The Kamikaze Congress

T here was another time, not so long ago, when we had a 50–50 Senate. With deaths and special elections, the balance would change slightly, but the new president, George W. Bush, took the electoral result as his reason to move toward the political center, at least on his domestic agenda. He pushed the 107th Congress toward a few items with cross-partisan support: a prescription drug benefit, Medicare Part D; an educational reform agenda called No Child Left Behind; a response to the major accounting scandals, Sarbanes-Oxley; and a tax cut. Fiscal hawks such as Congressman Paul Ryan actually supported Medicare Part D. Moderates got the odd victories they like. Conservatives got a lot of rhetorical spin. Worried about the growing role of the federal government in education, they were told that the reform was about holding teachers to higher standards.

We’re not even 100 days into the Joe Biden’s presidency, and the 117th Congress has passed a $1.9-trillion stimulus on a party-line vote. That’s more money than Canada’s gross domestic product. This bill was a gusher of cash spraying money into every existing sluice of COVID relief, and every stream of federal funding, with plenty of money granted to Democratic interests. $130 billion to schools, to help them open (most schools could open without extra money). $40 billion to colleges and universities (which largely don’t need it). And $6 billion to New York’s Metro Transit Authority.

Joe Biden wants a follow-up: the American Jobs Act, with a budget around $2 trillion, a long-awaited infrastructure bill that is 95 percent not infrastructure. Even the way centrist House members describe it makes it sound like it is something that voters must swallow even if it makes them cringe. “My hope is that it will yield a bill that is as bold as the votes will bear,” said Representative Stephanie Murphy, who leads the Blue Dog Democrats in the House. This spending package would also come with another tax cut — a restoration of the state and local tax deductions. This tax relief is aimed squarely at the most upwardly mobile and politically influential wine-track Democrats.

Instead of reconciling itself to a centrist agenda, the House is relentlessly messaging to its left wing by passing incredibly ambitious legislation. None of these agenda items is likely to get past moderate Democrats in the Senate, such as Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, but the waft of red meat has made left-wing dogs howl.

The measures include bills to make Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico into states, which Republicans correctly interpret as an attempt to make the Senate more Democratic — with a big ‘D.’

The House also passed the Equality Act, which would try to pry away all the statutory and court-recognized protections of religious groups that want to continue setting their institutions’ policies in conformity with their faith. Those could be treatment and medical policies at hospitals, or dorm policies at colleges, or hiring and firing at private religious schools based on a code of conduct. Do you want to find out if the First Amendment can withstand a full attack from Congress? Democrats do.

Another bill would require licenses and national registry for guns, and draft the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to regulate “military-style weapons” — which is a code word for AR-15s, the weapon owned by millions of people in the suburbs and rural areas of the county, where gun crime is much less of a problem. Anyone who had been hospitalized for mental illness or drug abuse would lose their Second Amendment rights, if the authors of this bill had their way.

Oh, and this Congress held an impeachment trial for Trump after he left office.

When Democrats won their House majority in 2018, it was on the strength of truly modest proposals to shore up Obamacare and Social Security. They avoided talking about Trump, and didn’t promise revolution. Radicals and semi-socialists tended to lose everywhere except districts, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, that are entirely uncompetitive.  It seemed as if the electorate was proving false the common left-wing theory of American politics, which held that Democrats were only losing because of their timidity.

Now we have a Congress that isn’t timid. Its Democratic members do not have the votes to pass their agenda in the Senate, and cannot restructure society. But instead of governing to the middle, they are goading the most highly motivated Republican off-year constituencies: the religious Right and gun owners. This Congress wants to spend money and send a message. That may be all it ever does.