Dems are trying to do a lot. That’s not disarray

A lot of people disdain artificial deadlines in legislation and the frantic, seemingly chaotic activity that goes with them. But while there was still no resolution by of the Democratic Party’s impasse on the dual congressional bills that would enact large chunks of their agenda, from climate to health care to child care to construction and more, the day’s events appeared to yield more progress than has been the case for months.
Do deadlines work? Sometimes. Do they help? Usually.
The deadlines in this case are particularly artificial, and missing them doesn’t seem important as long as everyone involved agrees to keep negotiating. That said, there’s still as much uncertainty as ever in terms of the range of potential outcomes.
To begin with, the negotiations within the party are difficult for a good reason: Democratic officials, including President Joe Biden and congressional leaders, are attempting something difficult, selecting an aggressive amount of their ideal agenda to pass into law despite having very thin margins in both chambers of Congress. That the resulting process looks messy and risks failure should be no surprise, because any legislative program looks messy. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki may have been correct when she said that people are out of practice watching lawmaking: “I know that feels foreign since there wasn’t a lot of it over the last couple of years.”
It’s easy to misinterpret the difficulties caused by thin margins and those inherent in any wide-ranging policy initiative as signs of disarray. The truth is that Democrats are remarkably united. They’re just not 100% in agreement on everything, in an environment in which nothing happens unless they are at or very close to 100%.
They could back off and choose a less ambitious agenda. But parties are right to try to take advantage when they enjoy the rare windows of unified government. After all, Democrats only held the White House and majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives for eight years between 1969 and 2020. Republicans have only managed that feat in six years after 1955.
Yes, many important items pass Congress even during periods of divided government, but it’s still true that unified government provides an important and unusual opportunity. From the party’s point of view, the risks of attempting to pass high-priority agenda items just aren’t that important. And for those whose main interest in politics is enacting policy, it’s hard to see any strong argument for not trying.

—Bloomberg

Jonathan Bernstein is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation team based in Berlin. He was previously Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He recently authored
a Russian translation of George
Orwell’s “1984”