It's Day 146 in the Biden Administration.
There is nothing particularly special about this day.
No historian ever praised FDR for what he accomplished in the first 146 days of his administration. There are no 146-day wars. Or diets. The number itself is not featured in any song. Or poem. Nor is the number devilishly transcendental (like 666).
At the same time, the number is not meaningless.
Far from it.
Two of the world's most famous authors used it to identify some of their work. One was Shakespeare. He wrote Sonnet 146. The other was the Biblical psalmist with his (or her) Psalm 146.
The Bible's 146 is one of the five "praise psalms" that end the Book of Psalms. It tells us not to "put [our] trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save." The sonnet is equally forbidding, lamenting the soul's bodily imprisonment. In the end, both advocate escape. To "the Lord" in the psalmist's case, He who feeds the hungry, gives sight to the blind, "frustrates the ways of the wicked" and "upholds the cause of the oppressed". To "Death once dead" in Shakespeare's, where the body's end can become the soul's immortal beginning.
The Bible and Shakespeare are enigmatic.
Even when they pretend not to be.
The psalm and the sonnet capture their enigmas almost too perfectly. It's easy to read the psalm as a pox on politics ("Do not put your trust in princes"), on a world that cannot be saved by us in our time. It's also easy to read the sonnet as a call to ascetic withdrawal ("Poor soul, the centre of [our] sinful earth, [Feeding] these rebel powers that thee array"). Neither view, however, works. The psalm embraces God in the here and now to "frustrate" the wicked, feed the hungry and vindicate the oppressed. And the sonnet's "rebel powers" embrace passions and affections (like love) that can enliven far more than they ever imprison.
If we let them.
So, on Day 146 . . .
Is Biden letting them?
The administration is receiving and deserves high marks for its thorough and completely competent response to the pandemic. It organized and delivered vaccines to America in record time. As of this writing, 65% of those 18 or older have received at least one dose and 55% are fully vaccinated. Among those 65 or older, more than 80% have received at least one shot. All this has made an enormous difference. The number of daily deaths from Covid has declined by more than 90% since January, and the rate of death among those 75 or older has been cut in half.
Biden wants 70% of all adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4 and is pulling out the stops to get there. If we don't make it, vaccine hesitancy will be the cause. The rate of vaccinations has slowed measurably since April, and the infection and death rates that still exist are being driven largely by the unvaccinated population. Thirty states are unlikely to reach Biden's July 4 goal even if the nation as a whole does. And a handful of states are projected to fall anywhere from six months to a year short.
Pandemic policy is not supposed to be political and with Biden it has not been. That was not the case, however, with Trump, and his effects linger. Vaccine hesitancy has been more pronounced in Trump states and among Trump voters. And while it is important not to over-generalize here (hesitancy is also more pronounced among Black Americans and they are not Trump voters), as late as April, 40% of identifying Republicans said they would not get a shot.
Biden, however, believes in government and knows that progress is incremental.
On the pandemic and vaccinations, he will not give up.
On other fronts, however, he is being stymied.
After passage of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, the administration's biggest legislative priorities -- its infrastructure plan and its voting rights bills -- have not been passed. They haven't even been voted on. On voting rights, the Republicans have made it clear that they will not support the bills and will filibuster any attempt to bring them to a vote. This is critical because, in the first five months of this year, fourteen states have already enacted restrictive voting laws designed to put statewide offices out of reach for Democrats. These include Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Arkansas, Texas and Arizona. In Texas, that state's attorney general even admitted that Biden would have won there had the GOP not succeeded in stopping Harris County (home to Houston) from sending out absentee ballot forms to all registered voters.
To make sure nothing like that happens, Republicans are creating regimes that suppress turnout among Democrats in future elections. Two-thirds of registered Republicans have swallowed Trump's lie that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden is not a legitimate president, and GOP elites and elected officials have for the most part either embraced that lie or silently allowed it to fester. In both instances, they have also used the lie to justify the new voting restrictions, claiming the new laws are needed to restore confidence in the integrity of our elections, the lack of which was generated by the lie in the first place.
Orwell is turning in his grave.
Meanwhile, the GOP is playing rope a dope on the infrastructure bill. After Biden shut down talks with the GOP on infrastructure, a bipartisan group of Senators (five Democrats and five Republicans) emerged to claim they had agreed on a bill that approaches the numbers Biden himself has indicated might be acceptable to him in any final package. Those numbers are way short of the President's initial $2 trillion proposal but also far north of the Republican's original counter-offer. The problem, however, is that this group has not said it can deliver enough votes to avoid a filibuster by the rest of the GOP caucus and unless it can, there is no reason Biden should compromise when he can just go ahead and pass his original bill (or something close to it) via reconciliation.
Biden, however, desperately wants a bipartisan package. He wants this for two reason. First, he still believes Congress can work and wants to deliver on the promise he made during his campaign to lower the temperature and create at least some semblance of unity in the wake of Trump's civil wars. Second, he (and the Democrats) have what can charitably be called a Joe Manchin problem.
Manchin is West Virginia's lone statewide Democratic office holder. Trump won the state with almost 70% of the vote last year, and in 2018 Manchin himself saw his statewide margin decline to around 3%. He has steadfastly refused to even think about ending the filibuster (which means it is here to stay) and has also refused to vote for the Democrats' federal voting reform bill (designed to counter the GOP's state-based restrictions), claiming it is too partisan.
On infrastructure, Manchin is part of the so-called group of ten claiming to have found a bipartisan alternative. But he also has not said it can avoid a filibuster. Earlier in the year, when legislation to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was coming up for a vote, he seemed pretty confident that there were "ten good solid patriots within [[the GOP] conference" who would vote to end debate and send the bill to the floor of the Senate for an up or down vote. When they didn't, Manchin said the GOP's actions were "unconscionable".
Not, however, unconscionable enough to get Manchin to kill the filibuster.
Or even vote for S1-- the voting reform bill.
Democrats can argue with Manchin until they are blue in the face. It will be useless. He represents a massively Trump state. He has always been more conservative than his Democratic colleagues, especially on social issues. He voted to confirm Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and would have voted to confirm Coney Barrett but for the fact that her nomination was made only weeks before the election.
So, he is not changing.
What should Biden do?
Three things.
1. Pass the infrastructure bill. If the group of ten can deliver a filibuster free bill, pass it. Otherwise, pass anything under reconciliation that Joe Manchin will vote for. I said above that he is more conservative than his Democratic colleagues on social issues. But he likes infrastructure and his state thrives on it. His mentor, Robert Byrd, more or less turned West Virginia into a federal office park, and no matter how many Trump voters it produces, the state would die without the massive amounts of federal spending that annually flow into it. Manchin will vote for something. And that something will be a lot of what Joe Biden is now demanding.
So, as the Nike people say, just do it.
2. Litigate on voting rights. If S1 can't be passed -- and it can't be -- the only solution is to take the GOP's restrictive voting bills to the courts. The bills are designed to thwart Democratic turnout and disproportionately burden minorities. Make the Supreme Court decide whether that is OK. When John Roberts overturned the pre-clearance provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he did so on the ground that the country "has changed". The 350 plus voting restriction bills now passed or coursing through the nation's various Republican led legislatures refute that claim.
Tell him.
It's a lot harder to pretend things have changed if you start looking like Roger Taney and your decisions start sounding like Plessy v. Ferguson.
3. Keep governing. And keep doing it calmly.
It is impossible to over-estimate the relief America wakes up to every day knowing that the current President of the United States will not be burning the house -- or the world -- down. Drama is a fact of life in politics, especially in the polarized politics of this era. Trump made that worse. He was all drama all the time, a pathological liar, and pretty much nothing else. On his best days, he was exhausting; on his worst, dangerous and frightening. That is over, at least for now. As I write, President Biden is in Europe revitalizing alliances and resurrecting dialogue. They're less exhausted too.
In the days ahead, there will be more drama.
This week, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) may decide that the church should not give Joe Biden communion on account of his political views on abortion. The Pope has advised against this but the USCCB has many within its ranks who like neither Francis nor Biden. So who knows. The church whose members could not become president before 1960 because the rest of the country feared they'd take orders from its Princes may be on the verge of excommunicating the second Catholic president because . . .
He refuses to take orders from its Princes.
Biden is a devout Catholic. In many respects, he is more devout than JFK (whose wife thought it would be a shame if he lost the presidency on account of being a Catholic, principally because, as she put it, he wasn't a particularly good one). If Biden is excommunicated or refused communion, he will suffer.
But he will not change.
And he shouldn't.
Pro-choice Catholicism is more than defensible at a number of levels. Embryos aren't people. They are cells. The church itself has been all over the map on why abortion is wrong, and two of its guiding lights -- Augustine and Thomas Aquinas -- never thought embryos were ensouled or that killing them was murder; they thought abortion was a form of birth control and any likely sin venial. Apart from all that, the notion that prelates can establish binding moral rules is dangerous. They are human and can be wrong.
Morality is too important to be left simply or only to priests. If the right or wrong of abortion is a moral matter, the Catholic Church is not necessarily an expert on matters moral; individual conscience still matters. And if it is a theological matter, no one who respects the Establishment Clause should be legislating anything.
The psalmist was right.
"Do not put your trust in princes."
Not even those who wear red hats.
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