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      Senate’s 50-50 split lets Manchin and Sinema revel in outsize influence

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      DemocratsSenate’s 50-50 split lets Manchin and Sinema revel in outsize influence Joe Biden, whose Build Back Better bill has been slashed by the two holdouts, said with ‘50 Democrats, every one is a president’David Smith in Washington@smithinamericaFri 29 Oct 2021 14.46 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Oct 2021 15.11 EDTJoe Biden recently summed up his problems getting things done.In an America where the US Senate is split 50-50, then effectively any single senator can hold a veto over the president’s entire agenda. “Look,” laughed Biden at a CNN town hall, “you have 50 Democrats, every one is a president. Every single one. So, you got to work things out.”Joe Manchin single-handedly denied US families paid leave. That’s just cruel | Jill FilipovicRead moreIt explains why the most powerful man in the world is currently struggling to get his way in Washington – and why two members of his own party, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are standing in his way.Such is the distribution of power that American presidents can only impose their will up to a point if Congress refuses to yield. While the White House can do much with executive orders and actions, major legislation must gain a majority of votes in the House of Representatives and Senate.Democrats do currently control both chambers – but only just. The Senate is evenly divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, meaning that Vice-President Kamala Harris must cast the tie-breaking vote. That means all 50 Democratic senators must be on board in the face of united Republican opposition – an increasingly safe (and bleak) assumption in polarised era.By contrast, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats reached 59 seats in the then 96-member Senate, while President Lyndon Johnson’s Democrats had 68 in what by then was a 100-seat chamber. Biden is trying to match the scale of both men’s ambition with no room for error.This is why his agenda – huge investments in infrastructure and expanding the social safety net – depends on the blessing of Manchin and Sinema in what might seem to the watching world as a case of the tail wagging the dog.Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont defeated by Biden in last year’s Democratic primary, tweeted earlier this month: “2 senators cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 senators and 210 House members want.”But the cold reality is that, after months of painful wrangling and concessions, Manchin and Sinema have almost single-handedly narrowed the scale and scope of Biden’s grand vision.This week it emerged that Build Back Better plan would be halved from $3.5tn to $1.75tn, axing plans for paid family leave, lower prescription drug pricing and free community college. Sanders’s dream of including dental and vision care also failed to make the cut.Biden insists that the framework still represents the biggest ever investment in climate change and the greatest improvement to the nation’s healthcare system in more than a decade.He said at the White House on Friday: “No one got everything they wanted, including me, but that’s what compromise is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on. I’ve long said compromise and consensus are the only way to get big things done in a democracy, important things for the country.”But what makes it especially galling for many is that opinion polls show the eliminated measures are highly popular. Manchin and Sinema have ensured that the US is destined to remain one of seven countries – along with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tonga – without paid leave for new mothers, according to UCLA’s World Policy Analysis Center.Biden met late on Tuesday evening with both senators at the White House. Countless newspaper columns and hours of airtime have been expended trying to understand the motives of the two holdouts, who can effectively decide whether Democrats keep their campaign promises – with huge implications for next year’s midterm elections.Manchin is not so mysterious. He hails from coal-rich West Virginia, a conservative state that Donald Trump won twice in a landslide, and once ran a campaign ad in which he shot a rifle at a legislative bill. He owns about $1m in shares in his son’s coal brokerage company and has raised campaign funds from oil and gas interests.Critics accuse him of putting personal and local concerns ahead of his party, the nation and the world. The USA Today newspaper wrote in an editorial: “It’s no stretch to conclude that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is risking the planet’s future to protect a dwindling pool of 14,000 coal mining jobs in his home state of West Virginia.”Sinema, however, has been described as enigmatic, sphinx-like and whimsical. In 2018 she became Arizona’s first Democratic senator for more than two decades and, despite progressive credentials and a flair for fashion statements, has taken conservative positions on several issues.She also provokes the left with stunts such as a thumbs-down gesture on the Senate floor when she voted against raising the federal minimum wage and, on Thursday, a parody of the TV comedy Ted Lasso with the Republican senator Mitt Romney. Perhaps tellingly, Sinema raised $1.1m in campaign funds in the last quarter with significant donations from the pharmaceutical and financial industries.In a divided Senate, where Republicans are consumed by Trump’s election lies, this duo holds the fate of Biden’s presidency in their hands. The haggling could go on for weeks more, granting Manchin and Sinema continued outsized influence and guaranteeing that their every move and word will be avidly scrutinised.Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary, tweeted: “My dream? Democrats pick up a few more Senate seats in 2022 and when Joe Manchin holds a press conference to declare what he can live with and what he can’t, nobody shows up.”TopicsDemocratsUS politicsUS SenateJoe BidenUS domestic policyUS CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Biden’s agenda remains unrealized as Democrats fail to close deal again

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      US politicsBiden’s agenda remains unrealized as Democrats fail to close deal againPelosi forced to postpone infrastructure vote on Thursday ahead of Biden’s meeting with world leaders in Rome Lauren Gambino in Washington@laurenegambinoFri 29 Oct 2021 13.53 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Oct 2021 14.31 EDTJoe Biden’s nearly $3tn domestic agenda remains unrealized after an 11th-hour push to rally Democrats around a pared-down package that he framed as historic, failed to close the deal in time for his meeting with world leaders in Rome at the G20 summit.Capitol attack panel faces pivotal moment as Trump allies stonewallRead moreBut after a dramatic Thursday of bold promises and dashed hopes, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was forced to postpone a vote on a $1tn infrastructure bill for a second time in a month, as progressives demanded more assurances that a compromise $1.75tn social policy plan would also pass.It was a setback – though perhaps only a temporary one – for Democratic leaders, who had hoped to hand the president a legislative victory that he could tout during his six-day trip to Europe for a pair of international economic and climate summits.The delay underscored the depth of mistrust among Democrats – between the House and Senate, progressives and centrists, leadership and members – after a lengthy negotiating process yielded a plan that was about half the size of Biden’s initial vision.Biden’s proposal includes substantial investments in childcare, education and health care as well as major initiatives to address climate change that, if enacted, would be the largest action ever taken by the US Congress. Revenue would come from tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy.But in concessions to centrists like the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, paid family leave, free college tuition and efforts to lower prescription drug prices were stripped from the latest iteration of the plan. Progressives were left disappointed by the cuts but their desire to pass the legislation ultimately held little leverage to force major changes.In a speech before departing for Europe, Biden acknowledged the bill fell short of his legislative ambitions, but reflected the limits of what was politically possible given Democrats’ narrow governing majorities and unified Republican opposition.“No one got everything they wanted, including me,” he said. “But that’s what compromise is.”As lawmakers and activists digested the newly released details of the plan, there seems to be a growing consensus among progressives that, while insufficient, the plan makes critical investments in many of their top priorities, especially in the field of tackling the climate crisis.“The newly announced Build Back Better Act can be a turning point in America’s fight against the climate crisis – but only if we pass it,” leaders of the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action wrote in a memo on Friday.Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, said unified control of the White House and Congress can, perhaps paradoxically, make governing harder. Because these moments are rare and often fleeting, there is a rush by the president and his party to pursue an ambitious, legacy-defining agenda, he said.“But the challenges of legislating don’t go away,” Zelizer said. “And in some ways, the tensions within the party are exacerbated by the stakes being so high.”Some have argued that scaling back key programs could make it harder for Americans to feel the impact of the new benefits, despite the substantial size of the legislation. That could make it difficult for Biden, whose approval ratings have slid in recent weeks, to sell the plan he told House Democrats would determine the fate of his presidency and their political futures.TopicsUS politicsJoe BidenDemocratsHouse of RepresentativesUS SenateNancy PelosiRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Manchin single-handedly denied US families paid leave. That’s just cruel | Jill Filipovic

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      OpinionJoe ManchinJoe Manchin single-handedly denied US families paid leave. That’s just cruelJill FilipovicAll of America’s economic peers have a paid family leave policy. Why would a Democrat oppose such a basic measure? Fri 29 Oct 2021 06.30 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Oct 2021 16.40 EDTAmericans will remain some of the last people on the planet to have no right to paid leave when they have children, and for that, you can thank Joe Manchin.Biden pitches $1.75tn scaled-down policy agenda to House DemocratsRead moreManchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, tanked the paid leave portion of an increasingly narrow domestic policy package. Manchin had already gotten Democrats to make what was once a sweeping and ambitious bill smaller and less effectual. Even though the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House, and are not expected to maintain control of Congress after this year’s midterm elections, they still can’t get it together to deliver what the American people put them in office to do. And that’s because of Manchin, as well as his fellow centrist holdout, Kyrsten Sinema.To be fair, 50 Republicans are to blame for this as well. All 50 of them oppose Biden’s paid family leave plan, and none were expected to vote for this bill. If even a few of them had been willing to cross the aisle to support parents and new babies – to be, one might say, “pro-life” and “pro-family” – then Manchin would not have the power he does to deny paid family leave to millions of American parents. So let’s not forget this reality, too: most Democrats want to create a paid family leave program. Republicans do not.But Manchin’s actions are particularly insulting and egregious because he is a Democrat. He enjoys party support and funding. He benefits when Democrats do popular things. And now, he’s standing in the way of a policy that the overwhelming majority of Democrats want, and that is resoundingly popular with the American public, including conservatives and Republicans.Paid family leave brings a long list of benefits to families, from healthier children to stronger marriages. And it benefits the country by keeping more working-age people in the workforce – when families don’t have paid leave, mothers drop out, a dynamic we’ve seen exacerbated by the pandemic. By some estimates, paid family leave could increase US GDP by billions of dollars.This is good policy. But it’s also a policy that is, in large part, about gender equality. While paid leave is (or would have been) available to any new parent, the reality is that it’s overwhelmingly women who are the primary caregivers for children, it’s overwhelmingly women who birth children, and it’s overwhelmingly women who are pushed out of the paid workforce when they have kids.As it stands, many well-paid white-collar employees do get some paid leave. It’s working-class parents who often don’t – and who can’t afford to take several weeks off of an hourly-wage job, even to recover from childbirth or to care for a brand-new infant who needs 24/7 attention. These workers, and particularly the women among them, are put in an impossible bind: money but no ability to care for a child, or caring for a child and no money. A paid family leave program would put an end to that particularly American cruelty.We are one of the most prosperous societies in the history of the world, and yet our lack of paid leave policies means that new mothers are back working at fast-food restaurants days after having major abdominal surgery, leaving their infants home with whoever is free to watch them. Or, our lack of paid leave policies mean that new mothers simply quit their jobs, pitching themselves into financial precarity at the exact moment they need greater stability, more money and less stress.It’s astoundingly cruel. And it’s entirely unnecessary – all of America’s economic peers have a paid family leave policy, and most of them have policies that are far more generous and far more sensible than even the plan Democrats were debating. This is not a mysterious or unsolved problem; every other wealthy and developed country on Earth has largely solved it. We are an outlier because we are simply choosing to make life unnecessarily brutal for families, and for women in particular.And this week, it’s Joe Manchin in particular who is choosing, single-handedly, to continue making life unnecessarily brutal for families, and for women in particular. He’s not the only bad actor, but right now, he’s the most powerful one.And he’s using his political power not to advocate for what his constituents want and need, but simply to demonstrate that he has it – to show that he is more influential than the American president, that American social and economic policy lies in his hands.It’s a pathetic, petty little narcissistic display. And it’s American families, and particularly American mothers, who suffer so that Joe Manchin can feel like a big man.
      Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind
      TopicsJoe ManchinOpinionParents and parentingDemocratsUS politicsFamilycommentReuse this content More

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      Biden urges Democrats to unite around ‘historic’ $1.75tn investment package

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      Joe BidenBiden urges Democrats to unite around ‘historic’ $1.75tn investment package President’s visit to Capitol Hill prompts flurry of activity as Pelosi ramps up pressure on progressives to accept Biden’s frameworkLauren Gambino in Washington@laurenegambinoThu 28 Oct 2021 15.48 EDTFirst published on Thu 28 Oct 2021 08.11 EDTJoe Biden on Thursday unveiled a “historic economic framework” that he said would make the US more competitive and resilient, touting the $1.75tn plan to expand the nation’s social safety net and confront the climate crisis as a victory for consensus and compromise even as the path forward remained uncertain.‘We’re on the path to get this done’: Pelosi pushes infrastructure vote as progressives balk – liveRead moreThe president, who delayed his departure to Europe to finalize the proposal, cast the emerging deal as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore American leadership and show the world that democracies can still deliver in the 21st century.His remarks at the White House followed a visit to Capitol Hill on Thursday morning, where he pleaded with House Democrats to unite behind the agreement, saying that his presidency – and their political futures – depended on the passage of his domestic agenda.“I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week,” he said, according to a source familiar with his private remarks to the caucus.The visit set in motion a flurry of activity on Capitol Hill, as Democratic leaders, eager to deliver Biden a legislative victory, ramped up pressure on progressives to accept the “framework” as a done deal, paving the way for them to join moderates in passing a related $1tn bipartisan infrastructure bill. With Republicans mostly aligned against the plan, Pelosi only has a handful of votes to spare.“When the president gets off that plane, we want him to have a vote of confidence from this Congress,” she told her fractious caucus on Thursday morning. “In order for us to have success, we must succeed today.”Twice during the course of the hour-long meeting, Democratic lawmakers rose to their feed and began to chant: “Vote, vote, vote.” But their enthusiasm was quickly tempered as her caucus’s most liberal members dug in.Leaving the meeting on Thursday, the Washington congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the House Progressive Caucus, said the deal was a sign of “tremendous momentum” but that her position remained unchanged: the bills must move in tandem.“I feel a bit bamboozled because this was not what I thought was coming today,” said congresswoman Cori Bush, a progressive from Missouri. Speaking personally about working a low-wage job and struggling to afford housing and childcare, Bush said she wasn’t ready to give up on fighting for policies that would lift her constituents from similar circumstances.Putting it more bluntly, congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan, said she was a “hell no” on the infrastructure bill if there was not a simultaneous vote on the larger spending plan.During a press conference, Pelosi did not commit to holding the vote on Thursday, saying only that the party was “on a path to get this all done”. Working franticly to advance the legislation, the framework was swiftly translated into a 1,684-page bill released shortly before a House rules committee hearing on the measure.“This is not the end of the process,” said congressman Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts and the chair of the committee, affirming multiple times during the hearing that the social policy package would not be ready for a vote on Thursday. “This bill will continue to be perfected.”Complicating negotiations for Democratic leaders was a lack of certainty from the key holdouts, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both sounded hopeful that a deal was within reach, but stopped short of offering their firm support.“After months of productive, good-faith negotiations with Biden and the White House, we have made significant progress on the proposed budget reconciliation package,” Sinema said, adding: “I look forward to getting this done.”Manchin also did not commit to supporting the legislation he played a significant role in shaping. Asked whether he would vote for the plan, he said only that its fate was presently “in the hands of the House”.After months of prolonged negotiations, the proposed framework is far smaller in size and scope than the $3.5tn package Biden initially envisioned. Even so, the president claimed a pre-emptive legislative achievement on par with those enacted by Franklin D Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.“Any single element of this framework would be viewed as a fundamental change in America. Taken together they’re truly consequential,” Biden said during remarks from the East Room at the White House, pointing to new spending on childcare and climate mitigation.“If we make these investments, we will own the future,” he added.The package would make substantial new investments in childcare and caregiving as well as transitioning the US economy away from fossil fuels. According to the White House, the framework would put the US on track to meet the president’s pledge to slash planet-warming emissions by 2030.Among the other provisions in the bill are free preschool for every three- and four-year-old, expanded health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, and what the White House is calling the largest “effort to combat climate change in American history”.Stripped from the package were plans to provide 12 weeks of federal paid family leave and two years of free community college; ambitious climate initiatives and efforts to lower prescription drug prices. A proposal to expand Medicare to cover vision, dental and hearing was pared back to just hearing.Democrats spent the last several weeks haggling over plans to pay for their agenda, amid opposition from both Manchin and Sinema to various revenue-raising proposals. On Wednesday, a novel plan to tax billionaires’ assets was tossed aside after Manchin said the plan carried “the connotation that we’re targeting different people”.To offset their spending, Democrats said they would raise an estimated $2tn by increasing taxes on corporations and the highest earning Americans, and by rolling back some of the Trump administration’s tax cuts passed in 2017. It honors Biden’s campaign pledge that he would not raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year, according to the White House.After weeks of frenetic negotiations, Democrats were scrambling to cobble together a deal that the president could tout when he travels to Rome, the Vatican, and then to the United Nations climate conference, known as Cop26, in Glasgow, Scotland, where he hopes to point to the accord as evidence of the US’s commitment to confronting the climate crisis.“We are at an inflection point,” Biden told House lawmakers. “The rest of the world wonders whether we can function.”Internal disputes over the bill delayed its passage for weeks, as Democrats blew past self-imposed deadlines in an effort to find a compromise that could satisfy the broad ideological expanse of their party.The result is a bill that reflected the limits of their governing coalition, Biden said, indicating that this was the best deal Democrats could hope to achieve with paper-thin majorities and unified Republican opposition.“No one got everything they wanted, including me,” he said. “But that’s what compromise is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on.”The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, chair of the powerful budget committee, called the framework a “major step forward” but warned that there were also “major gaps” in the legislation. He cited the lack of paid family and medical leave for workers and the failure to expand Medicare benefits to include dental and vision as well as herding, a major priority for the senator.Without all 50 senators, the legislation will not pass.TopicsJoe BidenUS CongressUS politicsDemocratsJoe ManchinnewsReuse this content More

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      The 2009 financial crisis taught us hard lessons. Have Democrats learned them? | David Sirota and Alex Gibney

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      OpinionUS politicsThe 2009 financial crisis taught us hard lessons. Have Democrats learned them?David Sirota and Alex GibneyThe political meltdown of a decade ago crushed faith in hope and change, and led to Maga and mayhem Thu 28 Oct 2021 06.37 EDTLast modified on Thu 28 Oct 2021 07.07 EDTA first-term Democratic president with a majority in Congress and an uncompromising Republican opposition. A country disillusioned by a previous administration’s corruption and mismanagement. A working class traumatized by an economic downturn. An establishment calling not for aggressiveness and boldness, but for half measures and compromise.Democrats’ tax plan to pay for Biden agenda would affect 700 of America’s super-richRead moreIf this sounds familiar, it is not only because it describes this current moment, but because it is the experience we lived through 12 years ago – a political meltdown that destroyed many Americans’ remaining faith in their government, and ultimately birthed Donald Trump’s presidency.That meltdown crushed faith in hope and change, and led to Maga and mayhem. And if Democrats continue making the same choices again, we should expect the same results – or worse.2009 was not 2021, but history tends to rhyme. Back then, the contagion wasn’t a virus, it was a financial panic brought on by the collapse of what had been the American economy’s most stable pillar: the mortgage. But the homes were built atop a precarious foundation. After a spate of bank deregulation, Wall Street giants had transformed themselves into the newest peddlers of the old swampland-in-Florida schemes, enticing borrowers and pension funds to bet life savings on unsustainable housing prices and debt.When enough homeowners couldn’t make their payments and home prices cratered, millions faced foreclosure, retirement systems faced huge losses on mortgage-related investments, 401k plans faced stock market declines, and banks faced the prospect of insolvency.Amid this financial pandemic, though, there was a glimmer of something better – Barack Obama, who had campaigned on an inspiring promise to “bring a new era of responsibility and accountability to Wall Street and to Washington”.That FDR-esque rhetoric resulted in a 2008 election landslide, a huge Democratic congressional majority, and high hopes that a new administration would fight the Great Recession with the same kind of robust New Deal that Franklin Roosevelt deployed to successfully combat the Great Depression.But that didn’t happen.Obama had helped the Bush administration forge the Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp), whose name seemed to promise assistance for homeowners, but which instead provided most of its benefits to a handful of financial institutions. When he took office, Obama could have changed how Tarp money was being spent, but he and his administration kept funneling the cash to Wall Street. The relative pittance that trickled out to aid borrowers mostly stretched out foreclosures to “foam the runway” for financial institutions, as Obama’s treasury secretary Tim Geithner reportedly said.Soon after, the Wall Street-bankrolled Obama administration scaled back its economic stimulus plan, backed off its promise to reform bankruptcy laws, refused to prosecute bankers, abandoned legislation to limit the size of too-big-to-fail banks, and allowed bailout money to subsidize lavish executive bonuses.Some lonely voices in Washington tried to sound an alarm. Tarp Inspector General Neil Barofsky warned that the opaque bailout was being misused. Congressman Brad Miller, a Democrat from North Carolina, tried to hold Obama to his promise to let judges write down mortgagors’ loans. And Senators Carl Levin and Ted Kaufman, a longtime aide to Joe Biden, pressed their party to prosecute and break up the banks.They were largely ignored – and Obama later justified the brush-offs by insisting that doing anything more would have “required a violence to the social order, a wrenching of political and economic norms”.But defending the banks and failing to deliver material gains to a nation ravaged by corporate malfeasance gave conservatives a political bailout, allowing them to further shred the social fabric once stitched together by a belief in shared sacrifice.Boosted by Glenn Beck’s blubbering broadsides and Rick Santelli’s CNBC dog-whistle rant against mortgage “losers”, Republicans were able to divide the country and portray themselves as populists – and shellack Democrats in 2010’s Tea Party election.A few years later, Democratic leaders confidently predicted that they would be able to overcome working-class rage with support from wealthier suburbanites. After all, the top 10% of income earners saw their fortunes rise by 27% during Obama’s presidency.But every other stratum saw incomes decline, and countless neighborhoods were eviscerated by more than 6m foreclosures, dooming families to losing battles with bank bureaucracy, government red tape, and a judicial foreclosure machine.There was Detroit’s Sandra Hines, who tearfully told a congressional committee about being thrown out of her home in the dead of winter after she fell behind on her mortgage payments.There was Florida oncology nurse Lisa Epstein, who, just after giving birth to an infant daughter, faced foreclosure and then endured a Kafkaesque struggle to expose fraudulent mortgage practices – which resulted in a slap-on-the-wrist settlement that netted her just $600.These experiences, repeated ad nauseam as Wall Street executives swelled their stock portfolios, convinced many to view the past promises of “hope and change” as a ruse. The subsequent outrage helped Republicans complete their takeover with Trump, a billionaire charlatan ginning up racial animosity and depicting himself as singularly able to “make America great again.”The throughline from the financial crisis to Democrats’ failure to deliver help to the rise of Trump is evident in a study from the Center for American Progress. The Democratic thinktank found that “larger proportions of underwater homeowners were prominent features” of more than a third of the 206 counties won by Obama in 2012 that flipped to Trump in 2016.“The legacy of the financial crisis is Donald J Trump,” concluded Trump consigliere Steve Bannon.For today’s Democrats, the takeaway is not merely that Trump is a pathological liar, a racist and an anti-democratic menace who exacerbated the problems he diagnosed. The lesson is more elemental: when America votes for hope and change and is instead force-fed more of the same, the backlash can be swift – and can benefit conservative opportunists who will make things worse.A dozen years later, with Democrats assuming power amid another national crisis, there were initial signs that this lesson had been learned: the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said at the outset of the Biden presidency that Democrats must pass bills that are “big and bold and strong”, and he added that “we will not repeat that mistake” of watering down legislation. The child tax credit in the initial Covid relief package was a solid victory – it significantly reduced child poverty, and a recent poll shows less anti-Biden animus among Trump voters who received it.However, much of the direct aid in that legislation has been stalled, cut off or scheduled for expiration – even as nearly one in five households lost all of their savings during the pandemic. Worse, Biden and Democrats have been considering big cuts to their already scaled-back package of housing, anti-poverty and climate initiatives. They’ve also pondered defanging provisions to reduce drug prices, and considered adding means-testing and work requirements that could make direct aid more difficult to access.Taken together, it feels like 2009 all over again.Billionaires are doing better than ever, while more and more Americans are getting economically pulverized – and simmering with rage. Just a year out from the midterm election, the latest polls show Biden’s approval rating plummeting, with particular erosion among Democratic constituencies who were promised change, but seem to be feeling like they’re only getting more of the same.Once again, progressive voices sounding the alarm are getting drowned out by conservative Democrats, their corporate donors, and pundits demanding surrender. Meanwhile, Trump and his Republican mini-mes are barnstorming the country preening as populists, all while a new crop of rightwing media hucksters are converting popular discontent into increasing support for rightwing authoritarianism.But let’s remember: the past does not have to be prelude. If the Democrats are willing to learn from recent history, they still have time to make different choices.In Congress, Democratic lawmakers can realize there is no “middle-ground” compromise with Republicans or corporate greed. They can end the filibuster and ignore the business lobbyists and the donors trying to halt their legislative program, which may be the last chance to help workers and ward off a climate cataclysm.In the White House, Biden can break from Obama’s fetishization of bipartisanship. He can instead try to be a modern-day Lyndon Johnson, arm-twisting his recalcitrant party members into embracing real hope and change.Though none of this would guarantee success, it would at least give the party a fighting chance to enact its agenda and materially improve people’s lives.That simple objective is often obscured in the social media-driven miasma of politics. But history suggests that going big and delivering tangible help to a nation in need is probably the only way to restore some faith in government, ward off an authoritarian takeover and end the meltdown of disillusionment that threatens to incinerate our democracy.
      Investigative reporter David Sirota and Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney are the executive producers of the new podcast series Meltdown, which explores the aftermath of the financial crisis
      This essay is being published in conjunction with the launch of Meltdown. Find the podcast episodes here
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionDemocratsFinancial crisisJoe BidencommentReuse this content More