This week’s events in Washington have been a good case-study in why the tradition of analyzing a presidency when it reaches the 100-day mark is just a silly media norm.
Because here we are, 75 days after that supposed benchmark, and there’s still no way to guess whether President Joe Biden’s legislative record at the end of his term will be one of astonishing accomplishment or a huge disappointment.
The positive scenario? Both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill — the whopping $3.5 trillion spending plan with programs to address health care, climate change, income inequality, immigration and traditional infrastructure (and more) — pass into law. Biden and the Democrats get credit for working with willing Republicans, which is nice, but also those two bills plus the earlier pandemic recovery act would constitute a major reordering of domestic policy. And that’s not all! It’s possible that Senate Democrats will blow holes in the filibuster or even reduce it to a marginal, ineffective tactic. If that happens, not only would major voting rights legislation pass, but possibly also statehood for the District of Columbia and even Puerto Rico.
And yet, it's also plausible that the bipartisan infrastructure bill will never win 60 votes, that the $3.5 trillion spending plan proves too large to keep all 50 Senate Democrats on board, and that none of it passes. A worst-case scenario for Democrats doesn’t just keep the filibuster intact; it also would include a government shutdown or even a debt-limit crisis that fails to get resolved, derailing the economic recovery. In that chain of events, nothing gets passed on voting rights. Nothing gets passed on any of the Democratic agenda. And, after Republicans gain majorities in both chambers in the midterms, Biden is unable to get any judges or executive-branch officials confirmed.
If the first scenario or anything like it pans out, Biden’s first 100 days will turn out to have been a major success story, with the recovery act demonstrating that the administration and its allies in Congress were master legislators prepared to govern. If it’s the latter, then we’ll all look for hints at what would soon go wrong, and we’ll surely have little trouble finding them.
We don’t even know whether the key players know anything about the outcomes. Take, for example, the question of Senator Joe Manchin and the filibuster. The way the West Virginia Democrat is acting so far — stating consistently that he will never vote to reform or eliminate it — fits lots of possibilities. Perhaps Manchin’s true intentions are exactly what he says in public. Or perhaps he intends to support filibuster change eventually, but wants to be dragged there kicking and screaming, having demonstrated that he’s given every other option every possible opportunity. Perhaps he has a bottom line in mind, something that would be one obstruction too far if Republicans erect it, and will only support filibuster reform if that happens. And of course there’s the possibility that he intends to select one of those options now, but will change his mind if circumstances change.
What’s true for Manchin is also true for Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. It’s also true about any Democratic senators (and reporters believe there are some) who are reluctant to change the filibuster but, unlike Manchin and Sinema, don’t want to say so publicly. They may also have a bottom line, or not.
The same uncertainties hang over legislation itself. Sure, most Democrats in both houses of Congress intend to vote for both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill. But a few are not yet sure. They may, or may not, think they know exactly what it would take to get them on board. But it’s hard for legislators to predict that in advance, because they don’t know which trade-offs they’ll be asked to accept.
This also makes it difficult to assess Biden’s strategy. What’s the best way for him to push toward filibuster reform? Should he, for example, have talked about the filibuster during his voting rights speech on Tuesday? It depends on whether there’s any realistic hope of finding 50 votes for procedural change. It depends on what his legislative team may know about what, if anything, Manchin is looking for. It depends, too, on what, if anything, would spark a backlash from Manchin, perhaps sinking not only voting rights but also infrastructure. There are times when presidential use of public speeches can provide cover for members of Congress to do what they want to do; there are times when it can have the opposite effect.
None of this is intended to slight the work of reporters who are doing an excellent job of telling us what can be known. Congressional reporting, in particular, is quite good these days (and, I think, a lot better than it was 20 or 40 or 60 years ago). But neither insider reporting nor outside analysis can tell us what’s likely to happen. It would be nice to know whether the Biden legislative record will be one of huge triumph, or disaster, or something in-between. But the best advice I can give at this point is to be skeptical of anyone who claims to know the answer. The best anyone can say is that as we approach the half-year point in the presidency (and a bit beyond that in the current Congress), there’s a surprisingly large range of plausible outcomes.
Bloomberg
