In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, future Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said the following:
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before… This is an opportunity, what used to be long-term problems, be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area, things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with.”
While exploiting a crisis to advance partisan reforms excited progressives, the broader public was less receptive to Obama’s sweeping inaugural agenda. Fueled by the administration’s stated desire to remake American life after the crash, the Tea Party movement delivered Democrats a devastating midterm defeat in 2010.
Does Joe Biden find himself in a similar situation today? Emanuel certainly thinks so. Unfortunately for Biden’s lofty policy goals, he lacks Obama’s sweeping legislative majorities and increasingly, a justifying crisis in the coronavirus pandemic.
As Build Back Better inevitably stagnates and public opinion shifts against Covid hawkishness, Democrats are staring down another midterm disaster. In a last-ditch effort to salvage transformative legislation from his presidency, Biden has decided to conjure a secondary crisis: Jim Crow 2.0.
To hear leading Democratic figures tell it, Republicans are channeling Bull Connor and other various forces of darkness by rolling back Covid-era voting changes. Much to the Democrats’ frustration, Republicans are acting as if temporary crisis measures were just that, rather than an excuse to enact progressive reforms.
Florida’s SB 90 is a prime example of this trend. Approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis on May 6, 2021, progressive critics deem it “an omnibus voter suppression bill.” Digging into the criticism reveals few substantive changes to the pre-Covid status quo.
Where SB 90 does impose restrictions on voting, they are as paltry as requiring voters to request absentee ballots every election cycle as opposed to every other one. Such an unreasonable burden. That many Democrat-run states don’t have no-excuse absentee voting at all is of no concern to those decrying the end of democracy.
Distinct from this contrived voter suppression, Biden’s concerns about election subversion are entirely legitimate. Former President Donald Trump did try to subvert the presidential election in 2020. Republican state legislatures are enacting changes that would make such an attempt easier in the future.
While these measures are more easily explained as a sop to the “Stop the Steal” base than as a framework for a coup, the loopholes in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that make such shenanigans possible desperately need to be closed.
Unsurprisingly, Biden’s proposed solutions involve much more than patching up the Electoral Count Act. Among the reforms are a proposal to make the Federal Election Commission a partisan body, a flagrantly unconstitutional federalization of state election laws and nationwide implementation of mail-in ballots.
When viewed as a whole, these measures would make the voting rules of the most progressive localities into the national norm. Clearly Republicans have no legitimate concerns about election integrity as Democrats would never conspire to subvert the franchise.
Nothing is as sure to inspire trust in American elections as a 50-50 U.S. Senate federalizing all election law, except perhaps a president declaring that democracy is over and Jim Crow will return should such an initiative inexorably fail.
In order to pass such sweeping legislation in a gridlocked Senate, Biden has additionally proposed that the Senate remove the filibuster. Although the voting reforms have unanimous Democratic support in the Senate, many moderate Democrats will not support an end to the filibuster, leading to amusing parliamentary gamesmanship.
True democracy is only ensured if a razor-thin majority can destroy federalism and impose its will across the entire country? A stronger case for the filibuster has never been made.
Cutting through the spurious accusations of racism and the unworkable constitutional inversions, a bipartisan group of senators is working on a separate bill that would solely address issues in the Electoral Count Act. Unlike the Democrats’ partisan proposals, this bill may actually pass.
Biden ought to welcome such a bill, as it remedies a problem he claims to care so deeply about. Yet, when asked about the bipartisan proposal, a Biden spokesperson said “there is no substitute” to the Democrats’ partisan bills.
Translation: the bipartisan proposal focuses on the problem at hand rather than progressive policy priorities.
That would be letting a crisis go to waste.
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Featured Image: Caricature of Rahm Emanuel. Unmodified photo by DonkeyHotey used under a Creative Commons License (https://bit.ly/2Sr5ngp).
