Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and author of the book “Abraham Joshua Heschel: A life of Radical Amazement.” Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rules the roost on Capitol Hill. The Kentucky Republican, reprising the playbook he used against former President Barack Obama, is successfully obstructing President Joe Biden’s agenda in a way that exposes the divisions within the Democratic Party and leaves the commander in chief looking weak.
Much of the press coverage surrounding Biden’s performance ignores the elephant in the room—a united Senate Republican caucus standing in the way of almost everything and using the threat of the filibuster to prevent legislation from passing outside the reconciliation process. McConnell has kept his political army disciplined, united and on point. Playing the long game, as he always does, the Senator waited out the initial popularity of the President until the gears of the legislative process came to a grinding halt.
With the Build Back Better bill still in limbo and voting rights legislation all but dead, media discussions about Biden’s struggles have intensified. Polls continue to show Biden is fighting public perceptions that he is ineffective on several key fronts, including the economy. In an astute piece for The Washington Post, Greg Sargent argues the President faces a double whammy because of McConnell’s handiwork: independent voters are unhappy with Biden’s inability to achieve bipartisanship—something that had as much chance as the Easter Bunny showing up to a White House meeting—while Democrats are feeling blue about his inability to achieve big things.
McConnell did give Senate Republicans wiggle room to support the $1.2 billion infrastructure bill. This was not a total surprise, however. After all, spending on roads, bridges and broadband has support from both parties given the benefits to voters in all states, red and blue. More importantly, by allowing the infrastructure bill to pass with bipartisan support, McConnell must have known the President would lose his biggest bargaining chip to persuade Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to support the Build Back Better bill. Passing the infrastructure bill may have been a win, but it meant Democrats ended up giving away the biggest carrot to dangle before Manchin – without having any sticks to resort to. Since Manchin wanted infrastructure, using it to pressure him to support a version of the Build Back Better bill could have been an effective way to get both pieces of legislation passed.
Other than infrastructure, the Senate GOP has stood firm against almost everything else the President wants to do. It was notable that even the so-called moderates of the party, such as Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, voted to block Democrats from advancing voting rights legislation this week.
McConnell, of course, also relied on obstruction when Obama was in the White House. Despite the dire state the GOP found itself in after the 2008 election, with an unpopular war in Iraq still raging and the economy in shambles, McConnell made opposition his top priority. The Dr. No of Washington, DC, McConnell embodied the Groucho Marx line, “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” in a strategy that paid off handsomely in the 2010 midterms. The Republicans performed extremely well, taking back control of the House of Representatives, and making advances in state legislative and gubernatorial races. The midterms were a “shellacking,” Obama admitted.
McConnell’s strategy of ruthless obstruction, which continues today, rests on two pillars. The first is that the Senate Republicans, under McConnell, remain in lockstep. On the whole, Republicans are pretty good at staying on the same page. Democrats, on the other hand, represent a wider range of views on the political spectrum, from progressives to Manchin, whose own website boasts he voted with the Trump administration 74% of the time.
The second factor is the filibuster. This procedure has been used so much in recent decades, with Republicans comfortable deploying the threat on almost any issue, we effectively have a 60-vote threshold for passing legislation, an incredibly high bar which has rendered the Senate ineffectual. So even while Democrats have a thin majority in Congress, the filibuster allows McConnell to maintain undue influence. The only other viable option is to move through the reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority, although all included measures must be directly related to the budget, whether it’s tied to spending, tax revenues or the debt limit.
McConnell acts from a position of strength given that most Americans don’t pay much attention to congressional politics. We are a nation that mythologizes presidential power, treating the inhabitant of the Oval Office as if he has the power to change the world with the wave of a hand. But presidents are only as good as their party’s congressional standing. When legislation gets hung up on procedures like the filibuster, Americans often mistake the inability to act on the president.
Biden knows there is a long history of Democratic presidents confronting this problem. After the 1938 midterm elections, a conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans dominated Capitol Hill. Over the next three decades, they often controlled the major committees to check liberal initiatives such as civil rights and health care. This coalition relied on the filibuster to make sure efforts to achieve racial justice fell short.
While Washington, DC, insiders understood the power of this coalition, most Americans had no idea why Presidents Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy had so much trouble fulfilling their promises. It wasn’t until a massive civil rights movement took hold at the grassroots level and the 1964 election brought in huge liberal majorities into the House and Senate the logjam was finally broken. While Lyndon B. Johnson proved to be a highly effective president, this was also the result of favorable conditions in Congress until the conservative coalition returned to power in the 1966 midterms. When Biden became a senator in 1973, he was part of a young cohort of Democrats shaking up Congress to wrestle control away from the old southern committee barons.
The good news for Democrats is McConnell’s political tactics might not prevent Biden from being reelected. As I argued last week for CNN, many presidents have rebounded from tough moments like these. But McConnell, who has undercut Biden’s effectiveness and stymied the President’s agenda, may hurt Democrats who were hoping to tout progress on issues like climate change and an expanded safety net in the 2022 midterms.
In a long press conference to mark his first year in office, Biden said, “I did not anticipate that there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done.” But Biden had front row seats to this obstruction when he was vice president. McConnell has been doing the same thing for over a decade, and the odds are he won’t change a bit in the coming years. At least Biden is now saying out loud what has been glaringly obvious from the first day of his presidency: McConnell’s prime objective is protecting partisan power, and he will pursue that goal at all costs.
