It’s Barack Obama’s Fault
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was historic in many ways, but the most relevant to our discussion here is this: pending the outcome of a contested senatorial election in Minnesota, President Obama was poised to enter his term only one vote shy of the first veto-proof majority rule in both houses of Congress in thirty years.
The way in which President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress spent this once-in-a-generation political capital contributed to the polarization seen throughout the Obama era, led Republican leadership far afield, and so isolated Republicans in Washington that they felt they had to combat this unprecedented extremism with more extremism.
Barack Obama’s tenure as President polarized the country and entrenched our partisan divides. Barack Obama is to blame for Donald Trump taking advantage of those divides to destroy our political system.
With the votes, the movement, the approval rating, and the near-supermajority on his side, President Obama proceeded to govern in a way that completely cut off Republicans from the levers of power, leaving them and their constituents isolated, embittered, and angry.
The unprecedented political capital afforded by the 2008 landslide election had a great deal of political implications, and the incoming White House was very aware of the opportunity they had at their feet. Rahm Emanuel, the incoming Chief of Staff for President-elect Obama, said in an interview that you should “never let a serious crisis go to waste… it’s an opportunity to do things you could never do before.”
While this was played for cynical political gamesmanship, it was absolutely the guiding principle of the Obama transition team. Combine the effects of the polarization of the Bush era and the historically high approval ratings of the White House, and it meant that the leaders of the Democratic Party had the political capital to do almost anything they wanted.
And they came in with the will to put those plans into action. President Obama and the Democratic leaders in Congress immediately went to work on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), otherwise known as the stimulus. Despite the hype and the advertising, this was no mere emergency injection of federal money into shovel-ready investment infrastructure and businesses to spur hiring. It was a complete transformation of the entire American economy along the lines that the progressive movement had been yearning for. It was not modest, and it was not temporary. The first major legislation from the Obama Administration would be bold, radical, and monumental.
Michael Grunwald, a journalist who was at the time with Time Magazine (and now with Politico) (and a sparring partner of mine! [never let a self-promo opportunity go to waste]), wrote much about the transformative nature of the stimulus, and a book called The New New Deal: The Hidden Story Of Change In the Obama Era. As Grunwald details, the stimulus was not merely money sent to the states for emergency relief. It wasn’t merely emergency unemployment benefits. It wasn’t merely putting shovel-ready infrastructure projects on the roads.
The stimulus was about windmills. It was about government-funded broadband. It was about smart grids. It was about universal college. It was about electric cars. The Obama Administration was remaking the entire American economy in their image. And it began before President Obama even got inaugurated.
Senate Republicans knew this was coming, and had two choices: attempt to keep their coalition together — at this point, it looked as if they would have just enough votes to prevent a filibuster-proof majority — or just lie down and acquiesce to the most expansive progressive agenda in decades. Having a Republican or two at the negotiating table — as is actually what happened in the end with ARRA! — wouldn’t matter. It’s not like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe were able to pry out any discernible concessions from Obama’s version of the New Deal. It’s unlikely that Jim DeMint and Mitch McConnell would have been any more successful.
Republican leadership chose to try to keep their coalition together and keep their fingerprints off of legislation that they thought would make the situation worse, and were pilloried for standing in the way of both recovery and history. And of course, they did not want to have a part in something they thought may look like this:
The ARRA was a $787 billion project that they would claim was an emergency piece of legislation meant to kickstart the economy rather than the biggest progressive economic reforms in decades. The media went along with this, of course, and Republicans in their opposition to this major progressive overhaul were portrayed as obstinate obstructionists who would be bringing pain to the economy and Americans put out of work, rather than what should have been seen as pretty standard opposition to what would become a progressive milestone.
With the Minnesota senatorial election up in the air and this backdrop of emergency legislation, President Obama did not need much Republican support. He received three votes — Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who would become a member of the Democratic caucus in a matter of weeks.
Now, if President Obama were to get you alone in a room, he would likely tell a different history of this critical period. He would say that with ARRA, the Democrats threw Republicans plenty of bones: about 30% of the package was made up of temporary, targeted business and individual tax cuts (Republicans like tax cuts!) and that Republicans’ opposition was not routine or standard but appalling and unprecedented. Republicans were still opposed to the legislation, after all, despite President Obama giving them what everyone knows they like: tax cuts!
Well, much of the “tax cuts” included in ARRA were credits and subsidies for programs that Republicans don’t like and don’t want to subsidize. Yes, Republicans were on board with things like Making Work Pay and expanded 529 credits, but they’d likely tell you that the American Opportunity Tax Credit is yet another college-tuition subsidy contributing to tuition hikes and not much else; that increased tax subsidies for unemployment benefits aren’t something that helps get people hiring and working again, and same goes for increased tax-subsidies for COBRA; that more tax-subsidies for municipal bonds to build infrastructure is just a kind of tax-code infrastructure outlay; that energy-efficiency tax credits for businesses are just a subsidy for uncompetitive green-energy crony projects; and so on. Republicans might be wrong on the merits of some of these policies, but it’s insufficient merely to say that the bill had tax cuts, and so the Republicans should have been happy with it.
[We can also quibble with the exact mathematical breakdown, like how the AMT fix was counted as a tax break when that’s a frequently-renewed piece of legislation usually passed independently, or whether the EITC should be something conservatives support. But that would make this even longer than it already is going to be.]
A negotiation that is done by one side telling the other what it wants over the other side’s objection that it actually wants something different is, of course, not a negotiation at all. But that’s not how the Obama Administration took it. They took Republican opposition to the stimulus bill not as principled, but as unnecessary obstructionism. Republicans should like the infrastructure projects. They should like the green energy tax credits. They should have at least come to the table over legislation that the Obama Administration considered necessary. But they took opposition over capitulation, and the Obama Administration took that as a slight, and wrote off working with Republicans for their next big projects.
After the stimulus, another brick of the Obama first-year wall fell into place: Senator Arlen Specter, reading the political tea leaves in the wake of the controversy over his ARRA vote, announced that he would be leaving the Republican Party to caucus with the Democrats.
And this is where the Obama Administration really kicked their one-sided view of politics into high gear.
A major overhaul of the way that health insurance works in America had been a policy priority of the Democratic Party for decades. But a major overhaul was not something that any Republicans were going to sign on to. There had been modest attempts at reform in recent years, and indeed, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Bob Bennett (R-Utah) had had legislation in the works for years; legislation that actually shared, structurally, much of what would come to be the Affordable Care Act, but structured differently, and in a way that could have drawn Republican support.
The kinds of broad bipartisan legislation that Republicans supported contained elements that were too hostile to big business for the Obama Administration. The Wyden-Bennett plan eliminated the employer-side tax break for health insurance; President Obama, during his campaign, had attacked a similar proposal from GOP nominee Sen. John McCain as “taxing health benefits.” No, Obama had already demagogued against aspects of the Wyden-Bennett plan as unacceptable. He was not going to turn around and endorse them now. The Baucus proposal was crafted much more in conjunction with Big Health: AHIP, PhRMA, and the AMA all played major roles at the White House and in Congress in crafting legislation that would ensure they came out ahead, no matter what.
So President Obama and his White House cut Ron Wyden (who had for a long time been a champion of health reform) out of the negotiations for what was to become the Affordable Care Act. They went through Sen. Max Baucus and the Senate Budget Committee for the lion’s share of the policy making, choosing movement Democrat insider Baucus and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid over innovative the maverick Wyden. And over on the House side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be one of the key leaders. This was going to be a victory for the movement Democrats, not the ones who had insufficient party loyalty.
The backdrop of all of this politicking was the looming supermajority. Specter’s defection gave the Democrats 59 votes in the Senate, and the Minnesota election was looking like it would go Democrats’ way as well. So through April and May, when the discussions really began to ramp up, President Obama, Baucus, and Pelosi were not counting on having to court Republican votes. The only thing they needed to worry about was keeping Democrats in line, and they could pass anything they wanted.
(Aside: for a detailed history of the negotiations between the White House, Congress, and the megacorporations that helped draft the behemoth legislation, check out my feature for National Review. It was fun to write and gets into the nitty-gritty details of who did what. At no point are Republicans seriously invited to the table.)
When the Minnesota election was finally settled, Sen. Al Franken was seated on July 7th. And with that mild uncertainty out of the way, it was free rein for Democrats to hammer everything out themselves.
It’s important to understand just how momentous of a legislative session this was. There had not been a fully partisan-unified government with a Senate supermajority since a short period in the 1970s, and ideological sorting had made this Democratic Party much, much, more ideologically aligned than ever before. And it’s not like there are formal rules preventing this kind of massive governing majority from governing in any way they saw fit. But the way they governed very much bothered the Capitol Hill Republicans. They’d never lived under an administration that did not have to cater in any way to a single Republican vote.
The Obama Administration, of course, did not waste this important opportunity. They passed a major financial regulation law — Dodd-Frank — only three weeks after Franken took his seat and secured the Democratic supermajority. They put the pieces together for the biggest overhaul of the American health system in fifty years.
Now, making sure that a governing majority of 60 senators, even when they’re on the same side, is not an easy task. But it’s considerably easier than having to reach across the aisle. The governing Democrats focused entirely on making their proposal work while being able to hold their team together. Governing in tandem with the minority was very much secondary.
Of course, outreach was made. But Capitol Hill Republicans will tell you that they felt that this method of governance was so unprecedented that they had to respond in an unprecedented manner. The goal of the Republican minority, after the way that they were treated in ARRA, Dodd-Frank, and Obamacare, was no longer to work with the Democratic majority. It was to take back some modicum of power so that they would force the Democrats to the table.
Democrats view this period differently. They believed that they did nothing uncouth to the Republican minority. They had the votes, after all. Republicans should have just taken their medicine and accepted it. The White House would have been willing to work with Republicans to an extent if they thought they would get their votes, but did not understand that what the Republican Party of 2009 objected to was the underlying structure of many of their reforms, not tinkering around the edges. And the underlying structure, to the Obama Administration, was non-negotiable.
Much of the intransigence here comes down to a he-said she-said situation. The Obama Administration and the Democrats and the members of the media who believe them will argue that the Obama Administration actually reached out a ton to Republicans to try to get them to join their side. Republicans and the members of the media who believe them will argue that the Obama Administration’s outreach was token, halfhearted, and condescending, assuming that throwing an empty bone would be enough to secure Republican support. Who you believe is up to you, but there’s no two ways around the fact that Democrats in DC firmly believe that they tried to bring Republicans into the fold, and Republicans in DC firmly believe that the supermajority was perfectly happy to railroad them.
President Obama was under no obligation to reach out and work with Republicans, but it would have made the rest of his term a lot easier. Republican opposition hardened in response to the steamrolling of the 2009 legislative session. Perhaps they should have been a little more pragmatic, but let’s face it: politicians are fickle creatures.
The Democrats won. They got the work done on three of the most consequential pieces of legislation in decades during the first year of the Obama presidency. Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts in early 2010, and we went back to a normal kind of majority-minority governance.
But the damage had already been done. There was no going back to a happy equilibrium where the minority acted like a regular minority and the majority acted like a regular majority. The way that the Obama Administration had conducted its legislative maneuvering during that first, crucial period of his presidency had demolished any semblance of the governing status quo.
