History Matters, Democratic Gripers

Excessive Concern over Joe Biden’s Ability to Successfully Steer His Agenda Ignores Historical Realities

Joe Biden’s approval ratings sank for several months, in part due to his struggle to successfully steer congressional Democrats into passing his agenda. Although the House of Representatives finally passed the bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill forged in the summer, questions remain about the larger bill that seeks to address the climate catastrophe while also bolstering children and the elderly. In fact, in October, CNBC’s Donny Deutsch noted on Morning Joe that his liberal New York friends often complain that Biden’s hands do not seem to be on the wheel.

To a large extent, these concerns ignore the paradoxical nature of what Biden is attempting to accomplish. Even if senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona succeed in significantly reducing the scope of the president’s “Build Back Better” agenda, Biden is still attempting the most comprehensive and ambitious set of domestic reforms since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s (which included, among other measures, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start). And even if Biden cannot quite become another LBJ or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he is still aiming to be a more “transformational” president than his most recent Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter. Obama proved “transformational” by virtue of his skin color, biracial heritage, and multicultural background, but his governing agenda proved less sweeping. His effort to achieve universal health insurance and protect consumers in the health insurance marketplace— the Affordable Care Act — proved profound, long overdue, and controversial, but its social scope was limited. Clinton unsuccessfully attempted a similar effort early in his first term, but otherwise, his domestic politics and policies proved mostly centrist. Indeed, his greatest domestic achievement became his fiscal stewardship as he turned record deficits into record surpluses (the latter of which would soon be squandered by his Republican successor, George W. Bush). Like Clinton, Carter was a Democrat of the New South: liberal in matters of racial integration and civil rights, but more cautious and conservative fiscally, emphasizing frugality, deregulation, and economic growth. Carter created the Department of Energy and his calls for transforming energy consumption proved decades ahead of the curve, but to the consternation of many liberals in his party, he did not promote a substantial expansion of the social safety net.

Biden’s agenda, then, is much more dramatic and multifaceted that what most Americans have experienced in their adult lifetimes. In seeking to rebuild America’s crumbling bridges, roads, and pipes while dramatically expanding access to broadband and electric charging stations, Biden is compensating for generations’ worth of domestic underinvestment. In seeking to provide better care for children and the elderly and to create universal pre-kindergarten, Biden is compensating for decades’ worth of domestic underinvestment. In seeking to relieve the economic burden on workers with children and aging parents, Biden is addressing the wage stagnation and growing wealth gap that have plagued the US since the late 1970s. In seeking to finally address the climate cataclysm in a comprehensive manner, Biden is following in the footsteps of Carter — something that should have started happening forty years ago.

In other words, the current president is attempting major compensatory initiatives, much like FDR in the 1930s and LBJ in the 1960s. The difference is that in those two great eras of progressive change — the only such epochs within the last century — Democrats enjoyed enormous majorities in both chambers of Congress. In the US Senate, Republicans never featured as many as 40 senators at any point in Roosevelt’s twelve-year reign in the White House. By the last two years of his first term, the Grand Old Party only possessed 25 senators. Then, stunningly, after FDR’s landslide reelection in 1936 (in which he won every state except for Maine and Vermont and gobbled up 60.8 percent of the vote), Republicans found themselves with only 16 senators — in 1937 and 1938, Democrats enjoyed a staggering 60-seat senatorial margin, 76–16.

The situation proved similar in the other congressional chamber. For instance, in Roosevelt’s first two years as president, 1933 and 1934, Democrats held a gargantuan 313–117 edge over Republicans in the House of Representatives. (There were also five members of the Farmer-Labor Party, a third party with goals similar to the Democrats and who eventually merged with the Democrats, meaning that FDR’s coalition essentially enjoyed a 201-seat advantage over Republicans during those two years.) That margin only increased over the course of the next two congresses, to the point where in 1937 and 1938, Democrats enjoyed an edge of nearly 250 seats in the House (especially when accounting for left-leaning third-party representatives). Indeed, not until the penultimate Congress of Roosevelt’s presidency (and, tragically, his life), in 1943 and 1944, was the Democratic advantage in the House remotely close to the current situation that Biden must deal with. And by then, of course, the Great Depression was over. While America’s entrance into World War II ended the depression, FDR’s vast Democratic majorities had enabled him to alleviate the depths of the economic despair, passing one landmark law after another during the 1930s, often with lightning speed.

Similarly, Lyndon Baines Johnson could pass his Great Society legislation and social programs due to massive Democratic advantages in both chambers of Congress. In the Senate, Republicans never enjoyed more than 36 of 100 seats during Johnson’s five-plus years as president from November 22, 1963, until January 20, 1969. Indeed, at the zenith of LBJ’s power and the height of the Great Society, in 1965 and 1966, the Democratic Party held a 68–32 senatorial edge, meaning that more than two-thirds of all US senators were Democrats. In the House of Representatives, too, Democrats enjoyed steep margins; at the peak of the Great Society, in 1965 and 1966, they outpaced Republicans by 155 seats, 295–140.

Of course, in the eras of both Roosevelt and Johnson, there were plenty of southern conservative Democrats, the base of the party ever since the Confederacy and the Civil War. Those southern Democrats — commonly known as “Dixiecrats” — torpedoed any prospect of a federal anti-lynching law during FDR’s presidency, and they threatened to do the same to Johnson’s initiatives on civil rights and voting rights in the mid-sixties. But because LBJ enjoyed such enormous margins, he — like FDR on economic bills — could afford to lose quite a few Democratic congressmen and still score legislative victories. Moreover, the Republican Party during Roosevelt’s presidency and especially Johnson’s was much more moderate than the current GOP. On matters of racial equality and civil rights, it still resembled the “Party of Lincoln” from the 1860s and 1870s, the party that stood against the expansion of slavery into new Western states and territories, that eventually abolished slavery by constitutional amendment in 1865, and that then embraced equal rights for black folks over the course of the next decade.

Thus when Johnson needed to overcome a 1964 filibuster launched by members of his own party — southern Democrats like him who, unlike LBJ, had failed to evolve on the issue of civil rights — he found a willing partner in the form of Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, a Republican from Lincoln’s home state of Illinois. The result was not only that Johnson’s civil rights bill (inherited from the assassinated John F. Kennedy) overcame that filibuster, but it enjoyed sweeping GOP support as well. Of the 34 Republican senators, 33 of them voted on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and they voted affirmatively by a margin of 27–6. (Sadly, one of the six voting against it was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, soon to become the GOP nominee for president that summer. His opposition and subsequent triumph at the GOP convention in San Francisco heralded the beginning of the end for the Republican Party as the “Party of Lincoln” and the start of its long transformation into the “Party of Trump.”)

Now imagine President Joe Biden receiving an assist from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, in overcoming a filibuster that prevents new voting rights legislation from reaching the Senate floor. Or imagine McConnell rallying some Republicans to join Biden and the majority of the Democrats to vote for the “Build Back Better” bill, meaning that even if more conservative members of Biden’s party, such as Manchin and Sinema, fail to support the legislation, it can still pass. And now, just now, some of Biden’s liberal critics, hobnobbing with Donny Deustch in New York City, might come to understand what the current president is facing.

In contrast to the massive margins enjoyed by FDR and LBJ, Biden is confronting a split Senate, one evenly divided with 50 senators who belong to the Democratic caucus and 50 Republicans. Only with the tiebreaking vote of vice president Kamala Harris, and only on budget-oriented legislation that cannot be filibustered, can Biden squeak a progressive bill through the Senate. Faced by unified opposition from a deeply conservative Republican Party that has largely embraced the myth of black voter fraud seeded by southern Democrats during Reconstruction, Biden cannot afford to lose a single Democratic vote in the Senate. Similarly, in the House of Representatives, the president’s party harbors just a 10-vote edge, 222–212, the kind of margin that encourages centrism, moderation, and piecemeal or negligible tweaks rather than the liberal sea change that Biden is attempting to catalyze. (One might note, of course, that those progressive investments prove widely popular with the American public, including with large — in some cases staggering — shares of Republican voters, as I noted in an October article. After all, they are long overdue following decades of domestic underinvestment. But not a single Republican congressman is likely to support the social spending bill.)

For a moment, allow for a basketball analogy. Biden’s impatient liberal critics, those suggesting that his hands are not on the wheel because this process has been messy, complicated, and inching, are imagining that matters should play out in a classic fast break — a three-on-one or four-on-one scenario where teammates come flying down the court, pass the ball briskly, and punctuate the action with a dramatic slam dunk. But given Biden’s extremely narrow margins in Congress, such a situation was always implausible.

Instead, Biden has to — in basketball terms — dribble the ball up the court more slowly, surveying the floor as he initiates a half-court set against a matched-up, five-on-five defense. He needs to orchestrate a pick-and-roll, which means that he needs to wait until one of his teammates lumbers up and sets his feet, creating the pick. Even then, the play may not initially pay dividends, forcing Biden to run it again, with that same teammate resetting the pick. Only then might Biden be able to drive to the basket, but the defense might effectively collapse on him, shutting off both scoring opportunities at the rim and potential passes to perimeter shooters. Biden might have to drive underneath the hoop, along the baseline, and then reemerge all the way on the opposite wing, needing to try the pick-and-roll yet again, this time with a different teammate. He cannot afford to rush or force matters, lest he turn the ball over or clank a low-percentage shot. Biden might need to use nearly every second of the twenty-four-second shot clock, patiently probing until he finds a soft spot in the defense and the right opening emerges. This kind of game may not be as enthralling and entertaining for casual fans, resulting in lower television ratings (an analog for polling numbers), but Biden is playing to win, not to placate the legions of Americans who prove ignorant of both their country’s history and its governing structure.

Again, Biden is attempting something that is virtually unprecedented: major progressive change with marginal congressional majorities. In addition to the New Deal and the Great Society, both of which flourished thanks to the overwhelming majorities enjoyed by Democrats in both houses of Congress, one can look to the stunning civil rights measures passed during Reconstruction, in the aftermath of the Civil War in the mid-to-late 1860s and the early-to-mid 1870s. In those days, the party supporting racial justice, equality, and opportunity for black Americans was the Republicans, the “Party of Lincoln.” And because the former Confederacy had basically been entirely Democratic in party affiliation, the US Congress in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War proved largely Republican. (The secession of eleven southern states had fostered the defection or expulsion of numerous Democratic congressmen.) In fact, by the time that the war finally came to a close in April 1865, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by a margin of more than three to one in each chamber of Congress. Partly as a result, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery in the US, in January 1865, with the needed three-quarters of state legislatures ratifying the constitutional amendment in December of that year. Then the Republican-dominated Congress passed the law creating the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865, just prior to Lincoln’s assassination the following month. Known colloquially as the Freedmen’s Bureau, this new federal agency distributed clothing and food to newly freed former slaves. It also aided ex-slaves with labor contracts and schooling while renting to them land abandoned by (or confiscated from) Confederate planters. Indeed, by June 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau had settled almost ten thousand black families on half a million acres of Southern soil formerly owned by slavers. (See The American Promise: A History of the United States, vol. 1, To 1877, by James Roark, et al.)

Their overwhelming congressional majority allowed Republicans to not only pass major progressive legislation, but also to override the vetoes of Lincoln’s successor, the Democratic ex-slaveowner Andrew Johnson (whom Lincoln had selected as his running mate in 1864 as a show of bipartisan unity and in an effort to attract Democratic voters). The Tennessean Johnson had constituted the only senator from a Confederate state to remain loyal to the Union, but he was also a white supremacist eager to restore the Southern suppression of blacks. So after the Republican-dominated Congress passed a new bill to extend the duration of the Freedmen’s Bureau in early 1866, Johnson vetoed it. Initially, Congress barely failed to override Johnson’s veto, but the president’s nullifying action spurred Republicans to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Negating the discriminatory “black codes” that had sprouted in the Confederacy soon after the Civil War, this legislation asserted that blacks must receive the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as is enjoyed by white citizens.” The Civil Rights Act of 1866 thus outlawed the legal ability of states to discriminate against their black citizens.

When Johnson vetoed the act in the name of “states’ rights,” congressional Republicans passed it again — in April 1866 — and this time overrode the president’s veto. Inspired, congressional Republicans passed another version of the bill extending the Freedmen’s Bureau in July of that year and again overrode Johnson’s veto. They also introduced the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in April and passed it in June 1866. The amendment affirmed and enshrined black citizenship (and that of all native-born or naturalized individuals), thus canceling the legal conclusion of the Supreme Court’s notorious Dred Scott decision in 1857. And once the Fourteenth Amendment received ratification from three-quarters of the state legislatures in the US in 1868 and thus became part of the Constitution, it provided a constitutional guarantee of the principles laid out in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Indeed, Section 1 of the the amendment declared the following:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Here, indeed, was the emergence of the famous “equal protection” clause in the US Constitution. Furthermore, Section 5 of the amendment asserted that “the Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” thus providing the constitutional basis for the 1866 Civil Rights Act and future legislative measures such as the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Contrary to President Andrew Johnson’s mistaken belief, this flurry of civil rights activity failed to imperil Republicans in the midterm congressional elections of November 1866. Instead, Republicans slightly increased their majority, maintaining a margin of better than three to one over Democrats in Congress. And having only buttressed their congressional advantage, Republicans in 1867 elevated Reconstruction to another level.

First, they passed the Military Reconstruction Act and overrode Johnson’s veto on the very same day. That legislation, along with three subsequent versions also passed in 1867, divided the ten unreconstructed Confederate states into five military regions, each to be overseen by a Union general. Under this law, the US military then registered voters in these states, including black men while excluding the former Union officeholders-turned-Confederates barred from holding future office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. After voters elected delegates to state conventions, those delegates would draft new state constitutions that affirmed the right of black males to vote. If a state’s voters then approved the new constitution, and the legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the US Congress could then — if it so choose — seat elected representatives and senators from that Confederate state, basically welcoming it back into the Union. (Again, see Roark, American Promise.)

Despite modest gains by House Democrats in the 1868 midterm congressional elections, Republicans still enjoyed better than a 100-seat margin in the House and a 50-seat edge in the Senate, allowing them to pass the Fifteenth Amendment in February 1869. (President Johnson, chastened after being impeached by the House and nearly removed from office by the Senate in May 1868, did not bother to contest this progressive legislation in his final weeks in the White House.) This amendment, which became part of the US Constitution in March 1870 after three-fourths of state legislatures had ratified it, guaranteed universal black male suffrage by declaring in Section 1 that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Fifteenth Amendment thus rendered black male suffrage (or the enfranchisement of all male citizens) a constitutional right and extended it to northern states as well as the former Confederacy. And like the Fourteenth Amendment, it included a provision (Section 2) that stated, “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” hence fostering the constitutional basis for the epochal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Of course, terroristic white violence in the former Confederate states constantly threated to annihilate the benefits and protections provided by these laws. Consequently, in 1870 and 1871, Republicans used their still-substantial — if gradually eroding — congressional majorities to pass the Ku Klux Klan Acts. The last of the three laws, passed on April 20, 1871, declared that interfering with voting rights amounted to a felony and enabled the US Army to enforce the legislation. Relentless federal marshals subsequently arrested thousands of Ku Klux Klansmen and decimated the original incarnation of the Klan, although other white supremacist terror groups — essentially serving as the paramilitary wing of southern Democrats — continued the intimidation and assassinations to some extent. (The Klan itself would eventually enjoy a rebirth, but not until nearly fifty years had passed.)

Only by building, maintaining, and sometimes increasing massive congressional majorities could the liberal party of the era — the Republicans — usher in monumental social changes and constitutional amendments. Their majorities proved so overwhelming that they could not only enact a sweeping wave of legislation that spanned four congressional terms, but they could override the constant vetoes of a Democratic, white supremacist president, Andrew Johnson. (One might note that the last notable Reconstruction law, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, came after Democrats had reclaimed the House in the midterm congressional elections of 1874, following the crippling depression of 1873 in which over eighteen thousand businesses failed and more than a million American workers lost their jobs. But the Civil Rights Act of 1875 — the final federal civil rights legislation until 1957 and one that explicitly prohibited racial segregation in juries, transportation, and places of public accommodation — only came about after vast Republican majorities in Congress had created a new template in the preceding years.)

In other words, as with the Great Society and the New Deal, there is a lesson for progressives to learn from Reconstruction. In order to pass historic progressive legislation, whether it involves voting rights or a smorgasbord of social investments, Democrats — the modern liberal party — need to seek enormous congressional majorities. Maintaining a barebones-minimum advantage in each chamber of Congress and simply enjoying technical control is not enough. The fundamental problem here is not Joe Biden, but the skimpy majorities of the Democratic Party. Indeed, even when Barack Obama managed to sign the Affordable Care Act in 2010 — a relatively moderate, if landmark, piece of health insurance legislation — he enjoyed huge congressional majorities in both chambers, including (however briefly) a 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in 2009.

So rather than whine, Donny Deutsch and his liberal New York friends — along with progressives and Democrats across the country — need to examine American history and redouble their efforts. Regaining control of the White House and the Senate in 2021 should represent not the end, but the mere beginning of a Democratic tide. They now need to “flood the zone” with Democratic officeholders by reinvigorating their attempts to turn out Democratic voters in 2022 and beyond. Disillusionment will only produce degeneration, but history offers clarity. Again, the problem is not Joe Biden; the problem is that Joe Biden does not have enough to work with.