In 2010, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear to his Republican colleagues that their coöperation with the Obama Administration would not be tolerated, especially on healthcare reform. According to Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, Senator McConnell (supported by the rancor of the Tea Party, which was fueled and funded by the billionaire, anti-union, libertarian-leaning Koch Brothers) used his power over committee assignments to bully Republican senators such as Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Olympia Snow of Maine from supporting a healthcare bill that, by design, consisted mostly of Republican policy proposals and was, in many ways, “the same fucking bill” as the one passed in Massachusetts by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney.
Despite having been sent to Congress to provide solutions to America’s many problems, Majority Leader McConnell’s marching orders for the Republican caucus in 2010 focused exclusively on obstructing President Obama’s agenda. Instead of working with the Democrats to ensure Republican principles were embedded in legislation, Republicans allowed themselves to be bullied by the leader and his allies into simply saying “No” to anything the Democrats tried to do.
Over the next ten years, the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats metastasized, to the point where, as Nathan Kalmoe of Louisiana State University and Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland found in their study on Lethal Mass Partisanship, “40-60% [of partisans] hold views that rationalize harming opponents” and “5-15% report feeling partisan schadenfreude or endorse partisan violence” (schadenfreude, for example, includes “Democrats feeling less concerned and more pleased about minor physical harm to President George W. Bush after a bicycle accident”).
According to Kalmoe and Mason, virtually half of all current partisans hold attitudes that include “vilification and dehumanization of targets, blaming targets and emphasizing their deservingness for punishment, holding morally righteous views of oneself or one’s group, displacement of personal or collective responsibility for harm done, and minimizing or misrepresenting the extent of those harms.”
Their findings show that roughly 60-70% of both Republicans and Democrats agree with the notion that the other party is “a serious threat to the United States and its people.” Worryingly, 15% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats “agreed that the country would be better off if large numbers of opposing partisans in the public today ‘just died.” As the authors of the study remark, this is “a shockingly brutal sentiment.”
The extremes of this trend can be seen clearly in the “Trump 2020: Fuck Your Feelings” campaign rhetoric of 2020 and in the partisan violence that erupted during the insurrection of January 6th.
In today’s 117th Congress, Democrats hold a slim majority of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, 221-211 (with three vacancies). The Senate, meanwhile, is divided evenly between 48 Democrats and 50 Republicans, with the nation’s two independent senators, Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, caucusing with the Democrats. Vice-President Harris’ tie-breaking vote determines control of the chamber, which puts the Democrats in charge of the floor.
Two weeks ago, the House approved a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package by a vote of 219-212, “with every Republican voting against the measure and just two Democrats joining them — Jared Golden of Maine and Kurt Schrader of Oregon.” On Friday, after a chaotic week of legislative infighting between progressive and “centrist” (re: conservative) Democratic senators, the Senate Democrats passed their own version of the package by a vote of 50-49 (the missing Republican vote needed to attend a funeral). This means that one of the largest bills in Congressional history, a bill that spends $1.9 trillion on the American people and their states, passed without a single vote from the minority party.
Unfortunately, President Biden made bipartisanship one of his defining campaign promises — not just in the general election against former President Trump, but also in the primaries, where he claimed his relationships with Republicans in the Senate would make his agenda more passable than “the political revolution” promised by Senator Sanders. Now Republicans are using the strict party-line vote on COVID relief to claim that President Biden has broken his promise to the American people.
However, as Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told a reporter last week, bipartisanship doesn’t mean working with Republican Senators and Representatives who refuse to accept the legitimacy of the President. Instead, it means passing legislation that is supported by the vast majority of Americans, and according to polls, 62% of voters, including almost half of all Republicans, support the Democrats’ COVID relief bill, preferring its swift passage over Democratic coöperation with Congressional Republicans.
Representative Jayapal is absolutely correct. The hyper-partisanship that governs the Republican primary system and the base’s continued allegiance to former President Trump all but ensures that McConnell-style obstructionists will rise to the top of the G.O.P. As in 2010, these individuals would rather play naked power-politics than actually engage with their fellow citizens on solving any of America’s problems.
Despite not winning a single Republican vote on what is sure to be one of his administration’s major legislative victories, the President doubled down on his desire for bipartisanship. “There’s a lot of Republicans who came very close [to voting for the bill],” he told reporters. “They’ve got a lot of pressure on them. I still haven’t given up on getting their support.”
But as we saw with the elimination of the minimum-wage increase in the COVID Relief bill, bridging the gap between progressive and centrist Democrats is hard enough without also courting the votes of the reality-challenged insurrectionists of the Republican caucus.
While Republican officials continue to take the obstructionist path in an attempt pacify the fury of their Trump-supporting base, Americans of all stripes support a myriad of proposals for change, including:
The President should stop paying lip service to “official” bipartisanship and push for policies supported by the vast majority of Americans. It’s the only way to move the country forward.
