Month: February 2021

From Infidel573:

I've opined that Biden and the thin Democratic majorities in Congress have two years to achieve real results — if we haven't seen some "big stuff" accomplished by November 2022, our voting base won't be motivated to turn out and we'll likely lose the House majority and perhaps the Senate too, despite a favorable map.

Here are the items I would say qualify as "big stuff". The Democrats won't get all of them done, but they need to get some of them done in the next two years.

1. Victory over covid-19. This means that at least in the blue cities, the virus should have been suppressed to the extent that masks and social distancing are no longer necessary, and social interaction and the operation of businesses like restaurants have fully returned to 2019 norms, while hospitals are under no more unusual stress than in 2019. It may be impossible to achieve this in two years in the red rural areas, where resistance to vaccines and precautions will slow down recovery, but the cities should be back to normal by sometime in 2022 at the latest.

2. A jobs recovery. Real unemployment should be back down to 2019 levels.

3. The $15 federal minimum wage. This might need to be adjusted for the lower-cost-of-living parts of the country to get Manchin on board, but the $15 minimum should be in effect in the cities, bringing the US into line with what some other developed countries have.

4. A public option in healthcare. The simplest way to achieve this would be "Medicare for all who want it" (not abolition of private insurance, which would be political suicide), or at least lowering the age of eligibility to make it available to far more people. This would begin the process of decoupling health insurance from employment and giving the US what all other developed countries, and some middle-income countries, already have.

5. A new federal voting-rights guarantee. This would be a law to eliminate state-level gerrymandering and vote-suppression schemes aimed at disenfranchising Democrats in general and black voters in particular. Federal voter-registration standards and promotion of voting by mail could also be part of this.

6. Statehood for DC or Puerto Rico or both. This would dilute the minority-rule problem posed by the Electoral College and the Senate.

7. Neutralization of the Republican packing of the Supreme Court. This could mean enlarging the Court, or in some way reducing its jurisdiction. There are many options.

8. Reversal of the Republican tax cut for the rich. Deficits do matter. Restoration of some semblance of an equitable tax burden won't cover all the costs of what the government has done and still needs to do to fight the pandemic, but it will help.

9. Serious action to contain China. This could take the form of a NATO-like alliance of democracies linking the US with India and Japan and possibly South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia; or some sort of multilateral initiative to get the upper hand over China economically (Trump's trade war "strategy" was doomed by pitting the US against everybody else instead of getting other democracies on board against China specifically). Right now we're on a 1930s-like trajectory, with a brutal fascist regime putting minorities in concentration camps (Xinjiang) and openly aspiring to seize new territories (Taiwan, the South China Sea) while building up its military to press those claims. We also have the same kind of head-in-the-sand appeasers and people insisting that the rise of this intolerable regime to a dominant position in world affairs is inevitable or, bizarrely, even desirable. We need to get off that trajectory and deal with the problem before it gets to the September 1939 stage, where the only option is a shooting war.

10. Successful handling of a new crisis. Just as covid-19 came out of nowhere, the odds are better than even that between now and November 2022 some new major issue will arise which we can't now anticipate. If it's major enough, how well the administration handles it could well prove as critical as any of the items above.

(I didn't mention a federal guarantee of abortion rights because it's unclear whether that will be necessary. If Roe falls, it definitely goes on the list.)

I'd say the minimum standard of success is four out of ten. The first two are essential; unless they are both achieved by November 2022, we'll probably lose the House and Senate. If those plus any two of the others are achieved, the administration will be a clear success and will deserve to win, and will win, increased majorities.

Then they'll have another two years (at least) to do the rest of it.