Sen. Warren Is Right: Democrats Need to Take Advantage of their Majorities Now or Face Disaster in November

Underneath the nearly wall-to-wall coverage of the war in Ukraine, the political news has continued to be terrible for the Biden administration and the Democrats.  

The chorus of doom about the coming midterm elections has been underscored by terrible poll numbers and persistent concerns about inflation along with a constant barrage of culture war attacks by the right.   

It’s a house of pain.  

In the midst of all this, cue the chattering death skull that is James Carville making the rounds on MSNBC and other outlets chastising rank and file Democrats to stop all the complaining and “faculty lounge” talk and forsake “wokeness” before it’s too late.  The problem, according to Carville and many other establishment Democrats, is that the base simply needs to get over it and start realizing how great Biden and company has been for them.  

Apparently, the failure to protect voting rights, adequately address the climate emergency, sustain a coherent public health response to the pandemic, or pass even a scaled down version of Build Back Better legislation are all somehow the fault of the “left wing” of the party who need to fall in line as wiser heads pivot to the center.  

This narrative has been echoed by an army of corporate media pundits who somehow forget that it is not “wokeness” that has stalled Biden’s agenda and made the entire party look ineffectual but the corporate Democrat in chief, Senator Joe Manchin, and his feckless enablers who cut the legs out from under their own President whose lack of charisma and, at times, basic political skills haven’t helped much either.  

For those of us who didn’t even have the President in our top three during the primaries but supported his efforts to address the multiple crises we face nonetheless, it’s not much of a surprise that Joe Biden turned out to be, well, Joe Biden.  But the blather coming from the likes of Carville attacking progressives for not digging the President’s failure enough is hard to take seriously.  

Thus, it was refreshing to read Senator Elizabeth Warren’s corrective to the prevailing nonsense in the New York Times where she argued:

• Time is running short. We need to finalize a budget reconciliation deal, making giant corporations pay their share to fund vital investments in combating climate change and lowering costs for families, which can advance with only 50 Senate votes. Other priorities can be done with the president’s executive authority. It’s no secret that I believe we should abolish the filibuster. But if Republicans want to use it to block policies that Americans broadly support, we should also force them to take those votes in plain view.

Warren goes on to remind us that policies to help protect workers’ rights and unions as well as raising taxes on the rich and powerful corporations while fighting corruption are extremely popular with the American people.  Thus, it would behoove a party that promotes itself as an advocate for working Americans to actually take some action on that front.  And if Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema block a reconciliation deal, Warren points out that much can still be done by Executive Order.  

As the Senator notes, “Decisive action on everything from lowering prescription drug prices to ensuring that more workers are eligible for overtime pay can be executed by the president alone, using the authority already given to him by existing laws, without rounding up 50 Senate votes.”  

One more game-changing move that Biden could take is addressing the student debt crisis.  As Warren argues:

• [B]y a margin of more than two-to-one, Americans support providing some student loan debt cancellation — an action the president could take entirely on his own. Doing so would lift the economic outlook for too many borrowers who still weren’t able to get a college diploma, for the millions of female borrowers who shoulder about two-thirds of all student loan debt, and for Black and Hispanic borrowers, a higher percentage of whom take on debt to attend college compared to white students, and have a harder time paying it off after school. With the stroke of a pen, the president could make massive strides to close gender and racial wealth gaps.

Maybe it’s because they don’t have a faculty lounge at the college where I teach, but this sounds like exactly the kind of thing that might excite working people and help avert a disaster at the polls as Warren suggests.  Nobody in the Democratic base is getting excited about opening more drilling on federal lands or watching the party play feeble defense on the culture war front.  

Perhaps Democrats taking advantage of the shrinking window that remains is the smarter way forward than surrendering before it closes.  Attacking their own base is not just intellectually lazy, it’s a fool’s errand.