While it is hard to quantify how much damage that Manchin and Sinema have wrought and how duplicitous they are, we should bear in mind that their power to make and break the Biden agenda rests on a solid, immovable block of Republican opposition in the Senate.
Thus an immediate challenge is to flip one or two or whatever Senate seats this fall.
Lurking behind the ruling overturning vaccine mandates for businesses with 100 or more employees is the unconcealed desire of the court’s right wing majority to dismantle the “regulatory or administrative state.” Such a “state” is, in its view, an unwanted obstacle to the unchecked freedom of private property or capital to exploit its workforce and exercise its absolute control over the worlplace environment.
If you don’t believe me, read the incomparable court watcher, Linda Greenhouse for an explanation of the ruling that I can only wish I could write.
Here’s a case for some optimism as we look to the fall elections. If Covid loses some of its deadly and disruptive punch, if the hiccups in the supply chains dissipate, if inflation proves to be temporary and eases, if the Russian-Urkranian standoff finds some sort of resolution short of war, if a modest version of Build Back Better and a voting rights-election protection bill make their way through Congress, if the Biden administration makes no big mistakes, and if all this happens by the summer, even late summer, the election prospects of Democrats will break in a better direction than many analysts presently predict.
There’s a lot of “Ifs” here and events could break in another direction, but still the scenario above isn’t pure invention. It as likely as unlikely. It’s reasoned, not wishful thinking.
I should add though that the outcome of any election, even in the most propitious of circumstances, depends on the the energy and skills of both candidates and their supporters. Election victories aren’t served on a plate.
In the modern era, the authoritarian right has understood far better than the left – with some exceptions – the primacy of electoral politics in general and vote counting at the ballot box and in the halls of Congress in particular in effecting change.
Isn’t the main, overarching issue of this moment the passage of a voting rights bill at the federal level? It will require, if not a wholesale change in the filibuster rule, a modification of it as it applies to voting rights.
A national action of some kind would strike the right note at this moment. The pandemic, however, makes that difficult. But isn’t turning the difficult into the doable what creative minds in the main organizations defending democacy and fighting for social progress are supposed to do?
