Mitch
McConnell’s latest sabotage effort is a scam. He already showed us how.
Opinion by
Columnist
Jan. 25, 2021 at 9:54 a.m. CST
Sen. Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.) is refusing to allow
Democrats to take control of the Senate; in so doing, the minority leader is
banking on a twisted convention of political reporting that he knows will play
to his advantage.
Specifically,
McConnell has calculated that the press will place the onus of achieving
bipartisan cooperation on President Biden, while allowing Republicans to cast
their own withholding of bipartisan cooperation as proof of Biden’s failure to
achieve it.
We know this because
we have already seen McConnell operate from this playbook. He has been quite
open about how it works. And this fact should shift the way the entire public
discussion about McConnell’s strategy proceeds.
McConnell is employing
a simple but deceptive scam that has hoodwinked a lot of people for a long
time. The central ruse is that McConnell piously holds up the filibuster as a
tool for securing bipartisan cooperation.
In reality, however,
McConnell himself uses the filibuster in precisely the opposite way: to
facilitate the partisan withholding of cooperation to an
extraordinary extent, for largely instrumental ends.
McConnell is now locked in a standoff with Senate Democrats. He is
demanding that they commit in advance to keeping the legislative filibuster in
place as his extortion price for allowing an agreement on the Senate’s
operating rules.
Senate Majority
Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has rejected this demand. While it’s
unlikely Democrats will end the filibuster as long as moderates such as Sen.
Joe Manchin III (D-W.V.) oppose it, they won’t commit to this up front: They
want to preserve this option if McConnell obstructs everything on Biden’s
agenda.
The result is that
the Senate has largely ground to a halt. Committees remain in GOP control, and
the Biden agenda remains to some degree in limbo, with the fate of more
controversial nominees and his proposed new economic rescue package remaining
uncertain.
The Post has
some new
reporting on McConnell’s thinking:
The calculations for
McConnell, according to Republicans, are simple. Not only is preserving the
filibuster a matter that Republicans can unify around, it is something that
potentially divides Democrats, who are under enormous pressure to discard it to
advance their governing agenda.
“Republicans very
much appreciate the consistency and the rock-solid fidelity to the norms and
rules that make the Senate a moderating force in policymaking,” said Scott
Jennings, a former McConnell aide. “The legislative filibuster is the last rule
driving bipartisanship in Washington.”
As it happens, this
hasn’t yet “divided” Democrats, who appear united behind the idea that they
cannot allow McConnell to bluff them into forgoing their main point of leverage
over him.
But if Democrats do
need fortifying in this regard, here’s a place to start. When McConnell’s
spinners claim that he wants to keep the filibuster to facilitate
bipartisanship and moderation, it’s knee-slappingly laughable. McConnell
himself has shown us otherwise.
In an
interview with journalist Joshua Green in 2011, McConnell explained
exactly why he was expanding use of the filibuster and other procedural tactics
against even noncontroversial aspects of President Barack Obama’s agenda. He
said:
“We worked very hard
to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we
thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know
that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When
you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences
have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way
forward.”
This deserves renewed
attention in the current context. McConnell’s core insight was that there would
be a major downside for Republicans if even a handful of GOP senators reached
compromises with a Democratic president — even if the Democratic
president made meaningful concessions to them in the process.
That’s because it
would bolster the notion that the Democratic president had successfully bridged
disagreement with Republicans. McConnell wanted to avoid that outcome,
regardless of whether the compromises reached were reasonable or salutary ones
by the lights of the crossover Republicans themselves.
In McConnell’s
wielding, then, the filibuster facilitated the prevention of
outbreaks of bipartisanship. It isn’t just that in many cases it blocked Senate
Democrats from governing despite having the majority. It also set up standoffs
in which refusing to reach compromises with a Democratic president fulfilled
the instrumental goal of casting him as a failed leader.
There is very little
doubt that McConnell intends to do the same to Biden wherever possible. In
fact, as
Brian Beutler suggests, by holding Senate action hostage right now — all to
leverage Democrats into unilateral disarmament in the face of future
filibustering — McConnell is already doing this.
Indeed, you can see
this reflected in the media coverage, which is already demonstrating the
success of this strategy and the correctness of the McConnell calculation
underlying it. Press accounts regularly describe the current standoff in the
Senate as casting doubt solely on Biden’s ability to achieve
bipartisan cooperation.
McConnell is not
obliged to support a Democratic president’s agenda, of course. And to some
degree, Republican opposition to Biden’s agenda will understandably reflect
principled disagreement.
But we are not
obliged to sugarcoat the full range of McConnell’s motives here, or to pretend
that there’s any legitimacy to his saintly insistence that he only wants to
keep the filibuster in order to facilitate bipartisanship. He demonstrated the
contrary to us himself, in his own words.