“IT IS ALWAYS darkest just before the day dawneth.” The greatest line in putting a brave face on adversity was penned by a colourful soldier-parson, Thomas Fuller, during the English Civil War. Four centuries later Joe Biden’s supporters in Washington, DC, can be heard muttering the same consolatory hope.
These are dark times for the Democratic president. The economic recovery has slowed dramatically. Burdened by supply glitches and the resurgence of covid-19, the economy grew by just 2% over the summer. Mr Biden’s big ambitions to pass a first national climate policy and hugely expand the safety net meanwhile ran into the congressional sand. Every Republican rejected his plans. That left Democratic senators needing to agree on them unanimously, and they could not. The bungled retreat from Afghanistan compounded these problems, triggering a slide in his approval ratings from which Mr Biden has not recovered. Only Donald Trump was more unpopular at this early stage in a presidential term.
As one of the first states to go to the polls after a general election, Virginians have a long tradition of taking new presidents down a peg. Of the eight gubernatorial elections held in the state since 1989, the incumbent president’s party has lost seven. Democrats thought they had a fair chance of avoiding that fate on November 2nd. Virginia has moved to the left in recent years. Moreover, their candidate to be its next governor, Terry McAuliffe, was the only recent exception to its anti-incumbency record—in 2013, when he won a previous spell as the state’s governor while Barack Obama was in the White House. Yet opinion polls suggest his race against Glenn Youngkin, a self-funding private equity boss, is too close to call. And the momentum appears to be with the Republican.
Given the state’s history, a loss for Mr McAuliffe was always likelier than Democrats thought. But it would be another bad blow for Mr Biden, not least as an indicator of where the wind is blowing ahead of next year’s mid-term elections. They also tend go against the president’s party. And the Democrats’ tiny congressional majorities mean that would mean them losing control of the Hill. Given the disloyalty of the Republican opposition, that in turn suggests Mr Biden’s tricky current opportunity to pass legislation may be the only one he gets. In politics, things can always get worse.
That is why the Democrats’ ongoing intraparty negotiation over his climate and social policies matters so much. The president and the Democratic congressional leaders—Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House—had wanted to pass the fat budget bill they have squeezed the policies into by the end of October, ahead of Virginia’s elections and COP-26. That would also have enabled Mrs Pelosi to pass a bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill—authorising $579bn of new spending on roads and bridges and the like over five years—that House progressives have made hostage to progress on the budget bill. Instead, ahead of his departure for Europe and the COP, Mr Biden was able only to outline the much-reduced budget package his party seems able to agree on.
Only by comparison with the president’s opening bid—a $3.5trn smorgasbord of emissions reduction, free community college and myriad other schemes—could that outline agreement look modest. It would amount to about half as much spending, mostly paid for by increased taxes on businesses and a sur-charge tax on the mega-rich. Yet by scrapping some of the relative luxuries in Mr Biden’s initial plans—such as free community college—and funding programmes such as child-tax credits for shorter periods than had been envisaged, Democratic leaders have kept most of his priorities. Even Senator Bernie Sanders, after weeks of griping at the couple of Democratic opponents of a more capacious budget bill, conceded that the end result could be “really quite consequential”.
Almost a third of the planned spending, around $555bn, would go on climate policies, including on expanded tax credits for renewable energy producers and consumers and a network of charging stations for electric vehicles. Another $400bn would be spent on providing free pre-school for all three- and four-year-olds and subsidising childcare for most American families. Lesser priorities, such as affordable housing and job training programmes, have been drastically scaled down.
The most significant omissions from the outlined agreement are a national paid-leave plan (which America, uniquely among rich countries, lacks), a proposal to penalise utilities for failing to shift to renewables, and another to negotiate down the cost of prescription drugs. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has strong political and business ties to the coal industry, objected to the first two. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona nixed the third, but has negotiated a watered-down alternative with the White House which could yet make it into a final deal.
There is no reason to think Mr Biden’s hurried outline will help him much in Virginia or Glasgow. Indeed, for now it has triggered a new round of intra-Democratic recrimination and horse-trading, over drug-pricing and other loose ends. But the impression of chaos many have taken from this is exaggerated. With no margin for slippage, Mr Biden’s lawmaking is bound to be fraught, and could yet founder. But his party appears to be grudgingly behind the outlined agreement. The House progressives who blocked the bipartisan infrastructure bill have formally endorsed it. Mr Manchin and Ms Sinema have not; but given that they negotiated it, it seems likely that they will. Mr Schumer and Mrs Pelosi will try to get the outline written into a bill, and conceivably voted on, by the end of the week.
The signing of both infrastructure and budget bills into law would be a triumph for Mr Biden. He would then have produced three major pieces of legislation (following the passage of the $1.9 trillion covid-19 relief bill in March) in his first year. Taken together, they would not have produced the New Deal-style makeover Democrats were dreaming of. Mr Biden’s agenda would have plugged a lot of gaps and produced lasting change. But whether this success (which is not to be counted on) would constitute a new political dawn for the president is another matter.
Where the Republicans tend to disregard lawmaking, Democrats consistently exaggerate the importance voters attach to it. Approval ratings tend to be determined more by fundamental conditions—such as the state of the economy and public health—than the passing of tax credits. And the fundamentals are not in Mr Biden’s favour.
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October 31, 2021 at 07:00AM
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Joe Biden's big, difficult week - The Economist
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