Consider this Politico piece a sequel to yesterday’s post about lefties whining ineffectually about how ineffective Biden is. They’re losing at the Court, they’re bottled up in the Senate, and they’re facing a ferocious beating at the polls four months from now.
They’re mad. And so they’re taking it out on the old man in the White House for failing to make their dreams come true with a 50/50 Senate and a narrow House majority.
It’d be one thing if it were just activists and random voters complaining, as no one expects them to think strategically on the party’s behalf or to care about the long-term health of American institutions. Case in point:
As Sen. Michael Bennet sought to encourage a small crowd of fellow Democrats not to give up the fight for abortion rights, Maryah Lauer stepped forward, bullhorn in hand, to exhort him to do more.
“Do you support ending the filibuster and expanding the court?” the 28-year-old called out from a quartet of fellow activists. “The Democrats are not doing enough.”…
When the demonstrators continued to be frustrated that Bennet wouldn’t agree to court-packing, he advised them, “There are not remotely 50 votes to do what you’re suggesting in the Senate.”
“Aren’t there 50 Democrats?!” cried one. Others demanded Bennet use “your power” to change Manchin’s position.
Yeah, Michael, use “your power” over pro-life Joe Manchin, who represents a Trump +40 state, to get him to nuke the filibuster and codify Roe.
People are angry, they don’t know how things work, and so scenes like that happen. But how do we explain esteemed liberal legal experts and professional lobbyists telling Politico that they’re all in on Court-packing at a moment when Republicans are mere months away from flipping the House and possibly the Senate?
“His admiration for the court as an institution has been overtaken by reality. And I think it’s time to wake up,” said Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, a member of the commission and someone who has advised the Biden White House on legal matters. “It’s the court itself that has plunged ahead without any inhibition on a kind of highly activist, agenda driven, right-wing ideological jihad.”…
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“If you’re in a kind of theoretical game situation with an opponent who begins acting in bad faith, what do you do? Do you continue to play by the rules and hope that will incentivize them to return to the norms? Or do you retaliate in a tit for tat way and thus hopefully incentivize [them] to go back to the traditional norms?” Michael Klarman, a Harvard law professor who testified to Biden’s court commission, said in an interview…
“Why does Joe Biden consider it his job to keep the public having confidence in a court that is completely working to thwart his agenda?” said Brian Fallon, the executive director of court reform group, Demand Justice. “He’s not ready to endorse it. [But] why demotivate his people that are passionate and upset at that moment? Why not leave a little fear in the minds of the Republican justices on the court about what he might support once he gets into office? Why not put a little fear into Mitch McConnell about what he might be for?”
Lay aside the obvious counterarguments here, like the fact that lefties who ran on a return to norms less than two years ago are now ready to burn down what’s left of the Court’s institutional legitimacy by starting an endless cycle of partisan Court-packing. Consider the situation pragmatically. Why the hell would Democrats be gung ho to set radical precedents on remaking American government at a moment when *the other party*, not their own, is ascendant?
James Hohmann puzzled over that today in a column for WaPo on the topic of the filibuster. If Democrats succeeded in nuking the filibuster now, they’d get six months’ of use out of it. Meanwhile, it’s possible that Republicans will control the entire government as soon as 2025, leaving them in position to undo everything the Dems might do with simple-majority rule between now and January — and without having to shatter the taboo against ending the filibuster to do so. It would have already been shattered by Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin this year.
“Grassroots Democratic activists are angry and talk to each other in a deafening echo chamber called Blue Twitter,” Hohmann writes. Indeed, and that’s the problem they’re having with the idiotic Court-packing demands too. Liberals are furious, frustrated at their powerlessness to hold back a conservative shift on the Court, so they’ve descended into a fantasy politics that’s essentially performative. They don’t have the votes in Congress to do any of the crazy things they want to do and Biden doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do it in Congress’s absence.
But it makes them feel good and righteous to insist that every legal weapon should be on the table in reversing the Court’s anti-abortion turn. And Biden’s an easy target for their rage because, whether due to age or temperament or lingering respect for the Court as an institution, he won’t even emote (much) for them about it. If impotent theatrical anger is the acid test of passion for The Cause, Biden has clearly failed. And unlike the Court or Joe Manchin, POTUS *is* someone who needs to care about what they think.
It’s a temper tantrum, nothing more. I doubt Schumer has even 45 votes in the Senate to pack the Court and the savvier activists on the left among them surely know it. It’s not even popular among the public: One poll taken earlier this year found a 26/65 split on whether to add more justices. But if you’re looking to lash out and express your contempt for SCOTUS, “Court-packing now!” is as satisfying as a string of F-bombs.
Byron York has the correct diagnosis of what’s ailing lefties: “The Democrats’ most fundamental problem is that they entered the Biden administration with wildly unrealistic expectations.” They underperformed in 2020 House races thanks to “defund the police” and needed a major assist from Trump in Georgia just to get to 50/50 in the Senate, yet the prospect of total control of government led them to believe that the next two years would be a cavalcade of big-ticket legislation — never mind that Joe Manchin had de facto veto power over all of it. Biden too was seduced by the idea of a game-changing presidency despite his thin majorities. And in some ways, like infrastructure and even gun control, his term has been more consequential than Obama’s.
But high inflation and the end of Roe will be his legacy, even though he had little power over the latter and little power over the former once he signed the COVID relief bill. The temper tantrum this week is all about Dems trying to reconcile how a term that began with so much promise will somehow be remembered for that.
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