“Under Biden, the Democrats should have been more radical”
[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”]
From this article by Park MacDougald [my remarks in brackets]:
And in other dodged-bullet news, Jonathan Last of “The Bulwark,” the never-Trump Republican webzine dedicated to “defending democracy” and bilking large checks out of gullible liberal donors, expressed regret, as the results came on Tuesday night, that the Biden administration hadn’t been more “radical” in rigging the system against Trump. Here’s Last, as transcribed by Tom Elliott on X [I watched the video of Last and others, and was struck by the sentence MacDougald excerpts here]:
[The Biden Admin] should have been quite radical. They should have made D.C. a state, they should have actually expanded the Supreme Court, they should have done a whole bunch of stuff that would have been deeply unpopular, but … would have restructured the framework in such a way as to make it harder for the next authoritarian attempt.
To me, this encapsulates a lot of things about the present-day left. There’s the complete lack of realization that it was actually the administration’s radicalism that turned so many voters off. There is the embrace of actions that would be extremely authoritarian in a transparent drive for more power under the guise of stopping the right from being authoritarian. And there’s also the air of expertise coupled with what appears to be a complete lack of knowledge about what actually happened during the Biden administration regarding the very things that Last seems to think they didn’t attempt to do.
“They should have made DC a state,” says Last. Why does he think that didn’t happen? Is he even aware of how hard they tried to do exactly that? I bring you, Mr. Last, history in the form of HR51, a bill introduced on January 4, 2021 – the day after the new Congress resulting from the 2020 election took office. Sounds like it was a top priority, doesn’t it? The bill passed in the House on April 22, 2021, by a vote of 216 to 208. At the time, the Democrats had 221 seats and the Republicans 211, with some not present for the vote, which was on strict party lines. Here’s an excerpt from the bill’s summary:
This bill provides for admission into the United States of the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, composed of most of the territory of the District of Columbia. The commonwealth shall be admitted to the Union on an equal footing with the other states.
The Mayor of the District of Columbia shall issue a proclamation for the first elections to Congress of two Senators and one Representative of the commonwealth.
The bill applies current District laws to the commonwealth and continues pending judicial proceedings.
The commonwealth (1) shall consist of all District territory, with specified exclusions for federal buildings and monuments, including the principal federal monuments, the White House, the Capitol Building, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, and the federal executive, legislative, and judicial office buildings located adjacent to the Mall and the Capitol Building; and (2) may not impose taxes on federal property except as Congress permits.
District territory excluded from the commonwealth shall be known as the Capital and shall be the seat of the federal government.
But guess what? The bill suffered a sad fate in the Senate, much as a previous bill passed by the House in 2020 had:
The House voted Thursday on a bill that would admit Washington, D.C., as the 51st state, although the measure is likely to fail in the evenly divided Senate. The legislation passed along party lines with a vote of 216 to 208, with no Republicans voting in favor. …
The House approved a D.C. statehood measure by a vote of 232 to 180 last year, but it did not get a vote in the Senate, which was then controlled by Republicans. Although Democrats now hold a 50-seat majority, most legislation requires 60 votes to advance, and this bill is unlikely to garner support from 10 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has committed to bringing the measure to the floor for a vote, but a motion to move forward with the legislation would almost certainly fail.
Ah, but Jonathan Last would no doubt say that they should have canned the filibuster and just passed it in the Senate, if they really meant business. And in fact:
Many D.C. statehood supporters are pushing the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, which would allow measures to advance with a simple majority. But this would require support from all 50 Democrats in the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. Two Democrats say they won’t support it — all but dooming the prospects for H.R. 51.
I bet you can guess who the two were, even if you don’t remember the incident: Sinema and Manchin. If not for them, the filibuster would have been eliminated back in 2021.
The article goes on:
However, it’s unclear whether all Senate Democrats would support D.C. statehood, even if the filibuster was eliminated. The two Democrats who oppose eliminating the filibuster, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have not signed onto the Senate bill as co-sponsors. Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Mark Kelly, and independent Senator Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats, have also refrained from co-sponsoring the bill.
And then of course in the next Congress, Republicans got control of the House and no such bill was going anywhere.
I wonder what Last thought the Democrats and/or Biden should have done to have “made DC a state.” Just declared it, by royal decree? Threatened Manchin and Sinema with removal from office? Obiously, there was no way to do it democratically or Democratically, although my guess is that Last knows nothing about any of this history – including the makeup of the legislature – and thinks the problem was just lack of trying.
And what of Supreme Court packing? Last says, “they should have actually expanded the Supreme Court.” No doubt any such effort would have run into the very same roadblocks that HR51 encountered. But again, that’s not Last’s gig or his problem. They should have waved a magic wand.
And indeed, Biden tried as recently as this past July:
President Joe Biden on Monday proposed major changes for the U.S. Supreme Court: an enforceable code of ethics, term limits for justices and a constitutional amendment that would limit the justices’ recent decision on presidential immunity.
But alas, no magic wand was provided, and when last I checked, Biden was never made king:
There’s almost no chance of the proposal passing a closely divided Congress with Election Day looming, but the ideas could still spark conversation …
Almost no chance? Zero chance. But guess what? It was actually tried, and only about six weeks ago:
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today announced the introduction of new legislation to restore balance among the three branches of government, increase transparency to improve public trust in America’s courts, and modernize the courts to ensure greater access to justice for more Americans.
In the wake of recent rulings upending decades of precedent and evidence of unethical behavior, Wyden’s Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act would modernize the courts by expanding the Supreme Court to 15 justices over three presidential terms, prevent political inaction from bottling up nominations to the Supreme Court, and restore appropriate deference to the legislative branch by requiring a supermajority to overturn acts of Congress, among other modernizing provisions to improve access to justice.
“To restore balance” – that’s pretty funny. Not only does the bill feature court-packing, but note that it also requires a supermajority to overturn an act of Congress even though to pass such an act requires nothing of the sort.
The bill is still in committee; it obviously was going nowhere, but the intent was there. And a previous House version that had some different details was introduced in May of 2023 and met a similar fate.
You may wonder why I’m spending so much time on this. It’s because I can’t stand the combination of arrogance and ignorance that I see so often in people like Last who have all sorts of credentials. The credentials give them the arrogance; what gives them the ignorance? Laziness, preference bias, personality?
Now I’m in favor of expanding the SC to 15 effective 1/21/2025.
Jonathan Last has decayed precipitously from when he was writing at (now bat-guano-crazy) Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard. Especially memorable to me is Last’s article “American Narcissus,” from November 2010: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/87594/american-narcissus/ (That’s in the archive at the Washington Examiner and is somewhat less readable typographically than was the original.)
It opens with:
Why has Barack Obama failed so spectacularly? Is he too dogmatically liberal or too pragmatic? Is he a socialist, or an anticolonialist, or a philosopher-president? Or is it possible that Obama’s failures stem from something simpler: vanity. Politicians as a class are particularly susceptible to mirror-gazing. But Obama’s vanity is overwhelming. It defines him, his politics, and his presidency.
Last followed up with this codicil …
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2135826/the-american-narcissus-cont/
… which I will quote in its entirety:
A reader sends in a classic Obama moment that I completely missed. Here’s Ryan Lizza in a 2004 profile of Obama for the Atlantic:
I couldn’t help noticing, when we sat down to talk in the dilapidated storefront that houses his Springfield campaign headquarters, that the blue-pen drawing he’d doodled on his newspaper during fundraising calls was a portrait of himself.
You may have your own favorite scenes from the American Narcissus. Feel free to send them along to jlast[at]weeklystandard.com. Submissions will be accepted without judgment. This is a safe place, a nest of trust in a tree of understanding.
You can’t make stuff like this up!
What the 10th planet here is I haven’t a clue.
Add to arrogance and ignorance, denial of reality. Arguably denial of inconvenient realities is the foremost characteristic of those on the left. Even ‘rational’ liberals like Carville, Dershowitz & Maher still “choose truth over facts”.
The filibuster, or any other Senate rule, can be set aside at any time for any reason by 51 votes:
We don’t actually know that only Sinema and Manchin among the Dems opposed it. Votes are whipped. They don’t hold the vote unless they believe they know the outcome. All we know is that at least two Democrats, not necessarily those two, opposed those bills and there was not a Senate majority in favor. The agreed-upon whipped vote is everyone but those two, certainly, but if there were more than two opposed, then Sinema and Manchin were cover for them–Dems who opposed it for some non-public reason that their home-state base would not forgive if they knew.
The Republicans do exactly the same dance of Designated Mavericks, and our failure to see through it is why they represent us so poorly.
Obamacare is an excellent example of what they can do when they want to. Individual Senators were bought off at sometimes a high price:
The debt ceiling vote in 2021 is another, when the Republicans had enough votes to sustain a filibuster but Mitch McConnell whipped enough votes to set aside the filibuster, at Chuck Schumer’s (and McConnell’s cronies’) behest.
The filibuster is theater, intended to fool us, the voters. They get rid of it whenever they want to. We need to stop being fooled.
I still say we should be thankful that Barack and Michelle weren’t really Long March communists.
Once they did their eight year stint in the White House and put together a multi-millionaire portfolio of properties in Chicago, Martha’s Vineyard, and Hawaii, then the Beautiful People lifestyle, they were Outta There.
Sure, Barack does phone consultations and occasional speeches, but if they were serious about the “fundamental transformation of America” they would have kneecapped Joe before the primaries, put in Michelle as a figurehead, and I doubt Trump could have won.
@Niketas Choniates
You are confusing a vote on changing or suspending the Senate rules, as well as the number of votes it takes to pass a bill in the Senate, with the Senate rule for the number of Senators who must vote to end debate and move to an up or down vote on a bill. By Senate rule it takes a super-majority of 60 Senators to end debate and move to an up or down vote on a bill. A modern filibuster is simply a vote count that indicates fewer than 60 Senators wish to vote on the bill rather than a continuous talk-a-thon but the principle is still the same. Also note that Obamacare was moved through the Senate (somewhat dubiously) under special provisions in the Senate rules for finance related bills that suspended the filibuster for those bills specifically.
It ain’t over….
“Dems to Biden: Take Action Before Trump Takes Over“—
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/donald-trump-democrats-joe-biden/2024/11/15/id/1188231/
Opening grafs:
Heh…
They’ve worked SO HARD (and lying SO EARNESTLY) over the past eight-plus years ginning up the HATE and the HYSTERIA.
Why should they stop now??
THEY HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE…to fulfill their dreams of destruction….
@Christopher B:You are confusing a vote on changing or suspending the Senate rules.
100% wrong.
By Senate rule it takes a super-majority of 60 Senators to end debate and move to an up or down vote on a bill.
This rule about 60 Senators “voting to end debate” can be waived, and has been waived, with only 51 votes according to the rule I quoted, and so can any other rule, and they do it whenever they want to, not just when you hear about it in the news. When they want to be dramatic they call this “nuking the filibuster” and when they want it to fly under the radar they call it “a procedural maneuver”.
Every time the “filibuster has been nuked” it has been nuked by the rule I quoted, with only 51 votes needed.
Here is the transcript of one occasion on which it was done, and note the vote count, 48-52:
It is a fact that filibuster or any other Senate rule can be set aside at any time by 51 votes, and any narrative that suggests otherwise is false.
Niketas Choniates
I don’t have a clue what the rules are – other than rules are made to be broken.
From what you are saying—it seems that the recess appointments can easily been done if Thune works with Trump on it.
Like he can have votes “whipped” for Gaetz – and if not enough he can do a recess for Trump…??
Trump is determined to see Gaetz confirmed as AG despite controversies
Trump wants this…can’t blame him after weak-kneed Sessions – can it be done?
Geez. Last studied molecular biology at Johns Hopkins and graduated.
One might think he would think more carefully. But I gave up on scientists as reliably critical thinkers a long time ago and the fancy degrees don’t help.
The topic of “Punditry bias” came up on another blog. It’s commentators’ belief that the policies they prefer are the policies that will win votes, as if voters were as ideological as the pundits. In spite of increasing and deepening polarization, elections are still decided largely by the state of the nation and by pocketbook issues.
The Bulwark crew does a lot of videos. They undercut the group’s message. Last, Kristol, and the rest of the team would like to be authoritative voices from on high, but seeing them on camera makes it hard to take them seriously. If you wonder why some people still believe the network nightly news, production values have something to do with it. Watching Kristol with his oversized earphones or manic Tim Miller trying to attract attention to himself does a lot to undermine the messaging.
Dopes like Last and their fantasies of permanent donkey control rely on the club of 100 to permanently and massively devalue their offices. That ain’t going to happen in the quotidian world.
Niketas,
You wrote at 6:43 yesterday “The filibuster, or any other Senate rule, can be set aside at any time for any reason by 51 votes…”
Your link — https://senate.la.gov/Documents/Rules/chapter6.htm — is for the Louisiana State Senate, not the U.S. Senate.
@Dax:Your link — https://senate.la.gov/Documents/Rules/chapter6.htm — is for the Louisiana State Senate, not the U.S. Senate.
Good catch, thanks, and sorry for the mistake. US Senate Rule XX “Questions of Order” is here.
The mechanism is:
1) A Senator raises a point of order, contradicting the Senate rule he wishes to set aside. (Can be any rule whatever.)
2) The chair overrules the point of order.
3) The Senator appeals the decision of the chair to the Senate, which overrules the chair by simple majority vote, as happened in the following example from 2013:
tl; dr the Senate has a rule that lets them ignore any rule, including the 60-vote filibuster rule, by simple majority vote. (That’s Rule XX, “Questions of order”.)
It follows then that the Senate can pass anything by simple majority vote, but they and the media find it advantageous to pretend otherwise.
Reminds me of a notion floated just prior to Election Day that Republicans couldn’t run against the Democrats actual agenda because no one would believe the Democrats were that radical.