NORMAL

What is normal?

The dictionaries define it to mean usual, typical or routine. "The expected state or condition," says Oxford.   The word itself derives from the Latin word "normalis" which was classically defined as having been made in accordance with "a carpenter's square", the tool for "establishing right angles."  Bob Vila of This Old House fame calls it the "go to tool for framing, roofing and stair work". It has been around for centuries. 

The precision of the tool, however, hasn't migrated into the current meaning of the word. 

In today's "normal", there is play in the joints.  "Usual" or "typical" is not "always".  Or "precise". In fact, sometimes the messiness of abnormal is repeated so often that it becomes "the new normal", which in truth has to be a bit of an oxymoron.  Repetition takes time and typical requires data from more than one tomorrow.  If the new is routine or typical, maybe the old wasn't.

Maybe there isn't any normal.

Maybe we just create it . . .  

Perpetually turning the repetition perceived in our limited space- time horizon into routines that, from another perspective, are not all that usual after all.

Maybe things just appear normal.

Even though they aren't.

For the past four years, Americans pondered the challenge to normal that was their 45th President.  Many believe the 46th owes his position to the widespread perception that he, unlike his predecessor, is not abnormal.  On this view, an exhausted electorate replaced the narcissistic, self-appointed destroyer of norms with someone who respected them.  

At the end of the day, we tired of all the broken glass -- the absence of any real policy on health care, infrastructure, the environment; the dangerous world of lies where the response to disease was disinformation, where science was side-lined, where aides promoted “alternative facts”; the criminal obtruction and mob-like, omerta-induced pardons of admitted or convicted felons; the predicted (and ultimately deadly) transition abomination where delusion refused to acknowledge defeat; the constant drumbeat of one man's jaundiced ego in 59,553 tweets or re-tweets.

So, we replaced that with . . .

Normal.

And got to take a breath.

We should savor the moment.

Because it will not last.

In the month and a half that has been the incipient Biden presidency, traditional anchors have been laid and the ship of state has been at the very least steadied.  We are back in the Paris climate accord, consulting (rather than dissing) allies, re-peopling the various federal departments with secretaries and undersecretaries qualified to advance their missions,  combating Covid with experts and electeds singing from the same page, and distributing disaster relief with no reference to a state's red or blue political countenance.  

A product of almost a half-century in the political trenches, Biden understands that progress is always slow but can be steady. 

He doesn’t need to be on TV every day praising himself or stabbing opponents.  Other than his Inaugural Address, he has appeared just once, on a CNN Town Hall in mid-February.  On a daily basis, his press secretary talks for the administration.  She is calm and credentialed.  No one has been called fake news, banned from the press room, or had their credentials pulled. 

To his credit, Trump had fast tracked vaccine creation.   He was AWOL, however, on production and delivery.  To that end, and almost immediately upon being inaugurated, Biden used his authority under the Defense Production Act to ensure that the nation will have enough Covid vaccines and created a plan to get them effectively distributed and into the arms of waiting Americans.  

It's the difference between doing . . .

And tweeting.

For a President facing a once-in-a-century pandemic, it is also normal.

The administration's $1.9 trillion Covid relief package has moved through Congress and should be on Biden's desk in a couple of days. It will provide payments of $1,400 for those who earn less than $60,000 annually, extend unemployment benefits through September, and provide the funds states and localities need to retain first responders and open schools. It will also increase tax credits for children, so much so that experts predict the rate of childhood poverty may be cut in half. 

The right and the GOP claim the package is too big, that much of it is unrelated to Covid, and that it belies the President's pledge to be bipartisan.  Biden, however, sat down with a group of Republican senators shortly after being sworn in and made clear that their alternative proposal for less than a third the amount was a non-starter.  Following that meeting, the GOP did not come back with any counter-proposals, House Democrats voted for the bill, House Republicans universally opposed it, and Senate Democrats then amended it.   

They removed the minimum wage hike, reduced the amount of unemployment benefits, stopped states from using any of the funds to pay down public employee pension fund deficits and deleted two mega-transportation projects in New York and California.  

Mitch McConnell, however, still demanded that every Republican Senator vote against it.

Which they all did.

After the Senate Democrats voted for it, however, the amended bill was sent back to the House.

It is expected to pass on Tuesday, again on a party line vote.

In the world before Trump, this was the Republican party's standard modus operandi.  In 2009, in the midst of a financial crisis that threatened to turn into a Depression, no House Republicans voted for the Obama administration’s $787 billion recovery plan and only three GOP Senators crossed the aisle (one of whom, Arlen Specter, later switched parties) to support it.  Later in the administration, when Obamacare was being crafted, Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley -- then the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee -- proposed a host of changes in negotiations with the Democrats only to admit that, even if they were all accepted, he still would not vote for the bill.  

Twelve years later, the Democrats and President Biden were not willing to be fooled twice.

In the country as a whole, the Covid relief package has bipartisan support.  Over 70% of the voters support it, including more than 50% of self-identified Republican. A number of Republican governors also favor the bill, aware that it provides funding they cannot replace and without which they will be forced to cut critical services.  Bipartisan support evaporates, however, among actual GOP House members and Senators. 

Why?

Two reasons.

First, the Congressional Republican party is not a governing party.   In fact, it hasn’t been for some time.  The party is about opposition and grievance.  Policy for the most part is entirely absent.  In the Trump years, Congressional Republicans did two things.  They passed the 2017 tax bill that lowered rates for corporations and the rich, and they stacked the federal courts with Federalist Society judges. On a whole host of other issues -- health care, climate change, gun safety, voting rights, income inequality -- nothing happened.  

This was intentional.

In the Senate, McConnell sat on over 400 proposed bills.  He wouldn't allow them to be debated or voted upon.  The GOP couldn't even come up with the infrastructure spending Trump promised in his campaign (and Democrats would have been happy to pass), and their repeated opposition to Obamacare finally died because they never had an alternative. Indeed, if one of the signature Congressional moments in the last administration was John McCain walking into the well of the Senate in the early morning hours to kill repeal of the Affordable Care Act, one of its signature comedies was Trump constantly promising a new health care plan "next week" or "soon" that he never actually delivered.

Second, even though Republicans do not control the House and now no longer (but just barely) control the Senate, the upper chamber’s current rules -- which require 60 votes to end any filibuster and bring a bill to the floor -- institutionalize a minority veto.  To avoid this barrier on Covid relief, Congress used the budget reconciliation procedure. This special rule allows legislation effecting spending, revenues or the federal debt limit to advance without being subject to the filibuster but limits the number of bills proposed annually under the procedure to three and requires that any one of them not trigger reconciliation for the same reason as any of the others.

After the Covid bill, Democrats will have only two more chances this year to pass legislation using reconciliation.  They are now debating which of their promised packages can be saved via that route.  The likeliest is the planned $2 trillion infrastructure bill.  For those that cannot, the Senate filibuster is a gauntlet that will have to be run.

So . . .

What's a governing party to do?

The Democrats have two options.  

The first is to obtain enough Republican support to remove the possibility of filibuster on any particular bill.  

This will take 60 votes, ten more than they now have. In 2022, there will be 20 Republican and 14 Democratic Senate seats on the ballot, and of the 20, those in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio will be open because Senators Burr, Toomey and Portman are retiring.  It is possible that Portman and Burr might provide additional support now for Democratic legislation on infrastructure.   Toomey is less likely to do so because he is a fiscal hawk.  And none of them are likely to do so on any other Democratic proposals.  Even  if they were, of course, Democrats would still need seven or eight additional Republicans to avoid any filibuster, and after Senators Murkowski (Alaska), Collins (Maine) and Sasse (Nebraska), not even remote possibilities exist on that score.

Nor do the prospects appear much brighter after 2022. Assuming the Democrats pick up those three open seats and hold all of their own (prayers for Georgia Sen. Warnock, please), the only other possible switches are in Florida (Rubio) and Wisconsin (Ron Johnson). So even then, a 55-vote majority would leave the Democrats five short of being filibuster-proof, two short if Murkowski, Collins and Sasse are in play on any particular bill.

The second option is to eliminate the filibuster.  

In his recently published book, The Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson argues for precisely this approach. 

Jentleson was former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's deputy chief of staff and is now a writer. As his book explains, the filibuster was created in the 1840s by John C. Calhoun to protect slavery. It was formally refined and made a part of the Senate's rules in the early 20th century and was then embraced by southern Democrats to insure the survival of Jim Crow.  Indeed, before the 1960s, the only proposed legislation it was used to successfully defeat were civil rights bills. And in the ‘60s, in the wake of Brown, the freedom rides and Selma, the historic civil rights bills overcame it only because (i) the Senate Republican caucus at that time had liberals in it and (ii) President Johnson out- maneuvered his southern Democratic opponents.

Since then, as Jentleson explains, the parties have “sorted” themselves.  The GOP has moved to the (far) right and "negative partisanship" -- the notion that it's more important to beat your opponent than pass an affirmative program -- has taken over.  Today, there is no such thing as a liberal Republican. Though red states comprise a minority of the country’s population, they can always elect at least 40 Republican Senators.   

As this reality increasingly interfered with the Senate's ability to get anything done , moves to end the filibuster gathered strength.  In 2013, the Democrats ended it on any lower court judicial nominees. Their reasoning was sound.  Before 2009, there had been 82 filibusters on all of the judicial nominees proposed by the forty-three previous presidents.  In the five years or so thereafter, however, the GOP filibustered 86 of President Obama's nominees.  

In 2017, the Republicans returned the favor and ended filibusters on Supreme Court nominees.  Having refused to debate or vote on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat vacated upon Justice Scalia's death, they did so to avoid the inevitable filibuster that would have been mounted once Trump sought to fill that seat with Justice Gorsuch.  

Today, therefore, and apart from judicial nominations, the filibuster lives on.

The procedure was created and defended to preserve the Senate's ability to engage in "unlimited debate".  As practiced early on, this literally meant that filibustering Senators or their allies had to continually speak on the floor.  In a strange way, it required courage. For all their transparent (if not then, certainly now) racism, John C. Calhoun and Richard Russell had to stand up and defend their views at length to their colleagues. Today, however, all a Senator has to do is announce he or she will filibuster and then go silent.  Far from demanding courage, the current practice rewards cowardice.

In 2013, when West Virginia's Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania's Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, in the wake of the massacre of Sandy Hook's first graders, proposed the bipartisan and widely supported universal background check on gun purchases, the two of them literally begged the bill's opponents to debate the issue -- to question them and challenge their arguments -- on the floor.   No one bothered.  Instead, in individual interrupted sessions over the course of a week, opponents delivered prepared remarks to a largely empty chamber.  In total, they spoke for two hours and twenty-four minutes.

It was hardly a "debate".

And it certainly wasn't anywhere near "unlimited".  

Can the Democrats kill the filibuster for good?

Right now?

Probably not.

Why not?

Because . . .

There are only 50 Democrats in the Senate today . . .

And Joe Manchin, one of the very legislators stymied by that 2013 filibuster on unlimited background checks, has said he will never vote to repeal it. 

Manchin claims that doing so would turn the Senate into the House.  He argues that repealing the filibuster would end unlimited debate and turn majority rule into minority silence.  His claims, however, are overwrought. For starters, the House these days is far from the lesser body Manchin assumes it to be.  Unlike the Senate under McConnell, it actually votes on bills and gets things done.  The votes are messy and they are close. But there isn't any legislation that won't be debated and voted upon merely because the minority opposes it. 

More importantly, eliminating the filibuster is by no means synonymous with restricting or cutting off debate. As the 2013 background check fiasco demonstrates, the tool is not being used to preserve debate in any meaningful senses; in fact, given that no one has to take to the floor and utter a word, it is actually being used to stymie debate. In truth, when today's Senate avoids filibuster and proceeds by unanimous consent, it has no problem agreeing on the number of total hours each side will have to debate. There is no reason such agreements could not be struck in the future, and barring that, the rules themselves could easily be amended to kill the filibuster while preserving the right to debate within reasonable time limits. No one will be silenced.

It's probably unfair to pick on Sen. Manchin.  

He represents a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the last two presidential elections and sees no need to walk the plank on a procedure the GOP deems critical to its survival, especially if doing so might lead to his defeat and the loss of Democratic control.  He also isn't up for reelection until 2024, and in the meantime, were the Democrats to win additional Senate seats in 2022, a more robust Democratic majority could eliminate the rule without Manchin's vote.  It is even possible that, were such a Democratic majority able to do so, the GOP might wave the white flag of compromise, lowering the threshold for a filibuster to, say, 55 votes, and requiring that filibustering Senators come out of the shadows and . . .

Actually debate.

I'm even willing to bet that this is what the veteran pol now in the White House, a half century of experience his guide, thinks may happen.

It's incremental.

And slow.

And frustrating.

Maybe even . . .

Normal.