![]() ![]() When Medicare became law in 1965, it passed with 70 Republican votes in the House and 13 GOP votes in the Senate. In the ‘60s, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen gave LBJ crucial help in getting his civil rights agenda passed. In the 1930’s, GOP Senators Robert LaFollette and Frank Norris were ardent advocates for organized labor. The Senate is 50-50.įurther, both Roosevelt and Johnson had crucial Republican allies. Democrats’ losses in the House whittled their margin down to mid-single digits. ![]() Last November, on the other hand, only 42,000 votes in three key states kept Trump from winning re-election. Similarly, LBJ in 1964 had won a massive popular and electoral vote landslide, along with a Senate with 69 Democrats and a House with 295. In 1933, FDR had won a huge popular and electoral landslide, after which he had a three-to-one Democratic majority in the House and a 59-vote majority in the Senate. It is why 100 days into the administration, NPR was asking a commonly heard question: “Can Biden Join FDR and LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?”īut the FDR and LBJ examples show conclusively why visions of a transformational Biden agenda are so hard to turn into reality. Beyond the emerging bipartisan infrastructure bill, he has proposed a far-reaching series of programs that would collectively move the United States several steps closer to the kind of “social democracy” prevalent in most industrialized nations: free community college, big support for childcare and homebound seniors, a sharp increase in Medicaid, more people eligible for Medicare, a reinvigorated labor movement. There’s no question that Biden is swinging for the fences. Reality Check 1: Biden Can’t Be FDR (or even LBJ) (Spoiler alert: the answer is “yes…maybe”). What remains to be seen is whether there is a politically potent answer to this dilemma. The wishful thinking that seems to have captured the party begins with a profound mismeasurement of what happened last November, which in turn feeds a profound misunderstanding of how major political change happens-and in turn triggers the embrace of “solutions” that are similarly grounded in delusion. Didn’t Joe Biden win the Presidency with a 7 million vote popular majority? Didn’t Democrats win both houses of Congress? If there’s anything more unnerving and disheartening than the Republican Party’s shredding of core democratic and republican principles over the past several years, it’s how so many of the Democrats’ attempts to fight back are grounded in delusion or futility. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, with the Democrats relying on wishful thinking and vague threats to fulfill their biggest campaign promises. Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, echoing the thoughts of many, promptly tweeted out some items from the progressive wish list: “We must abolish the filibuster and pass the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act,” he said, “and we must expand the Supreme Court.” The Democratic response? President Joe Biden urged the Senate to pass the For the People act, a voting rights bill that doesn’t even have full support from his own party. ![]() The decision was a gift-wrapped present to future Republican candidates, and a direct slap at one of the top priorities of not just Democrats, but good-government advocates across the country. And in its decision, the Court strongly hinted it would look favorably on the voting restrictions imposed, or underway, in a dozen other states. When they were challenged, a conservative Supreme Court upheld them by a forbidding 6-3 majority. ![]() A state legislature and a Republican governor passed those rules into law. If you’re looking for a microcosm of the burdens weighing on Democrats, look at what happened last week when the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s new voting laws. Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author. ![]()
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