Is it everything that Democrats dreamed of? Not by a long shot.
But it’s major progress — all the more remarkable for the fact that it is happening under an evenly divided Senate. It flies in the face of the prevailing narrative that Washington is irreparably broken and that President Biden is a nostalgic old fool for even trying to reach across the aisle. Regardless of what plays now on cable news, historians of Mr. Biden’s first term will have to admit that a surprising amount got done.
Of course, we are living through a toxic and deeply polarized era in which some politicians seem to prefer seeing the country fail than helping the opposite party succeed. But as compelling as the intractability narrative is, it might be a bit overblown. Obstructionism has limits. People who win elected office can get fed up with gridlock, too. Consider what happened when Mitch McConnell tried to hold the CHIPS Act hostage for political reasons. It didn’t work, partly because too many Republicans had worked on it and wanted to pass it.
And maybe Mr. Biden’s original, sweeping Build Back Better plan failed not because of obstructionism but because the country wasn’t sold on everything in it. When it died a slow death, many Democratic voters grew despondent. Presidential popularity poll numbers sank.
But that doesn’t mean that nothing was getting done. For the past two years, lawmakers have paid workmanlike attention to a series of bipartisan bills on things that have been on the country’s to-do list for years. Some who threw red meat to the base with one hand were also quietly hammering out bipartisan deals with the other to expand health care benefits for veterans, secure what has been called the largest investment ever in public transit and protect local and tribal governments from cyberattacks.
Fifty-five senators have played a leading role in one or more of 16 significant bipartisan initiatives over the past two years, according to Jason Grumet, the president and a founder of the Bipartisan Policy Center. Eight of their bills have become law, and more could pass in the lame duck session. A 50-50 Senate meant that much of what passed had to be bipartisan, with at least 10 Republicans in support. It was harder than it used to be, but not impossible.
“The democracy is badly bruised, but it is not broken,” Mr. Grumet told me.
Alas, it is a function of our hyperpartisan era that such productivity is often kept under wraps. Many politicians feel they’ve been elected to fight rather than compromise. It’s uncool to crow about working with the other side.
That leaves the public with the impression that their government is more broken than it actually is, and it robs voters of the hope that it could ever change. The notion of endless, absolute gridlock isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous. It’s causing Americans — and people around the world — to lose faith in democracy as a model of governance.
Politically speaking, when Democrats have controlled the White House and both chambers in Congress, the widespread notion of do-nothing government has also been self-defeating.
Democrats have spent much of the last year battling the perception that they were helpless in the face of Republican (or Sinemanchian) obstructionism, so much so that many activists who worked hard to elect Democrats began to wonder why they had bothered.
But the party kept at it. Build Back Better stayed on secret life support throughout the winter and spring. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland toured laboratories in West Virginia with Joe Manchin, the infamous holdout. Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council, went zip-lining with him. Even though talks had been declared dead umpteen times, Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, kept reaching out to find a slimmed-down version that Mr. Manchin could live with.
Now, after years of eking out bipartisan progress where they could, Democrats are on…
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