Passed only by a single vote in the Senate, President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act may lay the basis for overcoming two deep-seated problems that have bedeviled the Democratic Party for decades.
The first is a half-century curse on Democrats’ ability to maintain unified control of the federal government. As I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed a year ago:
Since 1968, Democrats have controlled both Congress and the White House three times, and each one of those periods ended with a hard turn right. Altogether, the years of unified Democratic government add up to just eight out of the past 52: four when Jimmy Carter was president, and the first two years of Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s first terms. Carter’s presidency ended with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Clinton’s first years with Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” in 1994, and Obama’s first years with the tea party insurgency in 2010.
Even before the pandemic, it was clear that if Democrats won control of both Congress and the presidency, they needed to prioritize “early deliverables” to the voters—visible material benefits—to avoid repeating the disastrous reversals in midterm elections the party suffered under Clinton in 1994 and Obama in 2010. The pandemic has made those early deliverables only more urgent, and the big relief bill is providing them. With their narrow majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats will need all the help they can get to retain control.
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