The Changing Political Landscape
The One Big Beautiful Bill is now the law. The time for speculation and promises is over. Now it will either do what Republicans hope or what Democrats fear. Most likely some of both. There will be failures and successes, but the overall results should hopefully be clear. If it works, Republicans should do well in the mid-terms; if not, the Democrats will do well.
I am hopeful. After all, some of this we have done before. For example, one of the biggest complaints Democrats have with the bill is the “cuts” to Medicaid. These come from two main areas: removing illegal aliens and the work requirements for those who can work. The first has broad support. The second we did in the 1990s.
Clinton talked an excellent game as a moderate, and one of the things he ran on was welfare reform. Once in office, he did basically nothing about it, but still talked about it. When Republicans won the Congress in 1994, they began working on it and produced a bill just before the next election, a key component of which was work requirements. Clinton opposed the bill. Still, given the approaching election and that it was one of his “signature issues,” eventually he signed it, promising to fix it.
The bill was a significant success, and by the end of his term, Clinton was bragging about it as one of his significant accomplishments, and it remained so after he was gone. It is still mentioned occasionally when talking about Clinton’s term. The work requirements worked well until Obama gutted them. What is happening now is that they are being partially restored.
The process to get the bill passed was pretty much what I expected. A complicated process that came down to the last moment. With slim majorities in both the House and Senate, how could it be otherwise?
As I have said before, parties are not monoliths, but coalitions of various groups that compete and sometimes have contradictory interests. To work out a compromise that could ultimately pass took a lot of time and effort. This is why I believe that many Democrats were unwise, at best.
In the Senate, Republicans could and did lose only 3 votes. Granted, it is impossible to tell if the three who ultimately voted against the bill were a hard no, or just allowed to vote no because their vote was not ultimately needed, so it is unclear how much influence they had on the final bill.
That was not the case with the Democrats. They made a strategic decision early on that was a hard no. Had they made a different choice, this could have been a compromise bill, that passed with a comfortable margin. It would have been a significantly better bill. Sure, many Republicans would have voted no, and each Republican no vote would have had to have been replaced by more than 1 Democratic yes, to make it worth the effort. But think about what Democrats could have gotten.
As it was, even the extreme parts of the Republican party could demand things be put in the bill, and the only counterbalance would be conflicting demands from other Republicans. However, with the input of Democrats, some of those more extreme demands could have been ignored.
One thing that could have been done, and still could be, is real immigration reform. The border has been a problem for most of my life. Biden completely broke it and left a huge mess, and it is one of Trump’s best issues. But he has been in the past, and I believe still is, open to reform.
The broad outlines could include, for example, very tight controls on immigration and visas going forward. A guest worker program that allows people to come legally for a short time for things like seasonal farm work. (We used to have that in the early 1960s.) Everyone who came here after a specific date, say January 2021, has to leave. Those who came before that and have a serious criminal record (to be defined) also have to go. Dreamers get to stay, and local community boards could be set up to determine whether the rest get to stay. However, if someone is allowed to remain, they are the financial responsibility of that community. Of course, this would not be a problem for those who are productive members of society. No one who came here illegally, except dreamers, can get citizenship.
That is a broad outline. Democrats would have their opening offer. The result would not be acceptable to all Republicans, but I believe most. The hard part for the Republicans is that we have made similar compromises in the past, but have been burned by Democrats.
For example, in the 80s, Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens in exchange for securing the border. Democrats got their amnesty, and we have all seen what happened with the border. Trump would have a fight among the Republican base to convince them he was not once again being taken to the cleaners. Democrats would have to give up more than normal because of their failure with past agreements.
Still, I believe there is a deal to be had. Maybe just a partial deal to move the ball forward. For example, legalizing the dreamers in exchange for better enforcement of VISAs. There is, or at least was, support for legalizing Dreamers among Republicans. Rubio had a bill that was very close (a few weeks) from getting the support needed to pass when Obama issued an Executive Order to legalize them, which blew up Rubio’s chances and thus killed the bill. Since the EO was clearly unconstitutional, and later ruled so, ending the bill was its main impact, and the Dreamers are still a problem.
Returning to the bill, think about what the Democrats could have asked for. For example, Alaska Senator Murkowski was a no vote until the last minute when she made a request for her state, got it, then voted yes. What could Democrats ask for? To put it in their terms, who could they protect? As it was, no one. They were too blinded by their hatred of Trump to even consider it. Those who aren’t, like Fetterman, are either too afraid of their party to break ranks or, more likely, too small in number to be worth the effort on the part of the Republicans.
Perhaps this is normal. For 40 years, Democrats had comfortable majorities and were in the dominant position for such negotiations. That began to change in the mid-90s when Republicans won back control. Still, their cultural legacy was as a minority party since the 1920s. Even now, Republicans are still learning how to be in the majority, and Democrats still struggle with minority status.
Democrats are also struggling with their identity and currently seem to be moving even farther left. They used to be the party of the working class. They opposed illegal immigration because they understood the impact on the working class, as illegals drove down wages and increased the strain on government services and schools. In one of the ironies of Biden, he had a bust of Cesar Chavez in the Oval Office. Still, Chavez was a vocal opponent of illegal immigration as it undermined his efforts to unionize farm workers in California.
While Democrats still rail against billionaires, they have become the party of billionaires, taking the side of Wall Street. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week, Wall Street always does well during good times, but it is Main Street’s turn to do well for the next four years. Thus, Democrats ultimately voted against no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security. Were these all significant tax breaks for billionaires? Democrats complain about how they are losing access to cheap labor and worry publicly about who will mow their lawns and buss their tables. Is losing access to cheap labor a significant middle-class concern?
Not only have democrats moved away from working people, they have moved to the Left in other ways as well. For example, according to CNN, in 2017, Democrats used to be Pro-Israel by 13%; now they are Pro-Palestinian by +43 percent. They nominated a socialist to be mayor of NYC. Patriotism has dropped to 34% among Democrats. Republicans were still patriotic under Biden, but Democrats link patriotism to their being in office. They also confuse the perfect with the good.
Many really believe their own rhetoric about Trump and his supporters, which is sad. A commentator who appears frequently on MSNBC called for the world to sanction the United States as a threat to peaceful people everywhere. He was upset with our ending Iran’s nuclear program. They are pretty clearly losing their minds, and so hardly in a position to compromise. It is looking like they will be in the political wilderness for quite some time.
It will be interesting to see if Musk’s new America Party catches hold. Since we do not have a parliamentary system, there is only room for two parties. The only way for Musk’s party to succeed is to effectively replace one of the existing parties. Most Republicans are generally happy with their party, and Democrats are generally unhappy, so you usually would expect Musk’s party to attract disaffected Democrats. Yet, Musk was recently the enemy, and his reason for starting the party was that the Republicans did not cut enough, which is not usually a Democratic position. Thus, I expect that not much will come of it.
I recently read The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray. I recommend it. First published in 2017, it is fascinating in that it could have just as easily been written about the United States under Biden, but then Biden’s first Presidential bid collapsed over plagiarism, so it was not surprising that his immigration policies mirrored Europe from a decade earlier.
Still, it shows that what is happening is not just one country’s policy but something much deeper on the Left. The main question is: What is Western culture, and is it worth preserving? The Left seems to be saying no to the question of preserving, with little or no thought about what might replace it. You can see this in LGBTQ++ or whatever it is this week, supporters standing up for countries that would toss them from the rooftop of a building if they went there. You see this in the patriotism stats among Democrats above.
The basic summary of Murray’s book is that Europe’s leaders ignored public opinion and opened their borders. When their populations complained, they called them racists and xenophobes. As the problems mounted, they ignored them. Thus, when things like honor killings and rapes by immigrants skyrocketed, they were officially ignored and even denied to a shocking degree. Murray has a very tragic letter of apology from a rape victim to her rapists (plural) apologizing to them for their having to live in such a racist country.
As populations were ignored by their leaders, they moved right on the political spectrum, increasing the power of what had been virtually non-existent right-wing parties, bringing some into power. All the while, the leaders blamed their populations for not keeping up with their enlightened policies.
The number one job of a politician is to listen to the concerns of their constituents and then represent them. Earlier in this century, this was a problem for both parties. Trump tapped into that in 2016 and won, transforming the Republican party in the process, moving it toward Main Street and the working class. Democrats had the same problem, but they were shielded by a press that actively lied for them, promoting them, while doing all they could to savage Republicans.
This primarily worked until recently, but now many more people are aware of the media’s lies, and the media’s trust has fallen to single digits. Yet many Democrats don’t realize the political landscape is changing, as they are still focusing on the 20% of issues, expecting the media to shield them. As a result, they are increasingly the party only of the wealthy, college-educated elites and are losing the middle class, as the election results of Mamdani showed.
