Asymmetric partisan polarization and the Senate filibuster

Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) explains his view on Why partisanship will increase in the post-Trump era MarketWatch 01/04/2021.

He stresses an extremely important lesson about the experience of the Obama-Biden Administration on fiscal policy that Biden-Harris need to apply immediately after they take office:

First and foremost, there is fiscal policy: the federal government’s use of spending and taxation, in this case to facilitate an economic recovery. The Republicans will try to block most helpful spending as much as possible, perhaps most important as a fundamental part of their political strategy.

They learned something from the Great Recession of 2008-09. They fought and reduced Democratic stimulus plans—which were not big enough to begin with—as much as possible. The end result was unemployment in October 2010 was still at 9.4%; and millions more jobs were lacking if we look at the decline in employment since the recession, rather than the unemployment stats only.

This was a resounding success, from their point of view. In the November 2010 elections, Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House, flipping control of the chamber, and gained six seats in the Senate.

The Biden-Harris Administration faces both the need to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic itself and with the recession that coincided with it, which officially began in February 2020.

So far, there seems to be no looming financial crisis on the horizon. And Paul Krugman still seems to be expecting something like a V-shaped (i.e., rapid) recovery once the COVID vaccine can achieve herd immunity. But the vaccination rollout is starting very slowly in the US. And it's clear that the Trump-Pence Administration had no vaccine distribution plan worth the name. So even if we get a V-shaped recovery, it's not likely to take obvious effect until sometime in 2022.

As Weisbrot writs:

Much more spending will be necessary just to pull the economy back to the levels of employment and unemployment that we had before the COVID recession, and to help the millions who have been hurt by the pandemic. We still don’t even know how much worse the pandemic itself will get before the effects of vaccination can seriously reduce infection rates.

Yet Republicans have fought tenaciously—even contributing to their own loss of the presidency—in order to block desperately needed funding for health care and education to state governments.

In other words, the economic situation is so similar to 2009 and the asymmetric partisan polarization in the US has gotten very much worse. So there's every reason to believe the Republicans will continue to run the same kind of obstructionist strategy against Biden-Harris that they ran against Obama-Biden. And, as Weisbrot rightly says, it was "a resounding success, from their point of view." In fact, as we see in the fight over the second relief package, they have already put it into motion.

The worst months of the COVID pandemic and of the recession will happen under the new Administration. And they will need to move quickly on actions like state and local government funding that require Congressional approval. Just blocking support for state and local governments for a few months will be more than enough to drastically raise unemployment and make recovering from the recession notably more difficult. And the Republicans will try to blame the Democrats for that, just like they did successfully with Obama.

That's why it's so critical for the new Democratic Senate to abolish the filibuster rule. The Republicans were remarkably effective at obstruction in 2009 when the Democrats had a large majority in the Senate, not a razor-thin one like in 2021.

In fact, it's so critical that if the Senate does not eliminate the filibuster, I'm going to assume that is the result of a conscious decision by Biden, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi. Even though it's technically the Senate's decision with Kamala Harris to break a tie vote, that is so critical to what the new Administration can get enacted in the critical 201-2 period that I don't believe keeping the filibuster would happen unless all three leaders agree. I don't care how much of a weenie Joe Manchin is. This is where Biden has to use all those years to Senate dealmaking to make sure all 50 Democratic Senators are on board with abolishing the filibuster.

The filibuster provided Obama a theatrical excuse for not approving the public option in the Affordable Healthcare Act, in which Joe Lieberman became the decisive figure in killing the public option, as Ryan Grim relates in Chapter 11 of his book We've Got People (2019). Obama had already agreed with the health-insurance lobbies that the public option would not be included. According to Ryan's account, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid seems to have made a serious and nearly successful push to get it in the ACA. But Lieberman nixed it in the end, relying on his ability to vote with the Republican to block debate - and he was backed up by Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. And those reluctant to recognize or admit 5Obama's conservative streak could shrug their shoulders and say, "Gee, what could we do? We tried. And the Republicans blocked us." (See also: Max Fisher, Why Obama Dropped the Public Option The Atlantic 02/24/2010; Miles Mogulescu, NY Times Reporter Confirms Obama Made Deal to Kill Public Option Huffpost 05/16/2010)

BTW, the Democratic Senate in 2009 could also have abolished the filibuster and chose not to.

Neera Tanden's Center for American Progress (CAP) has an explanation of the filibuster, which takes not of its very undemocratic nature in an institution like the Senate, where the population of the smaller states is already very disproportionately represented. "Consider that the 21 states with the fewest residents, who collectively have enough Senators to filibuster legislation, make up only 11 percent of the total population." (Alex Tausanovitch and Sam Berger, The Impact of the Filibuster on Federal Policymaking 12/05/2019)