by That’s the title of a book I’ve agreed to write for Yale University Press (their editorial director) Seth Ditchik commissioned my previous two books, Zombie Economics and Economics in Two Lessons when he was at Princeton UP. When we first discussed the book, I took the view that most of the writing would have to be done after November, since the outcome of the US presidential election would be crucial to developments in the US and globally. I’m now working on the assumptions that(a) Biden will be the next president(b) he will have a workable majority in Congress.(c) mainstream Democrats recognise the need for radical change, and Biden will align with the mainstream position as he always has done The first of these assumptions was problematic until recently, but seems safe
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That’s the title of a book I’ve agreed to write for Yale University Press (their editorial director) Seth Ditchik commissioned my previous two books, Zombie Economics and Economics in Two Lessons when he was at Princeton UP.
When we first discussed the book, I took the view that most of the writing would have to be done after November, since the outcome of the US presidential election would be crucial to developments in the US and globally. I’m now working on the assumptions that
(a) Biden will be the next president
(b) he will have a workable majority in Congress.
(c) mainstream Democrats recognise the need for radical change, and Biden will align with the mainstream position as he always has done
The first of these assumptions was problematic until recently, but seems safe enough to work on now. The third, I’ll leave for comments.
That leaves the question of a workable majority. Roughly speaking, I mean that the Dems have enough votes in the Senate to abolish or restrict the filibuster and pass the kind of program I’ll be advocating (allowing for a couple of defections, that would be 52 or more). Winning that many seats is still a stretch on current polling, but not out of reach.
The immediate question is that of how to get rid of the filibuster. Doing so pre-emptively would be problematic in all sorts of ways. Biden needs to start with the 2008 Obama playbook of reaching out across the aisle in the spirit of bipartisanship. But unlike in Obama’s case, once the proffered hand (or perhaps elbow bump) of friendship is slapped down, as it surely will be, Biden needs to point to his electoral mandate and whip up the necessary votes. Obama realised this, to some extent, in his second term, but by then he had a hostile Congress.
More concretely, I’d suggest starting with health care. Biden should call on the Repubs to drop their endless campaign against Obamacare, and work together on fixing the health systme. He should start with a proposal to expand Medicaid to all states, with incentives redesigned to get around (at least arguably) the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling that States had to have a “genuine choice”. Biden should offer the Repubs a chance to have a say in the framing of the legislation with the aim of bringing the country together.
Politically, this ought to be a no-brainer for the Repubs. The fact that Oklahoma voters just passed a referendum to expand Medicaid over the opposition of the governor, ought to make it clear that this is a fight they can’t win. But given that they are still fighting to abolish Obamacare, it seems unlikely that they will see this.
Even if Congress passes the legislation, it could still be invalidated by the Supreme Court. But, unlike 2012, this would be a fight that Roberts couldn’t win, since Congress could keep tweaking the law and sending it up again. Repeated rulings in favor of the Republicans on an issue where they have almost no public support https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/data-note-5-charts-about-public-opinion-on-medicaid/ would provide the ideal case for expanding the Court so as to nullify the Gorsuch and Kavanagh appointments.
This isn’t the only test case Biden could use. But it seems like an obvious place to start.