The Presidency Is Not Enough

And without reform, neither is a Democratic Senate.

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion columnist

• Nov. 4, 2019, 6:00 a.m. ET

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President Franklin Roosevelt addresses the 74th Congress in January, 1935.CreditHarris & Ewing, via Library of Congress

There are still more than a dozen candidates jockeying for the Democratic presidential nomination. Some are running on big, ambitious platforms for change, like the Medicare-for-All plans pushed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Others are selling “pragmatism,” with more modest ideas meant to win consensus — and which are often quite liberal by historical standards. But nearly everyone on the board faces the same, fundamental problem: They want to go further than where Congress, and the Senate in particular, will want to move, even if it has a Democratic majority.

Right now, the Senate Democratic caucus is 47 members strong — 45 Democrats and two independents. Twelve are up for re-election. If Democrats somehow sweep the field next year — if they save every incumbent, win every tossup and flip every seat that only leans Republican, they’ll have a 54-member majority. In this hypothetical majority, at least three members — Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana and Doug Jones of Alabama — will come from conservative, pro-Trump states. And there will be new members from competitive, Republican-leaning states like Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.

A Democratic president might have 46 liberal-to-left-wing votes for her agenda. Even without the filibuster, this agenda would rest with relatively conservative Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Sinema, Politico reports, has distanced herself from her liberal colleagues, won’t commit to supporting the Democratic nominee for president, backs the supermajority requirement for legislation — otherwise known as the legislative filibuster — and hopes to restore the supermajority requirement for judicial and executive branch nominations.

In this best-case scenario, the next Democratic president will have to work with a Senate that has bound itself by rules that preclude party-line legislation. That president might be able to build a workaround — Senator Sanders has proposed passing a Medicare-for-All bill through the budget reconciliation process, which requires only a simple majority, but he would still have to deal with a caucus whose pivotal votes are well to the right of the White House. For anything else — like immigration reform or climate legislation — he’d have to win six or seven conservative Republican votes. If this wasn’t possible in 2009, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, then it’s ludicrous to think it will happen at any point in the near future.

Barring some seismic shock to American politics, the next Congress will be a barrier to progressive change. And as much as the New Deal remains a touchstone for the left wing of the Democratic Party, it is also an important to keep in mind that the composition of Congress had as much to do with that particular heyday of American liberalism as the character of presidential leadership did.

The 1935 National Labor Relations Act, to give just one example, was a signature accomplishment of the New Deal. Devised in response to profound industrial unrest, it recognized the right to strike, to organize, to form a union. It gave American workers unheard-of power to shape the nation’s political economy, bringing the United States as close as it ever came to social democracy.

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President Franklin Roosevelt is rightfully credited for signing the bill into law. But while his White House wanted major labor reform, this wasn’t his bill — it came to the White House, not the reverse. The architect was Senator Robert Wagner of New York, a longtime ally to labor and a staunch New Dealer. After the 1934 midterm elections gave Democrats a commanding majority in Congress — nearly obliterating the right wing of the Republican Party — Wagner saw a chance to act.

Working closely with organized labor, Wagner and his staff went for broke. They affirmed the right to collective bargaining, established an independent board (still operating as the National Labor Relations Board) to adjudicate labor disputes and created new protections for workers who want to unionize, as well as restrictions on the ability of employers to coerce their employees out of joining a union.

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U.A.W. members picketing the Ford plant in St. Louis on Dec. 1, 1937, two years after the National Labor Relations Act made it much easier for workers to organize.CreditBettmann Archive/ Getty Images

Wagner introduced the bill in February, 1935. It passed the Senate in May by a vote of 63 to 12. The House followed suit, and by the end of June it was on the president’s desk. And while Roosevelt quickly signed the bill, he had actually been ambivalent during the process, wary of antagonizing business interests ahead of his re-election campaign in 1936. (The F.D.R. who welcomed the hatred of reckless capitalists would come later.) Energetic, liberal lawmakers had forced his hand.

Liberal, left-wing, or moderate, the next Democratic president will be ice skating uphill against Congress. That’s true of Warren’s wealth tax or Sanders’s tuition-free college. It’s true for Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, with their more modest solutions and tweaks. Even Senator Amy Klobuchar’s small-scale proposals — for building rural broadband and reducing prescription drug costs — will falter in the face of unified Republican opposition and the supermajority requirement.

What, then, is the way forward?

Long term, it’s a democracy agenda. Truly participatory elections — with fairly-drawn districts, automatic voter registration and easy access to the ballot — might make Congress more representative of a public that favors progressive solutions across a wide number of issues. Democrats at every level of government should use their power to make those changes a reality. Likewise, strengthening labor and workplace democracy is an indispensable part of building energy for progressive change.

The short term is much harder.

At the very least, everyone on the Democratic campaign trail — and on the debate stage two weeks from now — should be able to say what they intend to do about the Senate. Instead of bickering over health care spending, they should speak frankly and openly with the public about the serious barriers to virtually any kind of major reform.

Arguably the most important divide in the Democratic primary field isn’t by ideology, but between those candidates who understand the obstacles ahead and those who don’t. Despite the example of the last 10 years, the centrist candidates are still running as if persuasion and compromise will win the day.

Only two candidates seem to believe otherwise. Warren, who wants to abolish the legislative filibuster, and Sanders, who wants to mobilize his supporters — and the larger, sympathetic public — against recalcitrant lawmakers. Members of Congress, Sanders told CNBC’s John Harwood in an interview last week, are “going to have to think, ‘If I don’t support an agenda that works for working people, I’m going to have President Sanders coming to my state and rallying working-class people.’ ”

It will be very difficult to end the filibuster. I have no idea whether Sanders will be able to pressure lawmakers like Manchin or Sinema to vote his way, especially if they aren’t up for re-election until later in the decade. But these, at least, are actual ideas. The moderate

by contrast, have yet to give an answer for what they will do when their agenda hits the same wall the last Democratic president ran into.