As I write this, it seems highly likely that Joe Biden has won the presidency. And he clearly received millions more votes than his opponent. You can and should claim that you have been given a firm mandate to rule the nation.
But there are real doubts about whether he will, in fact, be able to rule. At the moment, it seems likely that the Senate, which is grossly unrepresentative of the American people, will remain in the hands of an extremist party that will sabotage Biden in every way possible.
Before we get into the problems this confrontation is likely to cause, let’s talk about how unrepresentative the Senate is.
Each state, of course, has two senators, which means Wyoming’s 579,000 residents outweigh California’s 39 million. Overweight states tend to be much less urbanized than the nation as a whole. And given the growing political divide between metropolitan and rural areas, this gives the Senate a strong tilt to the right.
An analysis by the FiveThirtyEight.com website found that the Senate actually represents an electorate nearly 7 percentage points more Republican than the average voter. Cases like that of Susan Collins, who remained in Maine, a Democratic state, are exceptions; the Senate’s underlying right-wing bias is the main reason the Republican Party will likely retain control despite a major Democratic victory in the presidential popular vote.
But, you may ask, why is divided government control such a problem? After all, Republicans controlled one or both houses of Congress for three-quarters of Barack Obama’s presidency, and we survived, didn’t we?
Yes, but.
In fact, the obstruction of the Republican Party did a lot of damage even during the Obama years. Republicans used tough tactics, including threats to cause a national debt default, to force a premature withdrawal of fiscal support that slowed the pace of economic recovery. I calculated that without this de facto sabotage, the unemployment rate in 2014 could have been about 2 percentage points lower than it actually was.
And the need for more spending is even more acute now than it was in 2011, when Republicans took control of the House.
More immediately, the coronavirus
it’s freaking out, with new cases topping 100,000 a day and increasing rapidly. This will strongly affect the economy, even if state and local governments do not impose new blockades.
We desperately need a new round of federal spending on healthcare, help for the unemployed and businesses, and support for struggling state and local governments. Reasonable estimates suggest that we should spend $ 200 billion or more each month until a vaccine ends the pandemic. I would be surprised if a Senate still controlled by Mitch McConnell would agree to something like this.
Even after the pandemic ends, we are likely to face persistent economic weakness and a desperate need for more public investment. But McConnell effectively blocked infrastructure spending even with Donald Trump in the White House. Why would he become more tame with Biden in office?
Now, spending is not the only form of policy. Typically, there are many things that a president can accomplish for better (Obama) or worse (Trump) through executive action. In fact, over the summer, a Democratic task force identified hundreds of things that a President Biden could do without going through Congress.
But this is where I am concerned about the role of a strongly partisan Supreme Court, a court made up of behavior that breaks McConnell’s rules, including the hasty confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just days before the election.
Six of the nine magistrates were chosen by a party that won the popular vote only once in the last eight elections. And I think there is a substantial possibility that this court will behave like the Supreme Court in the 1930s, which continued to block New Deal programs until FDR threatened to add seats, something that Biden could not do with a Senate controlled by the Republicans.
So we are in big trouble. Defeating Trump would mean that, for the moment, we have avoided diving into authoritarianism, and yes, the stakes are high, not just because of who Trump is, but also because the modern Republican Party is so extreme and undemocratic. But our skewed electoral system means that Trump’s party is still in a position to hamper, perhaps paralyze, the next president’s ability to deal with the huge epidemiological, economic and environmental problems we face.
Put it this way: if we were looking at a foreign country with the level of political dysfunction of the United States, we would probably consider it on the verge of becoming a failed state, that is, a state whose government can no longer exercise effective control.
Runoff elections in Georgia can still give Democrats control of the Senate; Other than that, Biden could find some reasonable Republicans willing to get us off that edge. But despite its apparent victory, the Republic remains in great danger.
Paul Krugman c. 2020 The New York Times Company
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