It all served as a stimulating reminder of Biden’s arduous task ahead and the obstacles in his path. The very structure of modern Washington, as Biden knows from his work in the Senate and as vice president, is built around the party war machine. Even in the absence of Trump’s polarizing presence, the compromise remains anathema. And the best intentions and sincere rhetoric are not enough to change that reality, even for a day.
“Every presidential inauguration is about unity,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way. “But how do you make your presidential inauguration over the unit at a time when your predecessor tried to carry out a coup two weeks earlier?”
He said: “I don’t think there has been a time like this since the civil war … How do you rule like that?”
It is the question that shapes your presidency. When Biden starts his four years In the long run, the vast majority of Republicans still see him as an illegitimate president – convinced of the lie, perpetrated by Trump, that the vote was rigged. More than half of Americans say that the greatest threat to American society today is “other people in America”, not foreign adversaries or economic or natural forces.
The division in the country is so acute that, with Biden’s inauguration, political risk consultancy Eurasia Group listed the divided United States – and what it called an “asterisk presidency” – at the top of its annual list of global risks.
“My concern,” said Bill Richardson, the former Democratic governor of New Mexico, “is that Biden’s decency and bipartisanship will not be returned in the short term, because Trump’s faction within the Republican Party is so strong … They still are. “
The Biden government has not yet completed two days and this partisanship is already on fire. On the eve of Biden’s inauguration, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, leader of the effort to block the Biden Electoral College’s victory certification, announced that he would oppose the swift consideration of Biden’s candidate for Secretary of Homeland Security, delaying the formation of your national security team. On Thursday, seven Democratic senators filed an ethical complaint against Hawley and Republican Senator Ted Cruz for their part in objection to the results of the January 6 presidential election.
McConnell and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer are debating whether Schumer should commit to preserving obstruction, the tool that would allow Republicans to block a number of Biden’s legislative priorities, despite Democrats – with the deputy’s decisive vote. President Kamala Harris – holding an effective majority.
Congressional turbulent politics is already at the doors of the White House. Republicans berated Biden for returning to the Paris climate deal and revoking a license for the proposed Keystone XL gas pipeline. Biden’s $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package met with resistance from some Republicans, raising the prospect that Democrats may have to pass a bill using budget reconciliation, the process by which Democrats can approve main budgetary measures by simple majority.
Minority leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, told reporters on Thursday that he was “disappointed to see that, within hours of taking office, the new government was more interested in helping illegal immigrants than helping our own citizens, more interested in signs of virtue for climate activists than in supporting union members who were building the Keystone gas pipeline, ”among other complaints.
At the same time, the Republican National Committee was busy expanding this message, featuring the newly installed president early hours in office like those spent “reducing American competitiveness, killing jobs and revealing a plan to grant amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants”.
None of these criticisms are abnormal in the government, and Biden never suggested that the unit would come without political disputes. But the party grudge is almost certain to become more – not less – pronounced in the coming days, when the Senate starts its second Trump impeachment trial. Both Republicans and Democrats are still indebted to grassroots voters, and disunity is just as bad outside official Washington as it is inside it.
During a focus group of Trump supporters organized by Republican researcher Frank Luntz last week, participants were asked to provide a word or phrase to describe Biden united around their common contempt for him. The responses ranged from “corrupt” and “pathetic” to “not my president”, “on his deathbed” and “pure contempt”.
When Congressman Tom Reed, a New York Republican and co-chair of the bipartisan “Problem Solvers Caucus”, joined the call, one of the focus group participants, a Texas man, told him not to worry about “it reaching through the corridor things. “
Sooner or later, he said, “You are going to reach the altar and pull a stump.”
There is optimism among Democrats that if any politician could usher in an era of unification, it would be Biden. More than 81 million Americans – a record – voted for him. Most Americans approve of the way Biden conducted his transition and he takes the job with a relatively high public approval rating.
“I think Joe Biden is basically the only person who could do that,” said Bennett, given “his whole narrative … the way he led his life, has been about overcoming differences and finding ways to connect.”
And even though Biden doesn’t now all sing on the same page, the dawn of his presidency – for Democrats who still remember Trump’s fire and sulfur possession – is still far more promising than it could have been.
“I think we need to look at the glass half full, instead of half empty,” said Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, about the climate of government inherited by Biden. “Why do I say that? What kind of position would Democrats be in if we had only one of the Senate seats in Georgia? “
Reid, a longtime advocate of abolishing legislative obstruction, said Biden should give Republicans “a month, two or three” to “see if McConnell will try to be the reaper with everything”, refuting legislation with the obstruction. If he does, Reid said, “we’re going to have to get rid of the obstruction.”
That time – a month, two or three – is important because, however divisive things are for Biden today, party attitudes only tend to become more calcified when politicians shift their focus from their first months in office to the elections half-term.
“They will have to hurry up as much as they can in the first 100 days,” a Democratic adviser told major party donors. “They’ll do a lot of shit and the pig will run wild … So you have to concentrate on the intermediate tests.”
Unity cannot be a concern, said the adviser, when in 2022: “We will probably lose the House. Who the hell knows about the Senate side of things. You have a very short window before you become a lame duck and can’t do anything. “
This is, in part, an exaggeration. With government divided or not, Biden can still bend Washington’s bow in significant ways on his own. He has already signed executive orders to re-join the Paris climate deal and rescind Trump’s travel ban in several Muslim-majority countries, among other measures.
“To try to end the separation of children, to re-join the Paris agreement to continue … the pause in evictions and student loan payments and to end the Muslim ban, all these things are really important for people to say that elections are important, ”said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Still, Weingarten said, for Biden and Harris to successfully tackle the challenges they face – from a still violent pandemic and an economic crisis to a reckoning with the nation’s own democratic ideals – will require them to “penetrate an environment where a considerable amount of the country lives in an alternative reality. ”
This will require at least unification around a shared set of facts, if nothing else. And the nation is nowhere near that.
“There is no manual for this, and what Biden and Harris will face is formidable,” said Weingarten.