Seeking unity versus trying to get things done

DURING his inauguration address US President Joe Biden tried to set the tone of his presidency, delivering a message that was different from that highlighted by former president Barack Obama, the last Democrat to occupy the White House, in his address 12 years ago.

While former president Obama placed the need for "change" on the top of his agenda, President Biden stressed the goal of national unity. He pledged to bring a politically polarised country together in order to resolve the existential crisis it is facing now. He ended his stump speech with "we choose unity over division" and recalled the late president Abraham Lincoln who had promised to overcome the national divisions created by the Civil War.

In fact, President Biden's appeal for unity seemed to be in harmony with his own political biography and ideological leaning. Over several decades on Capitol Hill he worked together with Republican lawmakers to fashion bipartisan legislation and still regards some of them, including Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as personal friends.

"I kept talking about unity, and everybody said, 'No, you can't have unity any longer. It's changed so fundamentally, Joe. It can't be put back together again'," he said during the presidential campaign. "Well, if that's the case, we're all dead. We're in real trouble, because our constitutional system requires consensus."

MODERATE DEMOCRAT

Moreover, for most of his political career, the former senator from Delaware and vice-president was identified as a moderate Democrat who espoused centrist positions on most policy issues. Hence the expectation has been that President Biden would be in an ideal position to build a bridge to the Republican opposition and to succeed in advancing a bipartisan national agenda. "Whether we get it all done exactly the way I want it remains to be seen," he said, "but I'm confident that we can work our way through."

But now the newly elected president is trying to win Congressional support for his ambitious plans to battle a deadly pandemic and revive the economy. That starts with his US$1.9 trillion spending proposal, the so-called coronavirus relief package, that would boost Covid-19 testing capacity to help reopen businesses and schools and provide for US$1,400 stimulus cheques for Americans.

So in the face of Republican opposition, he may now discover that he would have to make a choice between pursuing national unity and doing what is necessary to respond to a devastating national crisis.

Mr Obama had tried to juggle the competing goals of unity and change, by abandoning his earlier grand fiscal plans to deal with the financial crisis, by embracing more modest programmes that would be accepted by the Republicans on Capitol Hill.

But President Biden's economic advisers and many Democrats are warning him that the only way to fix the current economic crisis is by going big, by spending too much money rather than too little, and that unlike Mr Obama, he should not wait too long to find out whether he could mobilise enough Republican senators to work with him.

To put it in simple terms: Don't dilute a necessary domestic programme for the sake of bipartisanship, because if you fail to deliver the required change, the Republicans would win the 2022 midterm election, like they did after the 2011 midterm election when in response to dissatisfaction with the results of Mr Obama's policies, the electorate delivered Congress to the GOP.

In any case, even before the Senate started to debate President Biden's fiscal plan, Republicans have criticised the Democratic president for pursuing a left-leaning agenda that runs contrary to his soothing message of unity - for example, by signing executive orders that repeal his predecessor's initiatives on issues like the Paris climate accords. They also complain that he laid out his US$1.9 trillion fiscal initiative without consulting Republican leaders.

Moreover, the Republicans point to the upcoming Senate impeachment trial of ex-president Donald Trump over his alleged role in inciting the US Capitol riot as a move that is bound to antagonise them and their voters and make it more difficult to cooperate with the Democrats over critical policy issues.

Yet President Biden has insisted that his proposed coronavirus relief package which addresses the healthcare and economic challenges facing Americans isn't an exercise in partisanship but a demonstration of the advancement of policies, like accelerating the vaccination programme and assisting the unemployed, that reflect common national goals.

But beyond President Biden's rhetoric of unity, he faces basic obstacles to implementing his agenda that have to do with the makeup of the Senate. It is divided now evenly between the two parties, but its rules allow the White House to gain a simple majority of 51 senators when Vice-President Kamala Harris presides over the Senate.

In practical terms, this balance of power means that the White House and the Democrats would not be able to win a super-majority of 60 senators that is required to pass the novel coronavirus rescue plan. Otherwise they would face a "filibuster" - a legislative tactic of obstruction used to prevent a measure from being brought to a vote in the Senate.

In fact, a moderate Democratic Senator, Joe Meacham from West Virginian, indicated that he was not ready to support the president's proposed huge spending plan.

Indeed, Senator Meacham's concerns over the size of the coronavirus rescue plan and its demand that the federal assistance would target the groups that need it, are shared by several centrist Republican senators.

Ten of those Republican Senators - including Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah - have proposed over the weekend an alternative US$600 billion novel coronavirus relief package. They have expressed a willingness to negotiate with the White House a compromise legislation that would focus on battling the pandemic and providing assistance to families and small businesses.

PROCESS OF 'RECONCILIATION'

But members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, including Senators Bernie Sanders (Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), are pressing President Biden to stick to his original plan even if that means not getting even one Republican senator to approve it.

That could be done through a so-called process of "reconciliation" - a legislative procedure that expedites the passage of budgetary legislation in the Senate and that doesn't require a 6o-vote majority and therefore prevents the use of the filibuster. Some progressive Democrats have even suggested that their party force the elimination of the filibuster all together, a move that would clearly raise questions about the president's commitment to unity and bipartisanship.

And then there is the other side of the coin in the form of a Republican Party whose members, including many lawmakers, still seem to be under the political spell of Donald Trump and who regard any move towards compromise with the Democratic president as a betrayal of Trumpism.

From that perspective, winning the support of 10 Republican senators for his fiscal plans will help advance Democratic interests by creating more divisions among the Republicans. But then it would deprive President Biden of the opportunity to deliver a big knockout to Trumpism by promoting real change and getting things done, even if that means sacrificing the goal of unity.