Americans’ approval of Congress since former President George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. Issues such as political gridlock have resulted in government shutdowns, a lack of progress and everyday Americans being left behind. With Biden’s hesitation to reform the rules that have caused gridlock and inaction, it seems like this state of American politics is here to stay, affecting the Democrats’ chances of maintaining control of Congress in 2022.
Case-in-point: Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda. As part of his calls for political unity across the country, Biden has strongly stuck to a self-imposed rule that his agenda has to be passed with bipartisan support. This has resulted in his “Build Back Better” agenda being split into two bills. One bill would be a progressive safety-net expansion, which would provide free community college among other social programs and could pass through a process known as budget reconciliation that would require all 50 conflicting Senate Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris to vote in support of the bill. The other bill would be a much slimmer infrastructure package aimed at modernizing public utilities like roads and broadband. This second bill needed 60 votes to overcome the filibuster and pass the Senate, which required Democrats to work with Republicans and scale back some of Biden’s promises.
This frustrating stage is essentially where we’ve been at for the past couple of months, as neither of the two bills have passed both houses of Congress. The problems are two-fold: Biden’s reluctance to reform the filibuster — a Senate procedural move that would essentially require 60 votes to pass legislation — due to his fixation with bipartisanship and Biden’s inability to apply pressure on Democrats to get behind his agenda. Both play a huge role in causing his historic investments in infrastructure to stall and become diluted, going from a $6 trillion package to $4.5 trillion, with more cuts to both the costs and components to be made over the next few weeks as negotiations drag on.
Biden could have demanded to revert the filibuster procedure to how it was in the past — when a Senator would have to continuously talk for hours in order to stall a bill — instead of today’s rules which allow a single party to automatically kill a bill outright. The former would make it harder for an entire party to block Biden’s agenda. Yet, he has continuously voiced his opposition to filibuster reform for most legislative instances, careful to not disturb his fantasy of a “united” government where Congress will work itself out even if it takes a while.
Another problem comes in the form of a small faction of right-leaning Democrats who are poised to block Biden’s two bills in their current state. Citing an overindulgent amount of spending, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) have repeatedly lobbied Biden to scale back key parts of his plan, including climate action and the child tax credits, derailing major promises he has made. While Democratic lawmakers have frequently disagreed, Biden, as the highest ranking Democrat, has the pressing responsibility to get his party in line behind his vision at this urgent time. Yet, he has mostly taken a hands-off approach, again preferring to let Congress sort out their own issues. This has only resulted in more conflict and the appearance that he is an ineffective leader.
Biden’s relaxed attitude to both filibuster reform and to intra-party conflict has created a very real threat to the Democrats’ ability to stay in power after the 2022 midterm elections. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s approval ratings have now plummeted to 43.6% as of Oct. 25 after steadily declining from an all-time high of 55.1% in mid-March. The timing of that high coincided with the passage of his American Rescue Plan, which was the last time his administration has managed to pass a landmark piece of legislation. Furthermore, the American Rescue Plan was not a bipartisan bill but still received a 61% approval rating from the public. These developments have shown that Americans want Biden to be a more assertive leader and deliver on his promises by any means necessary.
Biden needs to start using hardline tactics to get his party members in line and to keep Republicans from obstructing his agenda. Voters are tired of the decades of Congressional inaction and will not show up at the polls as enthusiastically if it continues. If he does not respond to these sentiments and pass his agenda swiftly, it could very well depress liberal voter turnout and give Republicans control of Congress next year.
Johnny Nguyen is an Opinion Intern for the 2021 fall quarter. He can be reached at johnnln1@uci.edu.
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