One remarkable thing about the “American Rescue Plan” that became law last week is that President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders got almost everything they wanted.
The compromises Democrats made were small. The one exception was a proposed minimum wage increase, which they agreed to remove from the bill. But they hope to revisit the minimum wage later and the overall size of the bill, $1.9 trillion, is exactly what they first proposed.
Anybody who lived through or has read about the debates of 2009, the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, knows that this is a big deal. Obama and his allies had to make many more concessions when they were pushing an economic stimulus and, then, health care legislation through Congress. It’s a subject I discuss at length in THE TEN YEAR WAR, my book on the Affordable Care Act’s history.
So how were Democratic leaders able to get more of what they wanted this time around? My article at HuffPost over the weekend highlights one big, under-appreciated reason: The makeup of the U.S. Senate.
Although there are significantly fewer Democrats than there were in 2009, the ones who are there are more liberal — or, perhaps more precisely, less conservative.
When Obama took office, the Senate included 56 Democrats plus two more senators, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who were not formally aligned with the party but who were part of the caucus, meaning they met together and supported the Democratic majority leader. That gave them 58 votes. A few months later, the caucus swelled to 60 after Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched parties and Democrat Al Franken was finally declared the winner in a contested election from Minnesota.
Sixty is a magic number in the Senate, because it’s enough to break a filibuster, which Republicans had begun deploying routinely to block legislation. And Democrats needed all sixty on the health care bill, because efforts to win GOP support failed.
But keeping the sixty together was no simple matter, because it included a bunch of relatively conservative Democrats. Mostly these were senators representing southern and Great Plains states where voters were switching parties, from Republican to Democratic. These conservative Democrats held onto their seats by keeping their distance from party leaders and anything that sounded like “big government.” And these conservative Democrats were the ones most responsible for the what liberals have long considered the law’s biggest weaknesses, like the lack of a “public option.”
Nearly every one of those Democratic senators eventually left office, because they retired or lost reelection bids, with Republicans taking their seats. At the same time, a handful of Senate seats flipped in the other direction, as Republicans in Democratic-trending states had to retire or lost their reelection bids.
When I was working on my article, I created a spreadsheet with every Senate seat that had changed parties between 2009 and 2021. Here’s what it looks like, with Democratic senators shaded blue and Republican senators shaded red:
As you can see, Republicans gained many more seats than Democrats did during this transition. But with this year’s Democratic wins in Arizona and Georgia, it was just enough for Democrats to hold 50 seats, enough for a working majority since the vice president gets to break tie votes.
And although this majority is much smaller than the one Democrats had in 2009, the number of conservative Democrats is also much smaller. In fact, with the notable exceptions of Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Jon Tester from Montana, no Democratic senator today comes from a state that overwhelmingly voted Republican in the last presidential election. (It also helps that Lieberman, who was a conservative even though he was from a Blue State, has since been replaced by the more liberal Chris Murphy.)
To be clear, the conservative Democrats still have a lot of leverage, precisely because leaders can’t afford to lose a single vote. Manchin, for example, was among the small group who forced leaders to take the minimum wage increase out of the COVID bill.
And with 50 senators, rather than 60, the only way to move legislation on a party-line vote is to go through the budget reconciliation process. That allows a simple majority to pass legislation, but it also has weird, restrictive rules about what a bill can include. So it’s far from an ideal situation.
I talk about all of this, and what it means for the next two years, in that HuffPost article. You can read it here:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-covid-relief-senate-democratic-majority_n_604bfbd3c5b60e0725f7343d
The Ten Year War, On the Radio
Last week’s media for THE TEN YEAR WAR included appearances on two of my favorite radio shows:
“Press Play” with Madeleine Brand from KCRW in California had me on to talk about the book and political history of the Affordable Care Act.
“On Point” from WBUR in Boston invited me to talk about how the COVID relief program will shore up the Affordable Care Act — and, in the process, help millions to get cheaper health insurance.
More media and, yes, more events are coming up soon, including one on March 23, which will mark eleven years since the ACA became law. Stay tuned for information.
March Madness and Michigan
On a lighter note, I’m thrilled that the Michigan Wolverines are a #1 seed in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament — and crushed that they will likely have to play without one of their stars, senior Isaiah Livers, who is out indefinitely with a stress fracture in his foot.
Livers has been a favorite of media and fans and he’s been a favorite in the Cohn household too. He’s the team’s most reliable three-point shooter, at better than 40% this year. But beyond that, he just seems to be a great kid — always smiling, well-spoken and giving credit to his teammates. He passed up a chance to enter the NBA draft this year, saying he wanted to come back for a final year and compete for a championship.
At a press conference after Saturday’s game, talking about the injury, he said he wasn’t giving up on the possibility he could return if Michigan makes a deep enough run. That would be great and, of course, anything is possible in sports. But if it doesn’t happen, I’m glad we got to watch him play as much as we did and look forward to seeing him in the professional career that awaits.