The Democrats Are Flirting with Suicide in the Midterms

David wrote a couple of days ago about the endless assumption that the Republican Party is about to die. To his argument I would add this point: As usual, the Democrats are suicidal.

Had Joe Biden been what he pretended to be during last year’s presidential election, he could have represented a real threat to the GOP. If he wanted to, Biden could have pocketed the Democrats’ gains among the affluent, picked off some of the working-class voters that Donald Trump attracted, and tamped down the activist energy that tends to hurt presidents in the midterms.

But he and his party have not done this. Yes, yes, yes, Biden is currently doing fine in opinion polls. And yes, he’s managed to get away with pretending that his expensive progressive wish-list was “COVID relief.” But that won’t last forever, and, even if it does, the Democratic Party is assiduously building up precisely the sort of brief that Republicans need to make the case against unified control — irrespective of the president’s popularity.

In the space of a month, the Democrats have proposed blowing up the Supreme Court, sloppily federalizing the entire election system, passing a slavery reparations bill, resuscitating the Green New Deal, and prioritizing strict gun control — all while the crisis on the border worsens and the president’s approval rating on that high-salience question hits disaster levels. Not only is this likely to prove toxic to the party next time people get to vote — the most likely outcome of the call to pack the Supreme Court will be to pack the House with Republicans — it’s also likely to hurt its capacity to get anything substantial done.

Up until now, the Democrats’ playbook has been to insist that if Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are unwilling to abolish the filibuster then, in practice, they are unwilling to “save” democracy with the “must-pass” HR1. In response to this, Manchin and Sinema have said that they believe in collegiality and compromise — a good, even correct, answer, but one that lacks teeth. Now, though, Manchin and Sinema can point to far more concrete reasons for their reluctance. “The Democratic Party,” they can say, “is trying to destroy the judicial branch. Of course we’re not going to take the prerequisite step to make that possible.” Or, at least, their opponents can say that when discussing the topic.

As of this moment, every moderate Democrat in the Senate and the House is on notice. Immediately after the 2020 election, members of the much-shrunken Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives began attacking each other:

“No one should say ‘defund the police’ ever again,” Spanberger yelled on the leaked call. “Nobody should be talking about socialism.”

Spanberger, who won re-election by a narrow margin of 0.2 percentage points, called the election results “a failure” and told other Democrats, “We lost races we shouldn’t have lost.”

She added that if progressives continue to use this rhetoric, “We will get f—–g torn apart in 2022.”

The “defund the police” talk has mostly faded away. But it has been replaced with talk that is just as destructive, just as radical, and just as unwelcome to any politician whose margin of victory begins with a zero. Worse still, with the exception of reparations, these ideas are not coming from the likes of Rashida Tlaib; they are coming from the Democrats’ leadership. Further gun control was announced in person by President Biden during a televised press conference in which he called upon Congress to prohibit the most popular rifle in the country. Biden, too, takes direct responsibility for the situation on the border, and he is implicated by the plan to pack the Supreme Court, which was introduced by the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and which sits alongside a committee the White House has created to “study” the issue.

Aided by a compliant press, Democrats have over-interpreted a narrow election win and a dispirited opposition as proof that the country is finally ready for their policies and that the coalition of the ascendant has finally arrived. This is incorrect. In 1937, when the last attempt to destroy the judiciary was proposed, the party enjoyed supermajorities in both houses and a president who had won reelection in a landslide. Today, the Senate is split 50–50, and, at the time of this writing, the Democrats have a 218–212 majority, which means that they can pass nothing on a party-line basis if there are more than two defectors. As the Washington Post points out, in 2020 the Republican Party came within 90,000 votes of controlling all of Washington. This really is no time for a suicide charge.

And yet . . .