Most votes on major pieces of legislation in 2021 have been close to pure party-line splits.
Most votes on major pieces of legislation in 2021 have been close to pure party-line divisions.
W hat kind of mandate does Joe Biden have to remake America? At some point, he will hit the limit. It may be a lot more limited than progressive activists would like to believe.
What does a presidential mandate even mean? As I explained four years ago when Donald Trump was gearing up for his term, there are really three kinds of mandate: the executive mandate, the voting-coalition mandate, and the legislative mandate.
The first and simplest is the executive mandate: Is Biden the legitimately elected president of the United States? Just as was true of Trump, he is. He won by the rules of the game — rules set forth in the Constitution 234 years ago — and prevailed in extensive legal challenges to his election. This entitles and obligates him to exercise the powers of the executive branch within their constitutional scope. Some of Biden’s executive actions may be unconstitutional, and others may be things that the executive can legally do but shouldn’t. None of that, however, changes the fact that he’s entitled to carry out the job. He is entitled as well to have the Senate confirm his executive-branch nominees, with the traditional caveat that the Senate can and should deny its consent to the most egregiously bad ones.
A second kind of mandate is the voting-coalition mandate: what Biden’s own voters wanted from him when they voted for him. This is mostly internal to the Democrats, and reflects all of the tensions of the Democrats’ voting base. But it also brings into sharp relief the particular problem of the moderate and ex-Republican voters who flocked to Democrats in 2018 and 2020 in reaction to the personality and character of Donald Trump. Many of these voters did not want a radical left-wing agenda; they just wanted the Bad Orange Man to go away. Retaining them as Democrats may be tricky in any event, so long as the alternative is not Trump or a member of Trump’s immediate family.
Moreover, these voters were reassured by the fact that Biden was an ancient Senate institutionalist who speaks in old-timey patriotic terms, not in the language of woke faculty lounges or “Defund the Police” street activists. During the campaign, even as Biden publicly sold himself to these voters as a moderate, progressive pundits were telling their own wing of the party that they expected Biden to govern as the head of a much more transformative left-wing administration. In office, Biden has tried the same split-screen gambit: He has marketed his “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021” as an unremarkable sequel to last year’s COVID-relief bill, while actually stuffing it with long-term left-wing spending programs that — now that the bill has passed — are being celebrated by those same voices as the biggest progressive remaking of America since the Great Society. For an encore, Biden is preparing to roll out the biggest tax hike in three decades.
How long can this double-game be sustained? For the moment, Biden can combine the usual presidential-honeymoon tactics — i.e., blaming the last guy, offering contrasts to his style, issuing grand pronouncements of a new era of unity, honor, and good feeling — with invocations of the pandemic. He can hide from holding press conferences and delay his joint address to Congress, citing health and security threats. But none of this can be kept up forever. Biden’s approval rating in the latest RealClearPolitics average is 53–42 percent. That is better than Trump ever registered, even if one adjusts for the chronic anti-Trump bias in polling over the past five years. But Biden’s early approval ratings are historically poor once you extend the comparison beyond Trump. Barack Obama’s approval was in the 60s well into April of his first year; George W. Bush hovered between 54–58 percent in the same time period, and ranged as high as 88 percent in October 2001 and 72 percent in April 2003. As the pandemic recedes and voters look more closely at what Biden’s administration is actually up to, he may find that getting elected as “not Trump” is not enough.
The third kind of mandate is the one we usually mean when we use the term: a legislative mandate. A president can be said to have this kind of mandate when his popular support is such that other people in the political system feel compelled to help him do things that he wants to do, and that they don’t. The strength of a newly elected or reelected president’s legislative mandate can be measured by how afraid senators and representatives are that their constituents will punish them for opposing him. A classic example was Ronald Reagan getting a wavering House Democrat to vote for his tax cuts by calling in to a live radio show that the congressman was on. Many congressional Democrats likewise felt compelled to back Bush on the Iraq War and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security because of the strength of Bush and his positions with the public. That kind of fear becomes even more important as bipartisan norms of comity continue to degrade at a rapid pace; politicians who no longer cross party lines out of courtesy or conviction will still do so out of self-interest.
What kind of legislative mandate does Biden have? He needs his party on Capitol Hill to impose something close to absolute party-line discipline these days because Democrats have only a 50–50 Senate and now, with the deaths of two Republicans and the resignations of three Democrats to join the administration, a 219–211 majority in the House. Democrats have mostly held the line so far, but there is little sign that Republicans fear the consequences of crossing Biden. Most major legislative votes have resulted in pure party-line divisions, with Democrats exceeding the size of their caucus only by seven votes even on a bill ostentatiously titled the “Bipartisan Background Checks Act”:
To some extent, this is undoubtedly a reflection of our increasingly polarized era. Democrats no doubt would chalk it up further to Republican intransigence, Republicans to Democratic unwillingness to work across the aisle in crafting bills in the first place. The relevant point is that Republicans feel no pressure to go along with Biden simply because he is the president. If Democrats in conservative House districts, or even one Senate Democrat, start to go wobbly more regularly, the Democratic legislative agenda will be entirely doomed.
On nominations, Biden predictably has gotten a fair amount of Republican support for staffing his administration, with several nominations clearing 70 votes in the Senate. The two biggest controversial nominees have been nearly party-line: Only Susan Collins crossed party lines to support Xavier Becerra as secretary of Health and Human Services, and Joe Manchin crossed in the other direction to torpedo the nomination of Neera Tanden to run the Office of Management and Budget.
What does this all mean going forward? Mostly that Biden’s margin for error is so small right now that he cannot get a lot done simply by coasting on his own popularity, which is narrow and depends heavily on anti-Trump sentiment rather than a positive desire for what Biden is selling. He is going to have to come out of his shell and make an affirmative case for the things he wants to do. And for a man of Biden’s age and visibly slowed speech, engaged in managing a fractious coalition, that carries risks of its own.