Biden doesn't need McConnell's blessing to achieve "unity"

President Biden should strive to reach deals that a majority of the American people want — to hell with Republicans in Washington.

In his inaugural address, President Biden promised to strive for unity. The Republican party, and their media enablers, are now claiming that anything short of enacting Mitch McConnell’s entire agenda — and perhaps giving Marjorie Taylor Greene a cabinet post, for good measure — will be a failure by Biden to keep his promise to bring the country back together.

But there’s an impediment to reaching bipartisan deals: The Republican party has become a cult. The GOP has been careening far-right for decades, but under Donald Trump it jumped the shark entirely. Even on their best days, Republican electeds enjoy being difficult. But lately, things have gotten far worse, as their positions become more extreme and on behalf of a shrinking sliver of the American public. There was a nice article about this in the NYT on Sunday, let me share a little:

Today’s Republican Party is less concerned with national public opinion than it used to be — or than today’s Democratic Party is.

The Republican Party of the past won elections by persuading most Americans that it would do a better job than Democrats of running the country. Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower each won at least 57 percent of the vote in their re-election campaigns. George W. Bush won 51 percent, largely by appealing to swing voters on national security, education, immigration and other issues. A party focused on rebuilding a national majority probably could not stay tethered to Trump.

But the modern Republican Party has found ways other than majority support to achieve its goals.

It benefits from a large built-in advantage in the Senate, which gives more power to rural and heavily white states. The filibuster also helps Republicans more than it does Democrats. In the House and state legislatures, both parties have gerrymandered, but Republicans have done more of it. In the courts, Republicans have been more aggressive about putting judges on the bench and blocking Democratic presidents from doing so. In the Electoral College, Democrats currently waste more votes than Republicans by running up large state-level victories.

To wit: A majority of Americans wanted to see Donald Trump convicted in the Senate. so Republicans acquitted him. Republicans never let comity get into the way of what they want.

An added problem with reaching unity is the GOP electorate. Republican voters have become increasingly extreme, as a direct result of the constant diet of lies they’ve been fed by Republican electeds and the ever-growing right-wing noise machine. As I recently wrote, Republican voters have been lied to for so long, it could take a lifetime to win them back, if ever. And maybe we shouldn’t even try. Rather than treating each election as an intervention to save the GOP from its own web of lies, we should focus instead on the reasonable middle. Our goal as Democrats shouldn’t be to reach “bipartisan” deals with Republican elected officials. Rather, it should be to legislate on behalf of a majority of Americans, regardless of party affiliation.

That means focusing on proposals that are popular with the American people. To wit: Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill. Republicans in Washington, suddenly rekindling their love for fiscal austerity now that they no longer control the White House, are livid over Biden’s proposal — legislation that 2/3 of the American people support. Regardless of the polls, a number of reporters, on CNN in particular (as that’s my preferred source for news), keep repeating the mantra that Biden won’t be keeping his promise for unity unless he tailors the bill to the liking of Republicans in Congress, to hell with the desires of the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Republican elected officials in Washington, and many at the state level, no longer represent half the country, if they ever did. They represent a minority fringe of a minority party, and should be treated as such. President Biden should strive to reach deals that a majority of the American people want — to hell with Republicans in Washington.