It is a phrase that we repeatedly hear — typically by the majority as a justification for the unjustifiable, but elections do have consequences.  But it’s not just who wins, but how they win.  In many parliamentary countries, there is another common phrase a “working majority.”  And the basic concept is that it is rarely enough to win by one or two seats.  When you have a one or two seat majority, it only takes one or two members deciding to walk to cost the government the majority.  And that’s in a parliamentary system where members risk forcing a new election if they defect from the government to the minority.  In the United States, there is no threat of an immediate new election hanging over members’ heads to encourage the majority to stick together.  As a result, the margin required for a working majority is somewhat larger in the U.S.

And that’s the problem that the current Democratic majority is facing.  Currently, the Democrats have a 220-212 majority in the House (which will go up to 222-213 in January when all of the vacancies are filled).  That means a mere four (now or five in January) defections means that nothing can pass.  In the Senate, the Democrats do not have an actual majority.  Even including the two independents who normally vote with the Democrats, the Senate is a 50-50 tie.  Given the Senate filibuster rules, a 50-50 Senate can only pass reconciliation bills or confirm nominees, and even that requires all fifty members of the caucus to stick together at which point the Vice-President can break a tie.

The current mess on reconciliation and election reform is the result of the lack of a working majority.  Needing every vote in the Senate requires getting the agreement of every Senator.  Thus, each Senator can insist on concessions from the rest of the party.  (It is a little harder in the House, but a group of five or more members have the same leverage).  And to be clear, the leverage is not equal.  When you need every vote, the ones who want to do less have a negotiating advantage over those who want to do more.  The reality is that something is almost always better than nothing.  So the  “moderates” can tell the “progressives” that we are willing to vote for some increased funding for child care and clean energy and expanding Medicare but not for as much increased funding as you want, and the progressives have the option of accepting some funding for needed programs or not getting those programs at all.  The only real limit to the moderates leverage is that, when it comes to needing to cut funding, progressive can counter by trying to trade off programs that they want for programs that the moderates want that progressives do not see as particularly useful.  But that is very limited leverage.  Thus, at the end of the day, the current numbers give a lot of additional power to Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator Krysten Sinema of (suppoesedly) Arizona.  (The supposedly is that Senator Manchin’s positions flow from the politics of West Virginia and it is unlikely that Democrats could elect a more progressive Senator from West Virginia.  Senator Sinema’s positions on the other hand do not flow from Arizona’s politics as her fellow Senator from Arizona, Mark Kelly, who actually has to run in 2022, is not blocking current proposals.)

And to get anything done on election reform requires either ten Republicans willing to vote for cloture (not likely as the motivating factor in election reform legislation is to prevent Republican efforts to stack the deck with state election laws) or all Democrats willing to support a challenge to any ruling of the parliamentarian sustaining the Republican filibuster.  While Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema are the public faces of opposition to filibuster reform, it is less clear that all of the other members of the caucus support filibuster reform.  Back in the Obama years, we had several posts on filibuster reform.  One thing that is clear is that it is impossible to create narrow exceptions to filibuster rules in the current situation.   If Democrats expand what is allowed under the Byrd rule for reconciliation to also cover debt ceiling votes, Republicans will certainly make additional exceptions as to what is sufficiently budget-related if they regain the majority.  Similarly, if Democrats claim that civil rights laws are an exception to the filibuster, the Republicans will find other categories of legislation (perhaps immigration laws or abortion laws) that also should be an exception to the filibuster.  Figuring out the right fix that will put the filibuster genie back in the bottle of being limited to significant legislation that the minority thinks implicates their core interests is not easy.  And again, it takes all fifty members of the caucus agreeing on the solution.

Of course, all this goes back to the beginning.  Elections have consequences.  Narrow losses in the Senate races in Iowa, Maine, and North Carolina are part of what gives Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema de facto veto power over any legislation.  Similarly, narrow losses (margins of less than three percent) in ten House districts make the House much closer than it could have been.  (If you bump the margin up to five percent, the number of close Republican wins increases to seventeen).  While Democrats are disappointed in the difficulty of achieving all of our goals in the first year of the Biden Administration, it will go from difficult to impossible if we lose control of the House or the Senate.  Redistricting will probably make it hard to keep the House, but we do have a slightly favorable Senate map.  Keeping the House and picking up two or three Senate seats in 2020 will improve the chances to get something accomplished in 2023 and 2024.