President Biden doesn’t brag much, but after only two-and-a-half years in the White House, he has been called the most effective president since Lyndon Johnson. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t realize all he’s done, so Biden is trying out some new bully pulpits to tell them. His first was a live conversation last week with MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace.
But in addition to his accomplishments, Biden should continue sounding the alarm he set off before last year’s midterm elections. The soul of America is still at risk from hatred, racism, violence and totalitarianism. Biden should emphasize he’s eager to lead the fight to restore decency, unity and our commitment to democracy, but he needs an army of voters fighting beside him.
It turns out that exorcizing former President Trump from government isn’t as easy as removing him from the White House. His influence continues with his three appointees in the Supreme Court and he wields strong control among the Republicans serving in Congress. That will not be corrected without a massive mobilization of voters to return control of Congress to the people.
What’s more, SCOTUS itself is melting down — its ethical lapses are ruining the court’s reputation for integrity while its dramatic shift to the right has made the court a purveyor of conservative dogma rather than justice.
During his conversation with Wallace, Biden said he believes Congress and the Supreme Court will heal themselves. His faith in the self-healing power of institutions may be rooted in the kinder and gentler days when he served in the Senate. There was dignity, decorum and a desire for bipartisanship back then.
But those days are long gone, and they won’t return until voters remove members of Congress who are hell-bent on partisanship. Currently, Republicans in the House and Senate are holding kangaroo hearings and investigations to punish Democrats and the Biden Justice Department for holding Trump accountable for alleged crimes ranging from sexual assault to espionage and sedition. So much for the party of “law and order.“
Across the street from the Capitol, the Supreme Court has been busy stripping freedoms previous courts established for women, minorities and gays, as well as hobbled the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to fight global climate change and put limits on the Clean Water Act.
More than 80 percent of Democrats and independents and nearly two-thirds of Republicans favor nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people, according to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute last year. Nevertheless, the court just ruled businesses can refuse service to same-sex couples. The justices based that decision on a lawsuit filed by a conservative Christian group. It turned out to be bogus. The facts were fiction, and there was no injured party. It raises concerns the court is willing to issue rulings based on conservative objectives rather than actual cases.
As the Campaign Legal Center notes, “The Roberts Court’s track record on Democracy is abysmal and continues to threaten the democratic rights that are essential to a functioning America. The only potential remedy is a strong pushback from Congress.”
Why Congress? It has the power to impeach and remove justices who deserve it; prohibit the court from judicial review of specific bills; create term limits; require the court to develop and enforce an ethics code; and restore EPA’s authority, the Voting Rights Act and women’s rights over their bodies. It can expand the court’s size, allowing President Biden to restore balance by appointing moderate and progressive justices. In case it needs additional leverage, Congress also controls the court’s purse strings.
The threat to Democracy will be evident in the 2024 presidential campaign. The GOP’s top two candidates both trend totalitarian. They will try to enlist voters to that view. Trump will continue encouraging white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and groups officially labeled domestic terrorists. DeSantis demonstrates in Florida that he’s a classic totalitarian who wants to control public and private life while suppressing opposition.
If reform is in the air, perhaps a unified Congress would eliminate the filibusters that allow the minority party to effectively rule the Senate. Polls show voters are split on the issue, but Republican filibusters in 2022 kept Congress from restoring the Voting Rights Act, restricting voter discrimination by states, and fixing campaign finance. Some reformers point out that half of the 30 bills blocked by Senate filibusters between 1917 and 1994 involved civil rights.
Last fall, six in 10 voters told Gallup they would like to replace the Electoral College with the popular vote. They can accomplish that by pushing their states to join the Interstate National Popular Vote Compact. It’s an agreement in which states assign all of their electoral votes for president to the winner of the national vote. The Electoral College system gave the presidency to George W. Bush and Trump, even though they lost the popular vote.
Now, 16 states with 205 electoral votes have joined the compact. A few more states would bring the total to 270, the number required to win the presidency and make the Electoral College meaningless.
Biden’s call for reforms would resonate with the millions of Americans unhappy about the federal government. Gallup found in May that 77 percent of Americans disapprove of how Congress handles its job. A majority, 58 percent, disapproved of how the Supreme Court is behaving.
“There is near-universal agreement that our system is not working well — in particular that it is not delivering the results people want,” Brookings noted last year. “[I]t is not surprising that public support is very high for fundamental change in our political system to make the system work better.”
But public opinion alone does not protect democracy. It will always be under attack if voters keep electing the same bad actors to government.
William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.