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THE SOURCE OF ALL DEMOCRATIC FRUSTRATION. During his speech in Tulsa Tuesday, President Biden tried to exhort Congress to pass the Democrats’ election “reform” bill that critics characterize as an unconstitutional federal imposition on the states’ authority to conduct elections. But at the same time, Biden explained why that probably won’t happen, at least without major changes to the bill.
“June should be a month of action on Capitol Hill,” Biden said. “I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why didn’t Biden get this done?’ Well, because Biden only has a majority of, effectively, four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”
Many observers focused on Biden’s mention of “two members of the Senate” who vote more with Republicans than Democrats. They took that as a shot at Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema, who have frustrated Biden and other Democrats by not going along with some Democratic schemes like eliminating the legislative filibuster. (The core of Biden’s statement, however, was false; neither Manchin nor Sinema votes more with Democrats than Republicans. They are Democrats and they vote like Democrats.
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The real key to Biden’s remarks was the phrase “a tie in the Senate.” It points to the Democrats’ fundamental problem in Washington. They are referred to everywhere as the majority party, with control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate. But in one of those bodies, the Senate, they do not, in fact, control a majority of seats. The Senate is tied, 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, with Democrats having nominal control only because Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties in their direction. So Democrats have control, but it is a very tenuous sort of control.
And yet Biden and his Democratic allies want to pass giant, historic, far-reaching legislative measures like the election bill and some multi-trillion dollar spending bills. The president likes it when others compare him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in the scope of his ambitions. But he can’t be FDR, and he can’t be LBJ, with just 50 votes in the Senate. They had huge majorities in the Senate; Biden doesn’t have a majority at all.
Democratic frustration is everywhere. Recently Senator Bernie Sanders expressed anger at the Republicans who did not vote to create a commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot. The vote should spur Democrats to eliminate the filibuster, Sanders said. “Let’s be clear,” Sanders tweeted. “If 10 Republican senators cannot even vote for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection, 10 Republican senators will not vote for anything meaningful to improve the lives of the American people. We must abolish the filibuster & act now.”
But why would Democrats need ten Republicans to vote with them to reach the 60 votes required to break a filibuster? Because Democrats have just 50 votes. If they had an actual majority in the Senate — say, 53 or 54 votes — they would need just six or seven Republicans to join them to hit the 60-vote goal. And, by the way, six Republican senators did vote for a commission, and a seventh said he would have voted for a commission had he been present. If Democrats held an actual majority of the Senate’s seats, they might well have gathered the 60 votes necessary to break a filibuster on the commission.
But they don’t have the votes. It’s as simple as that. And the one person who realizes that more than anyone is the president, who in another life spent 36 years in the United States Senate. During that time, Senator Biden was in the majority, and he was in the minority. There was even a brief period, just a few months, in 2001 when the Senate was tied 50-50 and it was impossible to get much of anything done. Now, with the Senate again tied 50-50, Biden knows what his problem is. The rest of the Democratic Party should realize it, too.
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