Preview

There are a lot of scenarios where Democrats are endlessly frustrating people like me right now. Maybe President Biden is demanding negotiations with Republicans over his coronavirus relief bill, maybe he’s deferring to installed Trump loyalists who are undermining the early agenda, maybe there’s hesitation and confusion. You can find examples like that on some discrete issues—for example, we’re still doing deportation flights, and while Biden’s deportation moratorium was blocked, sending migrants home to certain danger isn’t mandatory—but by and large this isn’t happening.

Democrats in the Senate yesterday passed a budget resolution, the first step to doing a budget reconciliation bill, without Republican support. They passed it 50-49; Pat Toomey (R-PA) was absent but if he was there he would have voted no and Vice President Harris would have cast the deciding vote. It’s all so “partisan” I guess, but that hasn’t mattered. Democrats are moving forward on a bill that will be as much as $1.9 trillion.

Biden has also taken some significant action on his own authority. (More on that below.) He’s ended bad Trump actions like the Muslim ban and border wall construction and accelerated line speeds at meatpacking plants. He’s rejoined the Paris agreement and paused oil and gas leasing on public land. He’s on his way to raise the minimum wage for federal employees and contract workers to $15 an hour, increasing salaries for 250,000 workers. He’s fired a number of Trump loyalists, too, while hiring some dedicated regulators to take on powerful corporations.

So does this mean I agree with Rich Lowry that Joe Biden is the most radical left-wing president in history?

This can be the most absurd statement in the history of time and also, given the ideological posture of past presidents, true. For all the hyperventilating, Lowry does understand that history moves on, and movements can motivate presidents to not be chained to the preoccupations of the past.

What Biden is doing right now is following the will of the public amid a historic crisis. Over two-thirds of Americans support his COVID relief bill. And most of the other things he has either done or announced he will do gets above or close to 2:1 support: checks, shots, raising the minimum wage, the mask mandate, domestic manufacturing boosts and clean energy investment, a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented, criminal justice reform, tax hikes on the rich, and so on.

This isn’t that different from recent polling on these issues. I remember a series of Elizabeth Warren speeches where she announced that “our agenda is America’s agenda.” The core insight that Lowry gets right is that “the most important thing that any movement can do is influence the direction of a major political party.” Biden is positioning himself in the center of a Democratic Party that has moved to the left. The shifts are noticeable, not just on policy but on the political will to enact it.

Part of this has to do with Biden’s historical positioning. Part of it is about Chuck Schumer worried enough about a primary challenge in a rapidly shifting state to court the left. But a lot of it has to do with years of quiet work transforming the party, by making the case on policy with evidence and data and building support among the public.

It’s important to point out, therefore, that the big areas of concern in the early going are where Democrats are defying the polls. So for example, when Joe Manchin says he’s against a $15 an hour minimum wage, he’s opposing a clearly popular position. (He’s also trying to make the bill that will ultimately pass reconciliation more expensive, since the minimum wage increase brings significant budget savings. I don’t really care about that but you’d think that Manchin would.)

When the White House flirts with reducing eligibility on topping up checks to $2,000, they’re not only going back on a campaign promise, but they’re doing it on one of the most popular parts of the Biden agenda. Try explaining to someone making $55,000 in 2019 (the year with the tax data from which this means test will be initially derived), who lost money in the pandemic, that they made too much money then to get a full check now. Incidentally, if they want to be fair, Democrats would call for everyone to get the check now, and to claw it back from the ineligible next year based on 2021 tax data. If you want to nickel and dime people, at least give them a 15-month interest-free loan first. The government borrows interest-free from individuals all the time; it’s called tax withholding. Let’s reverse that process.

The point is that Democrats got to a popular place by doing popular things, and they’re now threatening to give back that goodwill. Success for Biden and his party is tied to making progress on things people want. If that makes him a radical in the eyes of unpopular conservatives, so be it.

Speaking of Biden being a successful president, we have talked a lot at the Prospect about the Day One Agenda, the series of actions that Biden can take without new legislation from Congress. Given the gridlock in Washington, executive action will be critical to actually making progress on a host of issues. Many people have asked me if we could track all of those actions, to see what Biden’s gotten done. As a service-oriented publication, we aim to please.

Today we unveiled the Executive Action Tracker, to monitor the Biden presidency. Through over 40 Day One Agenda articles we identified 77 discrete actions a president can implement from existing statute. So far, Biden has taken action in full or in part on 12 of these. We’re going to keep tracking this for his entire first term. I wrote an introduction post here.

The Executive Action Tracker reveals that Biden’s early actions, while questioned as “fast-moving” and “radical,” have mostly been about reversing some bad Trump orders. He’s barely scratched the surface of what an aggressive and creative president can do under existing law. Without a full cabinet that’s understandable, and Biden’s off to a good start. But we’ll see if he can keep it up. Check out the Executive Action Tracker for updates.

The Senate organizing resolution is ready and will be implemented today. (Twitter)
Great new bill from Dick Durbin and Cindy Axne to prevent the tax time bomb on unemployment benefits, which I wrote about in December. (Forbes)
Meanwhile, Trump’s delay in signing the last bill caused so much confusion on unemployment extensions that beneficiaries lost $17 billion in January. (The Century Foundation)
Biden daring the GOP to obstruct. Good! (Politico)
The administration declared a coup in Myanmar, the first step to reviewing foreign aid. (Washington Post)
Look at all the stupid things Senate Democrats have to think about doing instead of just ending the filibuster. (The Week)
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin fired all Pentagon advisory board members to de-Trumpify the boards. (Wall Street Journal)
I’m all for Moderna putting more doses in each vial, but it does add risk of spoilage and spillage, and I hardly think it’s the reason for all of their production snags. (New York Times)