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The Democrats Need Their Own Mitch McConnell

The Democrats Need Their Own Mitch McConnell

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Any Democrat elected president next year will have to deal with Mitch McConnell. Odds are he will remain Senate majority leader in 2021, and even if he doesn’t, McConnell has proved that he is willing and able to use parliamentary procedure to thwart the will of a Democratic president and Congress.

The only Democrat with a plan for dealing with McConnell is Joe Biden. The question is not so much whether the former vice president’s plan will work — he has already shown he can work with Republicans in general and McConnell in particular — but whether bipartisanship is what the Democratic Party really needs. For Democrats now, as it was for Republicans a decade ago, the need is for someone to contain and channel the energetic fringe of the party.

To be clear: Democrats have justifiable reasons for their antipathy toward McConnell and their skepticism of Biden. In 2008, Democrats had a new and popular president, control of the House and what would become a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.  They were ready to use that power to pass sweeping legislation on health care, climate and immigration. They also, wisely, wanted that legislation to be bipartisan. Without Republican support, they knew that the changes would become the source of bitter partisan fighting.

Enter Mitch McConnell. He refused to offer that cover, among other things ensuring that Obamacare passed on a party-line vote. In doing so, Democrats argue, he revealed how little he valued bipartisanship. Biden’s inability to see this, they say, is willfully naïve.

This assessment fails to account for circumstances, both then and now. In 2008, even McConnell’s fiercest critics acknowledge, the survival of the Republican establishment was very much in jeopardy. The loss to Democrats that year was devastating, but the real threat to Republican leadership was from the right.

In his 2008 manifesto “The Revolution,” Representative Ron Paul, then a candidate for president, argued that conservatism had been betrayed. In his view, the Federal Reserve, out-of-control spending, government regulation and war were on the verge of destroying America. In the months after the book’s release, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the federal government, AIG was rescued by the Federal Reserve, Congress approved the $700 billion TARP bailout and the newly formed Iraqi government nearly collapsed. It seemed as if all of Rand’s predictions were being proved correct.

When in early 2009 the Obama administration proposed additional help for beleaguered homeowners, what had been a fringe movement exploded into the mainstream. In its early days, the nascent Tea Party movement seemed on the verge of taking over the Republican Party. If McConnell had simply accepted the bipartisan overtures of the White House, it would have resulted in a complete collapse of the Republican center and pushed the party even further to toward the right.

Over the next six years, in fact, McConnell repeatedly allowed extreme members of the Republican caucus to test their thesis that big government could be defeated and Obamacare rolled back — if only they stuck to their guns and refused to pass a budget, raise the debt limit or otherwise allowed the government to function. Each time, with Biden as a partner, McConnell would swoop in at the last moment to close a deal that moved forward conservative priorities while averting a government shutdown or default on the debt. These deals made McConnell even more unpopular with Republican primary voters, but they brought his fellow Republican senators around to his way of thinking.

The partnership with Biden was key to McConnell’s success and survival. McConnell knows that, and his gratitude showed in his 2016 tribute to the former vice president. Biden also knows this, and that’s the source of his otherwise inexplicable confidence in his ability to cut deals with McConnell.

That said, any future partnership between the two men would be sustained by pragmatism more than sentimentality. The pair will likely turn to their shared interests in entitlement reform, perhaps combined with gradual action on climate. That’s the kind of long-term deal-making that older centrists of both parties favor.

But it comes with a risk. By joining with Republicans to pass a centrist agenda, Biden would risk alienating the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — which in 2021 would take up the role played by the Tea Party in the GOP in 2009. The left would sponsor candidates to run against centrist incumbents in Democratic primaries. (In fact, this may be happening already.)

As long as nothing goes horribly wrong, Biden might be able to ride out the storm. For a time, centrism might hold sway in Washington. Eventually, however, something always goes wrong: another recession, a climate-related natural disaster, a crisis in the Middle East or Asia. Then the Biden style of governing would be called into question.

At that point, centrist Democrats would be forced to deal with the uprising within their party, just as Republicans have been doing for the past decade. The best way to avoid this scenario is for the party to embrace the rising energy on the left now and integrate it into a presidential agenda. That’s the path Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have chosen.

That implies a much more hostile relationship with Republicans than Biden envisions — but also much less of chance of an intraparty revolt. The reason to oppose Biden’s Nixon-goes-to-China plan for bipartisanship is not that it’s naïve. It’s that, in the long run, it will make the party weaker.

The U.S. is going through a period of rising partisanship, and it will need strong political parties to ride it out. It’s a counterintuitive point that McConnell seems to understand well: The revival of the two parties in U.S. politics is more important right now than the revival of bipartisanship in Washington.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Karl W. Smith is a former assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina's school of government and founder of the blog Modeled Behavior.

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