The Biden-Harris mandate: fight for your own side!

Heather Cox Richardson gives us this historical reminder in a 12/01/2020 Facebook post:

There is an increasing feeling of desperation coming from the White House. Trump continues to insist he won the 2020 election, although the states whose results he has challenged have all certified their votes for Joe Biden. Biden has tallied more than 6 million votes more than Trump, including significant majorities in all the states Trump claims, in the biggest win for a candidate challenging an incumbent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt challenged Herbert Hoover in 1932. [my emphasis]

Biden got a mandate for change. He needs to use it to maximum effect. The mandate is not to kiss up to intransigent Republicans or to spend two years seeking an impossible goal of harmonious Bipartisanship. It's to get constructive things done that a Republican President wouldn't even attempt.

The policies on which he won a mandate are laid out the Democrats' unity program.

Only a tiny fraction of Democratic voters will have read even a few pages of that document, which is an all-too-typical Democratic laundry-list rather than a thematic manifesto of some kind.

But there are some painfully obvious priorities for the new administration to address the mandate for substantive change:

• getting a grip on the COVID-19 pandemic, including immediate aid to individual and state/local governments
• make visible and effective public investments to combat the economic depression under way and stop the wave of evictions and mortgage defaults that are a part of it
• start getting real about the climate crisis
• make the Post Office function normally
• stop brutalizing and terrorizing refugees and other immigrants
• make serious federal efforts to hold local governments and individual police officers responsible for racial murders
• limit the flood of big-donor money poisoning and corrupting American politics.

And to achieve any of these things, the Biden-Harris Administration will have to fight the Republicans, who will try to obstruct it all. With today's authoritarian, Trumpified, QAnon-ized, Mitch McConnell-led Republican Party, there isn't going to be any broad consensus from large bipartisan majorities on anything more controversial that Mother's Day resolutions. And the Republicans may even try to load that up with some poison-pill rightwing content.

Biden and Harris will have to do some serious political arm-twisting and be far more effective than the Obama-Biden Administration was in mobilizing public opinion to support vital legislation. They will have to rely on Executive action for at least mitigation measures when Congress blocks legislation.

And they will have to be perceived by their own base voters and the public more generally as clearly fighting for their own side.

It shouldn't be necessary to state something so basic. But after the Obama-Biden Administration's weak, bizarre, failed pursuit of Bipartisanship for its own sake, it does need to be stated explicitly.

Jeff Spross stressed the importance of establishing a stronger reputation of the Democratic Party for supporting policies for the good of ordinary people and showing it will fight against the Republicans to achieve them (Joe Biden’s Four-Year Plan The American Prospect 11/10/2020):

Drawing on history, political science has a pretty good idea what specific characteristics policies should have to create that feedback of voter goodwill leading to large, durable majorities. Social Security and Medicare are the gold standard: benefits that are generous, that go to large swaths of the population, and that are designed and delivered in a straightforward way, so that voters can clearly see they’ve received the benefit, and from whom. As a demographic, seniors moved from an irrelevance to a major electoral force because those policies gave them a stake in governance and something to fight for, plus the resources and material freedom to engage with politics and to organize.

Unfortunately, even when they’ve held total power, Democrats have spent the last several decades deliberately avoiding policy designs that do this. They’ve approached big, ambitious public investment with trepidation; they’ve gravitated toward programs, such as Obamacare and endless tax credits, that are targeted, modest, delayed by years, and delivered through byzantine systems. [my emphasis]

And he reminds us that many such actions can be accomplished by Executive action:

If Biden’s White House feels like getting really ambitious, law and public-policy professor Robert Hockett recently argued that many aspects of a major infrastructure bill and a Green New Deal could be accomplished with powers already at the disposal of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. There’s even a section of law that says the executive branch can give anyone Medicare coverage if they’ve suffered a harmful “environmental exposure.” Since the whole country is at risk from a pandemic right now … Medicare for All by presidential decree, anyone?

It's obvious that such benefit programs are better established by legislation than by Executive action because that makes them more durable and more reliable in the minds of the public.

But Biden-Harris should use the opportunity to take such actions, for instance, by extending Medicare coverage to people who have been suffered serious symptomatic COVID-19 infections. Put the Republicans in the position of condemning that action and threatening to take it away if they regain the Presidency. Fight for your own side.