Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The promise of Joe Biden’s candidacy for president was his potential to assemble a coalition of progressives, liberal and moderate Democrats, and even disaffected conservatives looking for an alternative to Donald Trump. In 2020, this meant that Mr. Biden won a solid, but not landslide, victory.

In 2021, it means he has to govern with that coalition. Like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, he came in with an ambitious, even transformative agenda. And like those presidents, he leads a party that’s a jumble of interests and viewpoints. But those earlier Democratic presidents had numbers, and solid majorities, on their side.

After the latest twist by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia in the Build Back Better drama, Democrats are weathering a storm of accusations of being plain bad at politics. This is nothing new: As a party of representing many groups, Democrats have always struggled to nail down party priorities and deliver on their campaign promises. But what is new is that for the Biden administration, those challenges have been compounded by a very narrow majority, nationalized politics and new ideological currents.

Democrats, as ever, have to figure out how to represent a diverse group of voters with different interests and outlooks. It is even tougher in 2021 because they have to find a way to mend the disconnect between the party’s ability to assemble a broad coalition at the ballot box and the struggles it faces in legislating.

This combination of the old and new Democratic Party has left the Biden coalition in a holding pattern. What might look at first like problems with individual politicians is in fact several structural problems at once: the counter-majoritarian institutions in American government; the fuzzy balance of power among different forces within the party; and the difficulty of energizing a diverse set of interests around common goals.

Negotiating with pivotal senators who are more conservative than much of the rest of the party isn’t a new thing under Mr. Biden — it’s also the story of the New Deal. Roosevelt had to deal with several conservative Southern Democrats. Today, Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are actually in line with many recent Democratic proposals, but they can still extract concessions that don’t necessarily reflect the bulk of the party’s priorities.

Nationalized party politics make it more difficult for these senators to cultivate a local, personal brand. As a result, they have to work harder to draw media attention to their performances of political independence and willingness to push back against the president and congressional leaders. Because it’s harder for them to distance themselves from the national party brand, they’re harder to negotiate with.

The second change is the emergence of a strong and cohesive left wing within the Democratic Party. It’s true that the party is more uniformly liberal than it has been in the past. But this means different things. The so-called Squad and the rest of the Progressive Caucus bring both a more economically left perspective and a different vision on issues like race and criminal-justice reform. The presidential candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren showed that there’s solid support for moving to the left on economic issues — even if it’s not a majority of the Democratic coalition. In addition to appeasing the more conservative wing of the party, the Biden coalition also features tensions between this new progressive faction and more traditional liberals represented by members like Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It’s likely that a smaller, patchwork Democratic coalition is here to stay for a while. This means that they will still face some of the same problems Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson did — like risk-averse party members and vocal campaigns against expanding the welfare state — but without a key tool for getting things done: large majorities (or the possibility of regularly picking up Republican votes on major legislation).

As a result, Democrats might be doomed to more cycles of lengthy negotiations and under-delivering on progressive promises. But there are a few changes that could shake up which groups hold power within the party, making it more responsive to a broader range of its voters. One route is to strengthen social movements, which could both keep progressive issues like green energy and student debt on the public agenda and possibly help to elect more progressive Democrats. Such movements could also help to mobilize different groups of voters around shared priorities like health care and economic insecurity.

The other — which has drawn the most attention in the past year, though little progress — is institutional reform. This approach isn’t so much about enlarging the Democratic coalition as it is about reforming the rules of governance to allow a party that already regularly wins national elections to wield proportionate influence in governing. These proposals include filibuster reform and making Congress more proportional. Proponents argue that these changes would ease the veto power that less populated and more conservative areas of the country hold over the majority.

But the balance of power within the patchwork Democratic Party is not just about institutions, or even about narrow majorities. It’s also about the influence of wealthy interests over public opinion. The persistent inability of a majority party to enact policies that reflect the opinions of its constituents means that we ought to look at the forces at work. Mr. Manchin is an especially good example of this dynamic — powerful voices in West Virginia have come out in support of Build Back Better, but the senator has serious ties to the fossil-fuel industry. Ms. Sinema’s hesitance to support party priorities has also been linked to her ties to powerful industries rather than any ideology or what Arizona voters want.

These problems also require structural solutions — tightening regulations over conflicts of interest for members of Congress and enacting lobbying reform. The party’s survival may depend on its ability to represent its own voters and not the corporate interests that still have a powerful veto in the legislative process.

Finally, the party could scale back on its policy agenda. But recent history suggests that “change” candidacies — from Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders — resonate with an electorate that craves change, even if they can’t agree on what kind.

Many of the Democrats’ problems in the legislative process are not of their own making. But, fairly or not, Democratic leaders will need to think differently about how power flows through their coalition if they want to see their successes in electoral politics turn into policy achievements.

A quick review to get us up to speed for what promises to be a fraught week, launching a fraught year.

The big story of the new year is what we will learn from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, whose members have announced they will hold public hearings early in 2022. As the New York Times editorial board put it in the paper’s January 1, 2022, edition, “Every Day Is January 6 Now.”

The New York Times editorial board—which consists of opinion journalists who weigh in on important issues—warned that the attack on democracy we witnessed so traumatically on January 6 has not ended. It persists in ongoing threats to election officials, threats to murder opponents, and new state laws skewing elections toward Republicans.

“In short,” they wrote, “the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends.”

The board called for Republicans to be honest with their voters and to fight their party’s extremists. It called for Democrats to end the filibuster for voting rights legislation, at least. And it called for “Americans of all stripes who value their self-government” to “mobilize at every level…to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy.”

There were two stories that dropped late on Friday, December 31, New Year’s Eve, that reflect on the ongoing story of the attempt to undermine our democracy.

First, former New York City Police commissioner Bernard Kerik, a high-school dropout who began a meteoric rise to prominence after working as Trump loyalist Rudy Giuliani’s chauffeur and bodyguard, delivered documents to the committee. Convicted in 2010 of tax fraud, ethics violations, and making false statements to loan officers and the federal government when being investigated for government positions, Kerik has been fiercely loyal to Trump, who granted him a full pardon in February 2020.

The documents Kerik’s lawyer delivered on Friday included a 22-page document titled "STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS PLAN—GIULIANI PRESIDENTIAL LEGAL DEFENSE TEAM.” Its subtitle was “We Have 10 Days To Execute This Plan & Certify President Trump!”

The document laid out a pressure campaign directed at “SWING STATE REPUBLICAN SENATORS—AZ, GA, MI, NV, PA, WI,” “REPULBICAN [sic] MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE, and “REPUBLICAN MEMBERS OF THE SENATE.” It laid out the false argument that the election had been stolen, offered messaging to push these false claims, and provided a list of outlets and influencers to use, including the House “Freedom Caucus” members. It called for protests around the country, including at “weak Members’ homes.”

Kerik’s lawyer also delivered a list of documents Kerik is withholding on the grounds that they are “attorney work product.” Although Kerik is not himself an attorney, the list indicates that the documents he is withholding were reviewed or written by an attorney.

The documents Kerik is withholding included a three-page letter with an eye-popping title: “DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS.” Drafted on December 17, the letter might well refer to the plan advanced by Trump’s disgraced national security advisor Michael Flynn and then-attorney Sidney Powell in mid-December 2021 that Trump should declare martial law, seize voting machines, and “rerun” the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, the Big Lie behind this document—that our election system is hopelessly corrupt and Trump was cheated—continues to be proved false. Also on Friday, the first piece of the audit of the 2020 election in Texas, launched in September after former president Trump demanded that Texas governor Greg Abbott investigate the election in the state, came out. Friday’s report said the investigators found nothing out of the ordinary.

Today, members of the January 6 committee revealed some of what they have learned. On ABC’s This Week, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told host George Stephanopoulos that “we have uncovered some things that cause us real concern,” and that “it appeared to be a coordinated effort on the part of a number of people to undermine the election.”

On the same program and on CBS’s Face The Nation, committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) painted a picture of Trump watching the attack on the Capitol from the private dining room in the White House, refusing to call off the rioters despite the pleas of his staff, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and even his own daughter Ivanka.

His refusal to act, Cheney continues to emphasize, was a “supreme dereliction of duty.” He was the only person who could have stopped the rioters—many of whom have since told courts that they were there because they believed he had called them to be—and he refused to act. Instead, he tweeted that Vice President Mike Pence was a coward, and made at least one phone call to a senator demanding a delay in counting the electoral votes. When he finally did release a video telling the rioters to leave, more than three hours after the attack started, Trump acknowledged that he did, in fact, know that he commanded them.

We’ll see where this goes, but to this historian and non-lawyer (!) it does seem like he’s coming perilously close to being called out for leading a conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.

Aside from the story of what Trump was doing—or not doing—in those crucial hours, Cheney’s interviews this morning revealed that the committee has gathered testimony from those who had access to Trump during the course of January 6. She said they had “first-hand testimony” that Trump was watching television in his private dining room, as well as that Ivanka asked him to call his supporters off. The information that the committee has a window into the White House that day has got to make certain people uncomfortable.

Cheney was talking not just about the past, but also about the future. She wants “the American people to understand how dangerous Donald Trump was.” He “went to war with the rule of law.” “Any man…who would provoke a violent assault on the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, any man who would watch television as police officers were being beaten, as his supporters were invading the Capitol of the United States is clearly unfit for future office, clearly can never be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again.”

Cheney had a very clear message for her colleagues: The Republican Party “can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both.”

Prince Andrew's lawyers have managed to get the agreement between his accuser, Virginia Giuffre, and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein made public in an attempt to wriggle out of the charges.

I think that would count as getting off on a technicality.