With a final House vote expected this week, President Biden and the Democratic-led Congress are about to enact his top campaign pledge: passing the roughly $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
After five congressional responses last year, the new bill provides billions of dollars to curb the pandemic and extend economic aid to individuals, states, cities, small businesses, and low-income families and children hit by the pandemic. Last year, bipartisan supermajorities voted for the pandemic relief bills. But this year, only Democrats voted for the bill in both chambers.
Here are four takeaways from Democrats’ response to the pandemic.
Party control matters, a lot
Scholars disagree about whether Congress and the president enact more of their agenda when a single party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress, or what scholars call “unified party control.” Some doubt that members of one party are ever sufficiently united on what policies they should pass to deliver successfully. Others note that the minority party still has a variety of ways it can derail bills — as with the Senate filibuster — and that, as a result, the majority party rarely gets its priorities translated directly into law. What’s more, since World War II, unified party control has lasted, on average, for just under four years.
However, unified party control does enhance the majority party’s ability to set Congress’s agenda. That matters especially at the start of a president’s term, when the party’s political capital is typically at its peak. Setting the agenda concentrates media and public attention on the majority party’s top priority, crowding out competing issues.
But what about those minority-party chokepoints? The Democrats’ very slim majority in the Senate means difficulty enacting legislation straightforwardly. And so congressional Democratic leaders used an approach to passing this bill, known as reconciliation, that can’t be filibustered. Despite some last-minute skirmishing, Senate Democratic leaders kept all 50 Democrats on board and passed the relief bill without any GOP votes. Without reconciliation, Democrats would have needed to win votes from 10 Republican senators, which would have required diluting their own policy priorities.
What’s reconciliation? It’s tricky, but here’s what you need to know.
Democrats can stretch reconciliation, too
Reconciliation began as a minor budgetary tool for cleaning up loose ends in the federal budget. But because it cannot be filibustered, both parties have learned to stretch it to expand the majority party’s power, using it to enact policies far beyond the law’s original scope.
Some observers suggest that reconciliation favors Republican agendas more than Democratic ones, since it easily allows tax-cutting provisions and spending cuts. As Sen. Jeff Merkely (D-Ore.) put it recently, “Why should it only take a simple majority to do tax cuts for the rich but it takes a supermajority to address the integrity of our elections?”
But the pandemic relief plan reminds us that Democrats often use the tax code to build up the social safety net for low- and middle-income Americans. Experts estimate that the new law will cut child poverty in half.
Reconciliation has its limits, including rules prohibiting long-term deficits, which limited some of the new benefits such as the guaranteed income for families with children to one year. But when the program expires next year before the midterm elections, the optics of taking benefits away from children could make it easier to make the program permanent.
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Blame game is alive and well
The House version of the bill included a phased-in increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour, one of Biden’s top campaign priorities. But before the Senate considered the bill, the chamber’s parliamentarian — the nonpartisan Senate staff officer charged with interpreting Senate rules — advised Democrats that the mandate violated a provision of the “Byrd rule.” So Senate Democratic leaders stripped it out of the bill.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tried, but failed, to secure the 60 votes needed to waive the Byrd rule, which probably would have restored the increase in the minimum wage. Notably, eight of 50 Democrats sided with Republicans against waiving the rule. Some of the eight, like Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), made clear that they preferred a lower minimum wage. Others might have favored the higher wage but disapproved of stretching reconciliation to accommodate it. Perhaps still others knew the waiver would fail and took a position they thought would be popular with small businesses back home.
Liberal Democrats quickly went on the attack. House Democrats blamed the parliamentarian, bemoaning her ability to derail the majority’s priority. Some even called on the Senate to fire her. They also targeted the Senate filibuster: If Democrats would abolish it, they could pass legislation without leaning on reconciliation.
But the filibuster has a secret upside for party leaders: It’s one of several rules that allow Senate majority parties to dodge accountability and deflect blame. Partisans can blame the rules if a proposal doesn’t pass, even if the real problem is that it didn’t have enough party support. Similarly, on the Sanders vote, senators did not actually have to vote on the proposed minimum wage increase. Rather, they could vote on a narrow procedural question about enforcing the budget law. Democratic defectors didn’t have to take a position on increasing the minimum wage.
Americans might find it shocking, but in Europe, former presidents do get sentenced to prison.
Rocky road ahead
If all 50 Senate Democrats stick together, the party could adopt a second reconciliation bill to pass at least portions of the president’s anticipated Build Back Better plan — a massive jobs, infrastructure and green energy bill. But the Democratic Senate and House caucuses are divided over what belongs in the bill and what procedures to use to pass it.
Reconciliation is a very limited vehicle for passing significant legislation. As a result, more centrist Senate Democrats are beginning to support abolishing or reforming the filibuster, which almost surely will block many of their other priorities, including protecting voting rights, police reform, and statehood for Washington and Puerto Rico. Although Manchin, a key swing senator, has said he will never vote to abolish the filibuster, he says he’s open to seriously reforming it. But would he ever support what’s called the “nuclear option”: a simple majority vote to change the rules? No one knows.
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