So, Democrats have bare majorities in both the House and Senate, and they have the White House. They don’t have the Supreme Court.
Because the margin is so low, the people who will rule are those willing to cross the aisle to work with Republicans. Pelosi is fairly good at enforcing discipline, but Schumer is not, so we’re back into an era where right-wing Democrats will have a veto on a lot of legislation, as will the Supreme Court.
Because Biden is conservative in the psychological sense, he is unlikely to pack the Supreme Court unless they cross him in a big way, but because of the time-lag between when legislation is passed and when the Supreme Court strikes down the parts it doesn’t like, it’s unlikely he’ll have the emotional impetus to tackle the Supreme Court before the 2022 elections.
There is good news. $2,000 checks have become Democratic consensus, and they’re likely to pass. I do expect Biden to be more competent administratively, since while lazy, he will hire people who are at least capable of getting out of bureaucrats’ way and letting them do their jobs. (We’re not talking actual competence in most cases, remember how the Obama administration couldn’t handle the Obamacare roll-out. But at least they shouldn’t be throwing mail sorting machines into the garbage and so on. Little deliberate sabotage.)
The Biden environmental team is the one group that activists seem actually happy about. I’m still leery on this, given the Obama/Biden record on fracking and Biden’s statements about the issue, but I think if there’s one area that is likely to be better than one would expect given Biden’s record it’s environmental issues.
This is buttressed by the fact that the House rules waive Pay-Go for two areas: Covid and the environment. AOC and the Squad have claimed credit, but I think the real credit goes to Biden; these are the two areas he seems serious about and Pelosi does usually cooperate with Democratic Presidential agendas.
I would think this won’t mean anything too radical, but we can expect that parks and reserves will be protected and expanded, pollution rules likewise, and endangered species lists taken seriously. Serious subsidies for renewable energy seem likely. It is possible we may get a green rollout across the federal civil service, which is a bigger deal than it seems, as it covers a lot of buildings and vehicles and it helps set up a domestic market for green firms if handled properly.
Biden’s other priority seems to be Covid. I don’t know how serious or competent he will be, but the current rollout of vaccines has been pathetic. A proper mobilization, if necessary using the military and the National Guard, would make a big difference. It’s clear that the US isn’t going to get past Covid without mass vaccination, as US states won’t do proper lockdown, track and trace, or provide proper support to people who stay home.
The issue here is whether Biden and Pelosi will provide enough economic stimulus and support to create a good economy so that Democrats keep the Senate and House in 2022. If they run as much as possible through the Covid and environmental pay-go exception, then the answer may be yes, but the insane opposition from centrist economists and wonks to the $2,000 check shows that means-testing and economic throttling is still Democratic party orthodoxy. They just don’t believe in giving everyone money, bullying the Fed into keeping interest rates low, and letting the economy roar.
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If they give into the neoliberal tendencies of these apparatchniks, Biden will lose the House and probably the Senate in 2022, get impeached, and be a lame duck from 2023 on.
There’s reason to believe this is what they’ll do, simply because they still insisted on putting in the pay-go restrictions. Why have them at all, unless you really believe in them and want to use them to throttle spending on anything you don’t want (like Medicare for all)? By attaching that rule, Democrats have indicated that they’re not really interesting large programs which will have a huge economic effect and ensure they retain control of the House and Senate.
I hope Biden is a good President, and better than I expect. Realistically, he’ll be awful in a lot of ways, especially in foreign affairs and civil liberties. We can hope that he’s good on the environment, handles Covid better than Trump, and runs an economy that doesn’t suck.
But I suspect he won’t have the guts to do what is necessary. He won’t forgive 50K in student debt, for example. He’s not a radical, he’s been one of the key implementers of neoliberalism over the last 50 years, and he’s unlikely to go hard against its orthodoxy. He’s willing to act on environmental issues because neoliberalism is finally coming around to realizing they should do something about that. That “something” is won’t be enough, and they plan on making the peons pay for it instead of rich people, but it’s “something.”
Otherwise, Biden is still a means-testing neoliberal who thinks that if someone is poor they deserve to be poor, and that the rich are rich because they deserve to be rich.
So he’s likely to not do enough, and become a lame duck in 2023.
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It’s traditional on New Year to either do a retrospective or a look forward. Let’s look forward to 2024.