The Reconciliation Bill Is Not about ‘Saving Democracy’

M ichael Tomasky argues at The New Republic that Democrats must pass their $3.5 trillion spending boondoggle through the reconciliation process because democracy itself will not survive otherwise. “The Reconciliation Bill Is About Saving Democracy: Democrats have to prove that the government can deliver for people. If they don’t, authoritarianism wins.” That’s the title and subtitle. The argument itself is no better:

Democrats have to be the party of democracy. That . . . means, as Joe Biden repeatedly and correctly says, that they need to show the country that democracy works and can produce positive outcomes. If they don’t manage to come to terms on this reconciliation bill, the negative impacts won’t be merely economic. This reconciliation bill is about democracy. If they don’t pass it and don’t show that democracy works, especially with the government in the hands of one party, the Republican Party will benefit—they’ll almost certainly take the House and the Senate in 2022, and they’ll be teed up to steal the 2024 election for Donald Trump, and American democracy will be on life support . . . the Democrats must now come together to prove that government can deliver services to its citizens. That is what matters, and that’s where any Democrat’s emphasis should be.

First of all, Tomasky is arguing that Democrats should pass something in general, rather than anything in particular, simply because it would be bad if they lost elections in 2022. Elections decided by . . . voters. There are words for being afraid of voters throwing you out of power, and none of those words is “democracy.”

Second, Tomasky’s memory is really short. In 2010, voters were furious at Obamacare, bailouts, and spending binges, and they elected a Republican House. In 2014, when the House was unable to do much about any of those things on its own, they elected a Republican Senate. In 2016, when both houses together failed to make a dent in Obamacare or the rest, they elected a Republican president — not just any president, but a president who ran specifically against the habit of Republicans failing to deliver the stuff they promised. In 2017, Donald Trump and the Republican Congress tried to repeal Obamacare, and they failed. I do not recall Tomasky, The New Republic, or much of anybody else in the left-leaning commentariat writing articles about how it was essential for democracy that Congress “show that democracy works, especially with the government in the hands of one party” or that the voters see that their votes had consequence. Quite the contrary: A program opposed by the president and a majority of both houses of Congress continued unabated. Apparently, only some of the voters are supposed to have their votes count. Those voters also do not, it would seem, include the people who elected Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

Third, even a brief review of the Trump years should remind one that the posture of Democrats being the party that shows that elections matter is a newly minted one. For four solid years, we heard nothing but glowing praise for the resistance of unelected bureaucrats, generals, spies, and judges thwarting the ability of the elected president to do what he wanted with the executive branch. When a Republican wins elections, the Democratic commentariat defaults to a supervised view of democracy, in which the people are permitted to decide only whatever subset of issues are permitted to them by their progressive overlords, a supervision exercised entirely without reference to which things have been written down by a constitution-making supermajority.

Fourth, the entire point of the ambitious reconciliation bill is to create permanent programs that cannot be undone. What Tomasky wants Congress to prove to the voters is that one election, one time matters. Tomorrow’s voters will face the same obstacles of process and politics in undoing this that Republicans faced with Obamacare.

It gets worse. The sheer scale of the Democrats’ proposed spending binge is such that it will constrain future Congresses in other choices on spending and taxes — even spending that progressives or liberals may desire in the future. The result of passing this bill now will be to tell future voters that their elections will not matter.

Finally, Tomasky overlooks the fact that, if Democratic voters actually want a particular level of spending on a particular level of services, many of them can accomplish this in their state governments. Money spent by states is the same as money spent by the federal government. There is neither a partisan nor a procedural hurdle to voters in places such as California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, or Hawaii adding massively to their state budgets, if that is what their voters want. Of course, it will bankrupt their state budgets and destroy their state business climates to do so, but that will happen at the federal level, too — just more slowly. What Tomasky really wants is to take away the choice of voters in other states to avoid being saddled with that kind of government.

As Jack Butler notes, this is not like Social Security or Medicare, which were passed by broad majorities; Democrats are trying to accomplish this with a 50–50 Senate and a four-vote majority in the House. They would not even have the Senate if the Perdue–Ossoff race had ended where it did on Election Day; only the brief shift in public opinion in Georgia between November and January, driven heavily by Donald Trump’s public tantrum, gave Democrats their Senate majority. They won that race fair and square and are entitled to govern with it for two years. But spare me the rhetoric about how it is a test for democracy if these accidental, razor-thin majorities prove unwieldy. That is actually how democracy is supposed to work.