Top Priorities for a Harris Presidency -- or ... Optimism!
It has been almost two weeks since Democrats rediscovered joy, hope, and what almost looks like optimism. Despite being the wet blanket that I am when it comes to US politics, even I am finding it impossible not to smile and sense somehow that things might not all go to hell later this year and in 2025. How positive (or how much less negative) do things now look?
Not very, to be honest. But fun is fun, and it has been enjoyable to observe recent events, with Democrats seeming to do everything right while Republicans do everything wrong. With those winds in my sails, I am going to break character today and talk about what the Democrats' priorities should be if they win the presidency, hold the Senate, and retake the majority in the House. As I said, fun is fun.
Before I get there, however, I will expand on some of my recent writings about this summer's tumultuous US politics. This week, in addition to my 2024 veganniversary post here on Dorf on Law, I published two Verdict columns. On Tuesday, in "It’s Not Just the 'Cat Ladies' Thing: Vance’s Disqualifying Misunderstanding of How Society Works," I first weighed in on Donald Trump's hapless running mate's misunderstanding of what it means to be a parent, which is a very personal matter for everyone (including me) and alone disqualifies Vance from being considered a serious -- or even minimally decent -- person. I then turned my attention to Vance's claim that childless people have "no stake in the future," pointing out that such a claim seriously misunderstands even the most conservative version of Economics 101 while also failing to comprehend that everyone -- no matter their parental status -- has a very direct stake in the health, education, and economic prosperity of current and future young people.
Today, in "Confused Appeals to Democracy, the Surprisingly Strong Harris Candidacy, and a Fair Assessment of Biden," I covered some remaining issues from the Biden-to-Harris transition that should not be lost in the blur of the constantly changing news cycle. Some very confused Democrats said that failing to nominate Biden would be a blow to democracy, because of the inviolable interests of the tiny fraction of eligible citizens who voted in those all-but-uncontested primaries (which ended months ago). Right. Anyway, those Democrats handed rhetorical ammunition to Republicans, and then some NeverTrump conservatives also started making silly noises about how Harris's emergence was a "coronation" (thus bad, even though those pundits would surely have described a contested process as "chaos"). The good news is that none of that seems to have slowed down the Harris momentum.
My final point in today's Verdict column was a corrective to the insta-conventional wisdom that Biden's decision to stand down was brave, selfless, or whatever. That claim is, at best, over the top. I understand why people now want to say good things about Biden, but he did not voluntarily step away from another term as president, nor did he take one for the team. He simply woke up to the fact that his only hope of having any positive legacy was to end his candidacy. Any other decision would have led to a rout of Democrats, and Biden would have gone down in history as the man who was so selfish or delusional (or both) that he was willing to guarantee the onset of one-party theocracy in the US.
In the years since Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death, a large number of people have (correctly, in my view) faulted her for stubbornly refusing to resign from the Supreme Court at a time when she could have been replaced by another jurist with similar views. That was a surprising turn away from the RBG rock star trope that had emerged before her death, but it makes sense. She stayed on too long, and the result was quite bad, especially for the people who admired her. Now imagine how people would view Biden if he had done the same. As I wrote in today's Verdict column, I am one of the people who came around on Biden during his surprisingly successful and progressive presidency. He deserves to be applauded for that. But a selfless hero who did something that was bad for himself in order to help others? Sorry, no.
Putting those two columns together, however, still leaves me in a surprisingly optimistic state. Vance is awful in ways that no one could have predicted, but that awfulness is coming up while it could still matter. Moreover, Vance and the Republicans have no response to any of this other than sarcasm (such as Vance's snarky comment that he has nothing against cats). If voters are reachable at all, things are looking bad for the Republicans. And as I noted above, none of the ridiculous claims that I discussed and debunked in today's column seem to have hurt Harris. She is rolling, the Republicans are flailing, and the hagiography of Biden is annoying but harmless.
Maybe this will all fall apart, but what if things really do go right? This is the fun part. What could an emboldened Democratic Party with an energetic leader do?
Last week, Professor Dorf and I spoke via Zoom to a group of Democrats who wanted to get ahead of the possibility that we could have another debt ceiling crisis in 2025. If Harris wins (and her win is not overturned in a coup, bloodless or otherwise) but Republicans control one or both houses of Congress, Republicans would unquestionably manufacture another debt ceiling crisis. As it happens, this group started organizing our meeting earlier this summer, and although both Professor Dorf and I agreed to speak, the political situation was so depressing at the time that the entire event seemed all but certain to be a purely academic exercise.
Being pleasantly surprised by the radically changed landscape, I began my semi-prepared remarks by talking not about divided government -- which, again, is the necessary condition for another debt ceiling crisis when a Democrat is President -- but what would happen after a Democratic sweep. Given the subject matter of the meeting, I tied it to the debt ceiling, which I will discuss briefly below. Before getting there, however, I ran through some of the obvious things that a unified Democratic Party could do if it ends up in control of the political branches.
And when I say "unified," I should note that both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will be out of the Senate as of the end of this year. That is not to say that some other preening schmo might not emerge as the Democrat who says no to everything, but it is at least possible to picture a Democratic Senate majority that either drops the filibuster entirely or suspends it when transformative legislation is at stake. What could happen?
There is no reason to call this a "Day One" agenda, which has become a hackneyed way to claim that everything good will happen all at once. Biden announced a more traditional (but only marginally less arbitrary) hundred-day agenda, which Harris is likely to adopt. There is no way to set a strict rank-ordering of priorities, in large part because these issues are often incommensurable, which means that the list below has no particular order. These are all, in any event, important proposals that Democrats should try to enact if given the chance. It is, of course, a partial list.
-- D.C. Statehood: This should be obvious. It is both morally right under any principles of representative democracy, and it can be accomplished through majority votes in both houses of Congress. Even better, once a new state is created, it cannot be un-created or demoted by a future Republican-led federal government (assuming that the Supreme Court does not simply ignore the Constitution and all good sense ... oh wait). This would create two new Democratic Senators and one guaranteed new Democratic House member (although it is unclear whether the latter would be a net plus, depending on which state lost a seat).
-- Voting Rights: In the very early stages of Biden's presidency, the "For the People Act" and the "John Lewis Voting Rights Restoration Act" died at Manchin's and Sinema's hands. I am not an expert in election law, and it might well be that there are even better alternatives to those two bills. The point, however, is that it would be both good policy and good politics for Democrats to do whatever they can to pass national rules against voter suppression and all of the other methods by which Republicans have manipulated elections.
-- Gerrymandering: Oops, sorry. I am being optimistic here, but this would require a constitutional amendment. Even a huge Democratic sweep this year could never flip the fourteen state governments that would be needed to amend the Constitution. Sadly, it appears that the Supreme Court's most recent rejection of a gerrymandering challenge will be the final word, at least at the federal level.
[Addendum on August 5, 2024: I have learned that there might be a legislative path to ending gerrymandering at the federal level -- i.e., in the House of Representatives, obviously not the Senate -- but Congress could still do nothing about the especially egregious gerrymandering of many state legislatures, infamously including Wisconsin's, Florida's, and too many others to mention. I continue to be skeptical that this Court would even allow that much, but I am happy to acknowledge here that my original assertion might have been overbroad. More importantly, this also reminds me that I left Supreme Court reform off this list of what President Harris and a Democratic House and Senate might do. Professor Dorf did discuss the Biden term-limits proposal (as well as his anti-immunity proposal and his Supreme Court code of conduct proposal) last week, and I will surely say more about unpacking the Court sometime soon.]
-- Abortion and other Reproductive Rights: Essential. As a political matter, this will necessarily be a big reason for any wins by Democrats this year, so even if it were not also good policy, it has to happen. Abortion-related legislation (securing the FDA's mifepristone regulation, for example), birth control access, and so on have to be at or near the top of the agenda. The Supreme Court's six religious extremists might try to invent from whole cloth a constitutional prohibition on abortion, but that is no reason not to pass popular laws in the meantime.
-- Minimum Wage: Yes please. This is another one that died by filibuster (with Sinema's sick thumbs-down curtsy/taunt).
-- Union Organizing Rights: Obvious.
-- Taxes: The simplest initial move would be to end the carried-interest loophole (another provision that Sinema single-handedly saved). I am not a purist when it comes to how to make the tax system less regressive, so I do not care how the Democrats do it. Wealth tax? Ending the realization requirement? Stopping giveaways on the corporate side? Any of these (alone or in combination) would be better than what we have.
-- Social Security: It is still wrong to claim that Social Security is "going broke," but that is quite different from saying that it should be left as is. There are plenty of bad ways to change it (increasing the retirement age being among the worst), but there are also good ways. Given how many people are unable to save money during their working years, and with traditional pensions all but gone, it is crazy that Social Security benefits average less than $1900 per month.
I could go on, but the list above includes items that are broadly popular and would be good for Democrats politically as well. I will not bother talking about single-payer health care or other matters, not because they are unimportant but because I am running out of energy.
-- Debt Ceiling: I will, however, say a bit about the debt ceiling. During my comments last week, I argued that there was in fact no good reason for full-majority Democrats to repeal the debt ceiling. Why not? It would honestly be difficult for them politically, because the debt ceiling is so easy for Republicans to demagogue. Democrats would thus be better off simply reviving the Gephardt Rule, which requires that all annual appropriations laws include increases in the nominal level of the debt ceiling sufficient to prevent a crisis. I also noted that Republicans could -- and would -- simply pass a law to reinstate the debt ceiling as soon as they returned to power, making it all pointless.
Professor Dorf did offer a friendly amendment, which was that Democrats would want to eliminate the debt ceiling statute because of the possibility that they could lose one house of Congress in the midterms. In that event, the Republicans would not be able to bring back the debt ceiling, but if it were still in existence, they could again abuse it. That is true, but I suspect that the best way to handle that would be to repeal the debt ceiling during the lame-duck session after the midterms. At that time, the Democrats would not be facing the voters again for almost two years, many of their members would be retiring or recently defeated, and they would have every reason to take away Republicans' favorite hostage-taking device. The issue would at that point be salient in a way that it would not be in early 2025. In that sense, then, repealing the debt ceiling is the precise opposite of a Day One (or first-100-days) agenda item.
Again, I continue to believe that bad political outcomes lie ahead. Even so, it is refreshing to have any reason at all to put together a wish list. Personally, I am still glad to be where I am, but looking southward across Lake Ontario now feels somehow different.