Content of Biden’s agenda trumps Republican complaints about process

A familiar argument has taken a new twist: Instead of discussing whether noble ends justify sketchy means, we now have a debate that blurs the distinction. Bipartisanship has moved from being a means to political success to a value-laden end itself.

Much criticism of President Biden is based not on the content of his agenda but on the fact that he achieved sufficient Democratic support to adopt it without compromising with Republicans.

Not surprisingly, Biden has weathered this without political damage. Voters care about substance, not legislative tactics.

Republicans do realize this. Their new-found post-Trump emphasis on the moral obligation of a president to conciliate the opposition is the result of the process of elimination, not a deliberate choice.

Biden’s first months have produced a shortage — but not the most dreaded one. The fact that we have enough vaccines for every American and to begin exporting some is a component of a different scarcity confronting those whose institutional role it is to critique the president. In contrast to the ample ammunition that was fired at Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, this year the president’s detractors got nuthin.

A quick, successful passage of a spending package of previously unimaginable scope preempted any claim that the new president is making “rookie mistakes.”

The great popularity of the first spending package accounts for both the relative mildness with which Republicans denounced it and the lack of resonance these attacks have had.

Two lines of Biden-specific attacks have also fizzled. The irrefutable response to right-wing insinuations that the president is enfeebled is the adaptation of a Marxism (Chico, not Karl) — “Who’s the public gonna believe; you or their own eyes?” And targeting Hunter Biden suffers both from the absence of evidence and the role of the increasingly ludicrous Rudy Giuliani as his accuser-in-chief.

Biden did stumble in reducing asylum applications and providing for unaccompanied children sent across the border. But he has corrected the first and is well on the path to improving the second. In addition, voters motivated by fear of immigration are an unlikely source of defectors from the Biden camp they were never in.

This dearth of alternatives is why Biden’s very success in marshaling his co-partisans has become a point of attack. Republicans are reduced to complaining that he is not deferring to their policy preferences, and that this wolfish partisanship is a contrast to the conciliatory sheep’s clothing in which he campaigned. This last charge not only clashes with their campaign rhetoric attacking Biden for having caved to his party’s left, it ignores the clearly stated refusal of most Congressional Republicans to partner in a two-party tango.

Mitch McConnell effectively renewed his 2009 pledge to make Barack Obama’s failure his top priority with his acknowledgement that he is now “100 percent” dedicated to thwarting Joe Biden. And remember: Given the derangement of House Republicans, which John Boehner affirms, McConnell is the closest thing to an adult in what Boehner calls the GOP “clown car.”

Nor is there any evidence that Democratic concessions on one set of issues would lead to Republican compromises on others. Democratic support for George Bush 2008 was answered by all-out partisan resistance to Obama in 2009.

That leaves the argument for bipartisanship as a standalone principle: not a tactic or strategy, but a moral imperative of some sort.

This distorts the role of parties. It is rooted in the view that party is another name for “faction,” which is in turn a label for an alliance of power-seekers motivated by their own selfish goals in contrast to the general welfare.

Party interest in this narrative is by definition opposed to the public interest, so anything that dilutes the impact of party advances the economic good. The lesson of history is instead that parties provide necessary components of a functioning self-governing polity.

Their presence is not sufficient — in the face of economic dislocation or deep social divisions — to make democracy work. But entities that organize debate over policy, give structure to elections beyond contests of personality, and mobilize support for effective governance are necessary for democracy to function. This indispensability of parties explains why they take root not as deliberate choices but as organic evolutions.

In neither of the two most successful examples of self-governance were parties a part of their founders’ original plan.

America’s Constitution writers denigrated the idea of parties even as they were forming them, and parties have been an indispensable part of our system ever since, with a small gap around 1820. Similarly, in Britain Whigs and Tories were functioning parties in the earliest stages of the emergence of representative government — to some degree before they were even named as such.

Well-run parties give shape to choices and provide coherence to the process of governing. That is why we have no examples of wholly non-partisan democracies.

Of course, parties should cooperate on maintaining basic rules and work together when that is necessary to take required action. But that should be the end of a process that begins with parties representing their views, and then adopting public policies that reflect the electoral results.

Treating bipartisanship as an independent value would mean that a party that receives a majority of voters should vigorously dilute its agenda by adopting portions that the electorate rejected.

That certainly is an odd conception of how the popular will should be respected.

Barney Frank represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives for 16 terms (1981-2013) and was chairman of the House Financial Services Committee from 2007 to 2011.