The last time a Democratic president took control of the White House, the wreckage he inherited was so great, there was little else his incoming team could prioritize.
Twelve years ago, Barack Obama’s blunt-spoken chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, liked to describe the Republican legacy – a financial crisis, deep recession and two wars – as a giant shit sandwich wrapped in a red ribbon.
Recovering from the economic crisis of George W Bush’s final year would require most of the Obama team’s focus in their first two years, when they controlled both sides of Congress with large majorities. Obama handed over his signature campaign issue – winding down the war in Iraq – to his vice-president to manage.
Now that former vice-president takes over the presidency with even more wreckage to sift through.
Joe Biden must overcome a pandemic, rebuild an economy, tackle racist insurrectionists and the ex-president who incited them, and reassert American leadership across a distrustful world. Somehow he must do all that while also confirming his senior officials in a Senate with no working majority.
So far the Biden team shows no sign of limiting its ambition in terms of what it hopes Congress will take up – and what it will push through executive action – in its first days and weeks in power. In addition to signing a flurry of executive orders, rejoining the Paris climate accords and restarting the Iran nuclear deal, Biden will also propose sweeping immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented.
Comprehensive reform of the nation’s broken immigration system proved beyond the capabilities of both Bush and Obama. It was Bush’s failure to enact immigration reform in 2007 that effectively marked the end of his second-term agenda, as Republicans turned towards a nativist agenda that Donald Trump placed at the heart of his campaign and presidency.
The Biden team may be marking a sharp break with the Trump years in prioritizing immigration reform. But what are their realistic prospects for legislative progress in the first year of the Biden presidency?
Obama veterans think there may be one good reason why Biden can feel more optimistic about political progress than their own experience in 2009, when Republicans obstructed their action from the outset, would dictate. That reason is the legacy of one Donald Trump.
“I think the difference between this and 2009 is that I believe there’s going to be a significant number of Republicans in Congress who think that their party needs a course correction here,” said Joel Benenson, who served as strategist and pollster to both Obama and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns.
“It doesn’t mean they are suddenly going to be liberal Rockefeller Republicans, but the damage that Trump has done to the party and its image – and it has exacerbated through the events of the last two weeks – is giving them pause.
“I don’t think it’s a major shift ideologically, but they have to recognize they are losing large and important sections of the electorate, and that’s going to be problematic for them. They know for their long-term prospects they can’t just be a base party. The biggest political failure of Donald Trump is that he didn’t fundamentally understand that to win the presidency, you have to win the center.”
At the heart of that calculation is the singular figure of Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who now finds himself in the minority after six years of control. McConnell was effective as an obstructionist force through the end of the Obama presidency, but he also can be a pragmatic figure when it comes to gaining and holding power.
Recent polling underscores McConnell’s challenge: the majority of Republicans are fundamentally misaligned with the majority of the country. Almost two-thirds of the party falsely believes that Trump won last year’s election, according to polling by the Pew Research Center. The same polling showed that more than two-thirds of Americans do not want Trump to play a major political role moving forward, giving him the lowest approval rating of his presidency at just 29%.
Congressional Democrats aim to test McConnell’s approach – and his main lever of power, the filibuster – with their first legislation, which would expand voting rights and reform campaign finance.
The so-called For The People Act, which passed the House in 2019, aims to tackle gerrymandering and “dark money” donations, and expand voting rights through initiatives such as a national voter registration system. If McConnell filibusters the bill, there will be immediate pressure for Democrats to abolish the filibuster through a change in the Senate rules requiring 51 votes.
Senator Jeff Merkley, the Oregon Democrat who has introduced the new bill, said: “Each and every one of us takes an oath to protect and defend the constitution. There’s nothing more fundamental than the ability to vote. That should not be subject to a veto by McConnell. If he exercises a veto, it will cause everyone to figure out how to honor their oath to the constitution that requires us to pass this legislation.”
Merkley believes that Democrats can achieve a lot in Congress by using budget reconciliation rules that allow taxing and spending legislation – including climate-related policies – to pass by simple majority votes. But policy changes such as immigration reform will need 60 votes to overcome a likely Republican filibuster, and Merkley expects McConnell to continue with his approach from the Obama years.
“I think McConnell is deeply wedded to the strategy of delay and obstruction,” he said. “It has been his fundamental theory of power that if you show the majority in place isn’t getting the job done, it strengthens your case to replace them.”
In two years, one-third of the Senate will be up for re-election, representing the class of 2016, when Trump won the presidency, and the senators at risk are overwhelmingly Republican – including Republicans from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Biden won last year.
The historical trend is clear: the president’s party tends to lose seats in the first mid-term congressional elections. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all lost control of the House in their first mid-terms. The one president who bucked the trend was George W Bush, in the first elections after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
It’s unclear how the domestic terrorism threat of white supremacist groups – and this month’s insurrection at Capitol Hill – will play out in the next several months, as Trump’s second impeachment trial begins and federal investigations continue to unfold with criminal prosecutions across the country.
“The congressional Republican party in the House and the Senate are going to have to be very careful about how they choose to obstruct and govern in the aftermath of the insurrection at the hands of the president they refused to stand up to,” said Benenson. “They could get labeled as complicit with the leaders of the worst episode we have seen since the civil war. They have to be mindful of that.”
