How to get the authoritarian far-right to cave in a hurry
Now that the Food and Drug Administration has finally given its full blessing to the Pfizer BioNTech shot, the president is jawboning corporate leaders into establishing mandates requiring employees to be vaccinated. This is not a reversal, as some reporters have said. Joe Biden is not ordering firms to do anything. (Though in the case of air travel, the Federal Aviation Administration's vaccine mandate for flight passengers has an obvious effect on the airlines.) He's using the world's biggest bullhorn to champion good public health. With the FDA's approval, firms are now rushing to show how much they agree.
According to Bloomberg: "A day after the federal Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, institutions central to their regions announced tougher — perhaps bellwether — rules." These include Goldman Sachs, Disney, Delta, Chevron and Louisiana State University. If you want to see LSU play college ball at Tiger Stadium, you're going to have to show proof of vaccination or a recent negative covid test. New York City now has a mandate. Same for other major cities. The California university system has one. Ditto for a galaxy of other systems, municipalities and countless small businesses.
Republican leaders in states like Florida and Texas have been trying to get ahead of what is likely going to become a new national norm by signing executive orders or enacting legislation that forbids government entities, such as public schools, from instituting vaccine or mask mandates. So far, this has fallen into the larger constellation of conservative thinking. (Though there's pushback from schools requiring masks.) Government is best when it governs least blah blah blah. What are these leaders going to do when the civil society, including the biggest firms, moves in the direction of good public health, which in this climate means moving in the direction of the GOP's enemies?
We could see a repeat of what we saw after the January 6 insurrection and after states like Georgia made laws giving legislatures effective veto power over democratic outcomes. That's when Coke, Major League Baseball and others issued statements affirming their commitment to the principle of one person, one vote. That rankled Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who famously said earlier this year that corporations should "stay out of politics" or suffer "consequences." Some state GOP threatened to rescind tax rebates for firms speaking out in favor of democracy. So it's possible a company like Disney, for instance, which is headquartered in Florida, could butt heads with right-wing lawmakers. It's possible the party of limited government, private enterprise and free markets could abandon all that for the sake of grinding its many, many axes.
To be sure, someone like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is going to pander to the party's extreme right, which has always been skeptical of corporations, especially multinational corporations, which at the very least make traditional social hierarchies difficult to maintain or at the very most are in league with a shady cabal of Jewish conspirators trying to take over the world, in their view. (You think I'm kidding.) These people will always be with us. Demagogues will always have an audience. But will such pandering mean going to war with the party's biggest backers?
Well, going to war would demand sacrifice, like eating out, flying, or going to football games. I'm here to tell you, right-wing radicals make a helluva holler but don't overestimate the noise. Authoritarians are weak on account of their being authoritarians. Their meaning of freedom, as I have said before, is the narrowest, brittlest and dumbest meaning of freedom. Once the whole mainstream of civil society starts asserting itself — once private businesses say do this or you can't do that — the authoritarians among us, even the wild ones most animated by fantastical belief in the "Jewish conspiracy," will cave in a hurry.
But there's a deeper reason why GOP authoritarians will comply once civil society demands compliance. They say they're against masks and vaccines, because they fear losing their freedoms. They don't, though. What they fear, as I have said many times before, is humiliation. Mandating vaccines actually helps authoritarians save face. They say they don't want to be forced, but what they are really saying is they don't want to choose. They can't choose. They don't know how. And they are afraid of making the "wrong choice." They are not going to go to war with big corporations. They'll obey, like good authoritarians.
This isn't to say they won't resent it. This isn't to say demagogues like Ron DeSantis won't whip them up into a frenzy. Authoritarians will still elect their own. But it won't have anything to do with ideological consistency. It won't have anything to do with deference to private enterprise on account of their being conservatives committed to the principle of limited government. They don't care about "limited government." They'd be fine with Louisiana's legislature hammering Louisiana State as long as it didn't get in the way of watching LSU football. If that doesn't make sense, well, it's not supposed to.
Recalculating Nancy Pelosi’s big win
The preliminary win to advance Joe Biden's huge social services spending bill is being depicted as a parliamentary victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a small group of would-be Democratic spoilers. A day or more later, what looks more the case are two things:
It's our American obsession with winning rather than focusing on the basics.
As The New York Times summarized, "For now, the deal that Ms. Pelosi struck amounted to a precarious détente for Democrats that did nothing to resolve tensions between the moderate and liberal flanks or end the jockeying for political leverage."
It's an important distinction because there is no bill yet for infrastructure spending—small, medium, or huge—in place yet, and, other than general support for the substance over the timing of votes, there are lots of ways that this discussion about investing in our next 10 years still can go south.
As it stands, this contested vote essentially only lays the groundwork for Democrats to force through both a $1 trillion bill to fix roads, bridges, airports and a lot of rural broadband wiring and the three-times larger bill to address spending on "human infrastructure" that includes an array of improvements to universal pre-K education, health and prescription drug access and pricing, expanded Medicare coverage, child-care tax write-offs, paid leave and tax increases for the wealthy and corporations.
It's an important step, of course, but what we should remember is that Pelosi was forced to deal with a handful of "moderates" who basically don't support the full package.
What Pelosi Did
In case you were living your life and managed to avoid worrying about Congress, the group of nine moderates wanted an immediate vote on the already Senate-passed bipartisan hard infrastructure bill. Pelosi wanted to twin the two spending packages. What happed was, according to a variety of press reports and congressional statements, was extended legislative negotiation.
Pelosi's particular way out was to link all the spending under a singular "rule" vote that would set a Sept. 27 deadline for a vote on the roads bill, setting up the possibility for House committees to vet the social services programs and price them for a simultaneous vote. She won the day, but, obviously, there's not a lot of time to assess both the actual cost of these sprawling programs and to ensure the politics for passage.
Basically, Democrats want to use the so-called "budget reconciliation" rules to cram all the spending together in bills that can be passed by as little as a single-vote majority – something that is a real prospect in the Senate. In the House, there was an eight-vote majority for this measure, which is likely the maximum it can achieve in an up-and-down vote for final approval.
Politico and others have attempted to revisit all the back-and-forth conversations and late-night haggling between Pelosi and her closest minions and the group of nine, headed by Rep. Jeff Gottheimer (D-NY). It was a serious enough effort to force delay, and to put the outcome in doubt.
To summarize, it turns out that Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Mad.) and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) were able to separate and exploit individual concerns among the nine and to persuade them that they all need to pull in a single direction. We'll never know if there were individual promises.
Afterward, Pelosi praised the rebel group for its "enthusiasm" while announcing her commitment to pass the infrastructure bill it had opposed.
Topping off the 220-212 vote on the eventual spending bill was approval for a voting rights measure that the House passed soon after.
Our Focus
This House showdown reminds us of the power of just a handful of people to hold up approval of legislation – or court decisions, or even who's giving advice within the White House.
We keep thinking that we go to the polls every two or four years with the idea of setting an understandable direction for our democracy. But then we keep tripping up over those one- or two- or even nine-vote groups that decide that they are smarter than the rest of us.
We will go through this same discussion over what constitutes a fitting social services safety net for America when this big Biden spending package comes back to the Senate, and we must depend on the peculiar waverings of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, and Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz.
We think we're voting for an agenda when we cast ballots for Biden or Donald Trump only to re-discover daily that there always is a single vote over in the corner of the House or Senate that insists on standing in the way of popular support, whether the issue is more gun control, abortion, environmental rules, or economic issues.
It's bad enough that we have gridlock resulting from near-equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. It seems worse when one side or the other can't line up its own folks – or free them from party commitments to specific legislative agendas. We expect that democracy is messy, but not daily.