Maybe Democrats Should Start Playing a Harder Game of Ball
PLUS: A review of "The Holdovers" starring Paul Giamatti
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When last we left our nation’s capital, its parties (predictably) were at an impasse. For nearly three months, President Biden had been pushing for a military aid package for Ukraine and Israel — aid, by the way, supported by many Republican legislators on Capitol Hill. Yet as congressional Republicans are wont to do, they took a bill they preferred to pass hostage, refusing to vote for it unless President Biden and the Democrats agreed to add heavy-handed border security provisions to the bill. With both parties now locked in a stalemate and with no clear way forward—along with an intensifying war in Gaza, a Ukrainian army running short on ammunition, and what Republicans themselves characterize as a crisis at the southern border—House Republicans opted to do what they did a few months ago when they couldn’t find one of their own to serve as Speaker, call the House to order, and, like, govern: They adjourned and skipped town for the holidays. Not even three different emergencies can keep GOP legislators from a fun, old-fashioned family Christmas and the warm embrace of kith and kin.
With Congress ready to reconvene, our nation’s legislators now find themselves butting up against two new deadlines: One on January 19 to fund military construction and the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, and another on February 2 to fund the rest of the government. The government will shut down if those deadlines aren’t met, and Republicans are determined to keep the government closed until the border is secured.
Truth be told, there are real policy debates to be had here. Should we continue to fund a war in Ukraine that has turned into a bloody stalemate when the risk is that Ukraine will run out of manpower before it runs out of munitions? Should we supply arms to an Israeli military that is clearly well-armed and acting in a way that threatens to drag the United States into a wider regional war? And don’t even get started on the border, an issue so vexing it has stymied Congress for nearly twenty years now.
Those are important issues we ought to hash out, but Republicans, as they always do, have turned them into political time bombs. On the one hand, what can you expect? This is politics, and we should assume politicians who care about issues will maneuver and press their advantage whenever they can. It’s just that Republicans go to the mats on every issue. They have no sense of forbearance. They’re only happy when they win and get everything they want and their opponent loses. They’ve demonstrated time and time again that they’re more than willing to sacrifice the things you would think they hold dear—a functioning government, a stable national economy, a democracy—to get their way and stick it to the libs.
When Republicans do this, they usually end up faceplanting. Government shutdowns, debt ceiling crises, and insurrections have had a tendency to backfire on Republican politicians. The problem is Republicans, who have yet to be thoroughly repudiated by the American electorate for their habitual negligence, keep doubling-down on this strategy, ostracizing or even purging party members who back down or urge restraint. We’re getting close to the point where Republicans won’t have anyone left to pull them back from the brink, meaning they along with the rest of the nation will learn the price of their obstinacy the hard way.
Republicans likely believe they can play ball in this fashion because they sense Democrats actually care about governance and will eventually cave if forced to choose the lesser of two unacceptable options. For Republicans, it’s just a matter of circumstances finally aligning, offering Democrats their money or their lives (while signaling Republicans are crazy enough to pay the ultimate price themselves) and forcing the dreaded opposition to submit.
Republicans are only half right, however, in their read of the political landscape. Democrats do care about governance because they believe government can be used to generate social goods and therefore want government to work well. Republicans are either loath to admit that or simply don’t believe that to be true, and besides, they intuit there is more to be gained playing to the American political Id by railing against government than actually getting serious about governing.
Even Republican advocacy for a border security bill—an instance in which Republicans actually support government intervention to solve a public problem—is an exception that proves the point. H.R.2, the bill House Republicans are demanding Biden accept to unlock their votes on basically everything, is a blunt instrument more useful as a way to play to the xenophobia of the conservative base (building a wall, family detention, ignoring backlogged legal immigration pathways) than actually addressing the problem at hand.1 In fact, as David Bier of the Cato Institute wrote when noting the end of the asylum ban in May 2023 actually increased border security by cutting down on the number of illegal crossings, “Nearly everything that politicians now use to justify immigration restriction can be traced to the restrictionist policies already in force. In other words, immigration restrictionists create the problems and then demand ever more restrictions to fix them.”
But maybe the biggest tell is that some hardline House Republicans have indicated they would oppose any deal on immigration, even one they found highly favorable. Why? As Rep. Tony Nehls of Texas explained, “I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating. I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it.” I suppose it’s not necessarily unusual for partisan members of Congress to tank legislation under the assumption they can get a better deal with a president of their own party; after all, why let Biden build the wall Trump promised to build eight years ago when Trump is promising to do it for reals this time? But it does seem pretty strange to take a hostage, demand a ransom, and then reject that ransom when it’s paid. H.R.2 isn’t a serious bill or even a messaging bill. It’s a primal scream.
What Republicans have historically gotten wrong about Democrats is the assumption that Democrats will cave if Republicans force them to choose between two bad options. Democrats learned with the Tea Party that good governance depends on not negotiating with legislative hostage takers, a strategy that has typically compelled Republicans to back down and cut a deal. That has routinely outraged hardline Republicans who can’t get it through their heads that a.) The responsible members of their party don’t actually want to kill the hostage they’re taking; and b.) In a system of divided government, lawmaking—getting to yes—requires compromise between the parties. It’s hard enough to pass major legislation when one party controls both houses of Congress and the White House. Whatever bill that gets signed into law by a president whose party affiliation does not match the majority in the House will either be small-bore legislation, mostly uncontentious, generated by a wave of public pressure, or the product of grueling negotiations.
Furthermore, House Republicans should take note of the size of their current House majority. It isn’t exactly sturdy. Over the past month, they’ve lost two members—George Santos was expelled, and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy resigned—and two other members (Ohio Rep. Bill Johnson and New York Rep. Brian Higgins) are set to resign in the coming weeks. (BREAKING: Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise announced Friday he will be away from Washington until February to undergo a stem-cell transplant.) That will bring their House majority down to 218, which is the bare minimum needed to control the House. House Republicans keep saying they won’t accept a compromise border bill coming out of the Senate, but they have no room for error in their own caucus, where they need unanimity and perfect attendance to pass any party-line bill and where every Republican House member effectively holds a veto over anything the party hopes to pass. (It also means it would only take one Republican to depose the Speaker.)
But that’s also why I’m worried about what Democrats are doing over in the Senate, where a bipartisan group consisting of Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy, and Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema are working on a border bill that’s just a scaled-back version of H.R.2.; in other words, a bill focused exclusively on immigration restrictions rather than one that includes pathways to citizenship or anything more comprehensive. If this is really supposed to be a bipartisan bill, Democrats should get—and Republicans should be willing to accept—some Democratic priorities in the legislation.
How did Democrats end up in this position? I suspect Biden initially included some border provisions in the Israel-Ukraine funding bill as a sweetener for Republicans who felt it was important to continue supporting Ukraine despite growing disapproval of America’s involvement in that war among their base. (Again, we can debate the merits of Ukraine policy, but as David Frum points out in The Atlantic, it’s pretty clear Republican views on Putin and Ukraine have shifted to accommodate the GOP’s fealty to Trump and their dislike of Joe and Hunter Biden.) I don’t fault Biden’s instincts there, as that’s what a president looking to get a bill through Congress does. Republicans, however, interpreted Biden’s outreach as an invitation to overhaul the United States’ entire border policy and therefore used it to take the Israel-Ukraine bill hostage. Now it’s all getting rolled into the government funding bills coming due in a few weeks.
Democrats are in a bit of a political bind here. Biden and many others in the party would like to pass a border bill—even a bipartisan one—to defang Trump’s most potent talking point heading into the 2024 elections. Yet Republicans are intent on making sure Democratic provisions aren’t included in that bill, meaning whatever legislation that does emerge from Congress won’t play well with the more fickle elements of the Democratic base Biden will need to turn out in November. (Making matters worse, Biden’s record on immigration is already too easily compared to Trump’s.) Additionally, there’s no guarantee that whatever watered-down version of H.R.2 that emerges from the Senate will pass the House, where either Republican hardliners or Hispanic Republicans could sink the bill for reasons of their own, leaving Biden holding a bill that’s effectively a political punching bag.
Democrats’ instincts might be to declare a compromise on border security impossible, cut off negotiations, insist on a standalone vote on Israel-Ukraine, and engage in small-bore negotiations over government funding bills. After all, if Republicans had used the Israel-Ukraine bill to try to defund Obamacare or pass a nationwide abortion ban, I’m positive Democrats would have told the GOP to go pound sand. But given the salience of the border issue right now, I doubt Republicans would so easily back down.
So maybe it’s time for Democrats to play a harder game of ball. The obvious move would be to insist Republicans include a range of Democratic provisions in the bill, including codification of the DREAM Act, to balance out Republican demands. Republicans would probably say no by claiming they’re already taking a tough vote on Ukraine, but Republicans should be reminded that’s not a hostage they can credibly take since many Republicans already support Ukraine aid.
At that point, maybe Democrats should go big and outside the box. If Republicans expect Democrats to take a bruising vote on border security to get Israel-Ukraine funding passed, then maybe Republicans should sweeten the deal for Democrats and take a tough vote on the pressing issue of, oh, I don’t know, abortion or gun control, by including the codification of Roe v. Wade or the assault weapons ban in the bill. Or if we’re going to spend so much money on keeping people out of the country and funding foreign wars, how about spending some money directly on the American people by passing a universal health care bill or, more modestly, universal child care and pre-K?
My guess is Republicans would reject those proposals out of hand. But if Republicans are playing hardball, why can’t Democrats?
Or here’s a more plausible course of action: Find a rump of Democrats to oppose special funding for Israel on the grounds that the United States should be encouraging Israel to wind down their war in Gaza and that Israel can afford to buy the weapons themselves. As politically unpopular as Ukraine funding may be in Republican circles, support for Israel’s war in Gaza is waning among Democrats, so there is a tough vote already built into the Israel-Ukraine bill for many Democratic lawmakers. No need to add any sweeteners in the form of a border bill to the Israel-Ukraine bill, as that latter bill would already represent a compromise between legislative parties.
I hope Biden and the Democrats are actually playing a longer game here. Maybe they sense House Republicans, who have no room for error, won’t take yes for an answer and will reject whatever sort of hardline deal that comes out of the Senate. That would allow Biden to paint House Republicans as obstructionists and go back to the drawing board to put together a new, more favorable border/immigration bill. That’s kind of happened before: When Republicans pushed the country to the edge of default last spring, Biden indicated a willingness to negotiate that brought Speaker Kevin McCarthy back to the bargaining table, where he learned he didn’t have the leverage he anticipated and had to cut a deal very favorable to Democrats to save the country from financial ruin. Maybe Speaker Mike Johnson is about to learn a similar lesson: You can’t drive a hard bargain with your opponent if you don’t have a reliable majority and therefore need your opponent’s help to govern.
Democrats have proven pretty adept at governing around Republicans’ temper tantrums. Eventually Republicans self-destruct, allowing Democrats to work out a favorable if not necessarily spectacular deal. It’s exhausting, however, and even when Republicans emerge looking like buffoons, their antics end up tarnishing government in general, which accrues to their benefit. And rather than learning from their self-owns, Republicans keep doubling down on their tactics. Eventually their recklessness is going to do some awfully severe damage to the country. I’m not yet convinced this is the right way for Democrats to react, but if Republicans keep insisting on playing a game of hardball, maybe Democrats need to prove to them exactly how counter-productive the strategy is by demonstrating two can play that game.
Signals and Noise
By Amanda Ripley for the Washington Post: “Why We Split the World Into Good and Evil — And Make Decisions We Regret”
By Steven Shepard of Politico: “Why Jan. 6 is a Problem for Trump’s Campaign” (“Democrats and independents still hold starkly negative views of Jan. 6, its participants and Trump’s role in stoking the riot. Majorities of Americans overall still believe now-President Joe Biden was elected legitimately, that Trump is guilty of trying to steal the election and that the federal criminal charges in Washington against Trump are appropriate. … And it’s not just a poll-based hypothetical that direct ties to Jan. 6 or broader denial of the 2020 election results are a millstone for Trump and his aligned candidates. Only 14 months ago, voters in the midterms rejected the majority of 2020 election deniers — especially in battleground states — despite a political environment and generic ballot that otherwise favored Republicans.”)
Nicholas Riccardi of AP looks at how resilient the United States’ democratic institutions have been over the past three years and how imperiled they remain.
“I know nothing about Hitler. I have no idea what Hitler said other than (what) I’ve seen on the news.”—Self-proclaimed “genius” Don Trump during an interview with Hugh Hewitt when questioned about recent speeches by Trump echoing Hitler’s rhetoric. As that article points out, Trump claims to “know-nothing” about a lot of unsavory things he ends up being associated with. (Also: One has to wonder if a man who knows nothing about Hitler really knows what he’s saying when he calls Democrats “fascists” or claims the lawsuits against him are “reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.”)
Despite doing so in 2016 and 2020, Don Trump declined to sign a non-binding ballot access pledge in Illinois promising not to overthrow the government. As an Illinois politician put it:
The Supreme Court will determine the constitutionality of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that, according to the 14th Amendment, Don Trump is not eligible to appear on ballots in the state as someone who engaged in insurrection.
Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft is threatening to kick Joe Biden off his state’s ballot if the decisions by Colorado and Maine to exclude Trump from their ballots stand. Ashcroft said he would justify his actions by claiming Biden is allowing an “invasion” of the country at the southern border and that both Biden and Kamala Harris supported people who were rebelling against the government during “riots” in 2020.
The Detroit News reports the Trump campaign organized the effort to file a fake Michigan elector certificate with the express intent of using the move to allow Trump to hold on to power. Investigators in Michigan are still looking into the matter, which could lead to indictments.
A report released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee provides concrete proof Don Trump received $7.8 million from foreign governments while president, with the largest total contribution—$5.5. million—coming from China. Democrats point out this is the behavior Republicans are currently accusing President Biden of engaging in, only without evidence.
Nate Cohn of the New York Times writes about the parallels between the election of 1948 (high inflation, low presidential approval ratings for a Democratic incumbent who would go on to win, a do-nothing Congress, the nation returning to normal following a major disruption) and the 2024 election.
Harry Enten of CNN argues Don Trump will likely need high voter turnout to win in 2024. (Trump does better in polls of registered voters than in polls of likely voters.) The Economist offers a good reminder: It has always been hard for pollsters to gauge Trump’s support, which has often been underestimated.
Shelby Talcott of Semafor reports Hispanic leaders are warning Democrats that President Biden is struggling mightily with Hispanic voters. A new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll shows Biden struggling to consolidate support among young, Black, and Hispanic voters.
The Michigan Republican Party is in a full-on civil war.
Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, beginning this year, Americans will be able to purchase insulin for less than $35.
Congress is on the verge of allowing Medicaid to cover substance abuse treatment in mental health facilities, (institutions that had fallen out of favor with legislators in the 1960s.
After Chicago and New York City began prohibiting busses carrying migrants from the southern border from entering their cities, Texas Governor Greg Abbott began flying migrants to those cities. The suburbs of those cities have also responded with their own prohibitions.
“Harvard Can’t Have a President Who Plagiarizes. But America *Can* Have a President Who Coups.” by Jonathan Last of The Bulwark (“[I]t seems to me that anyone outraged that a mere plagiarist could hold the relatively humble position of university president would be spending every ounce of their strength trying to prevent a man who has been convicted of having committed sexual assault, is under 91 felony indictments, and who incited a motherforking insurrection to be President of the United States. But you don’t see a lot of that, do you? Quite the opposite.”)
A federal appeals court ruled federal regulations do not require hospitals to perform life-saving abortions if those procedures run afoul of state law. The Supreme Court will hear a case out of Idaho on this issue, and, in the process, blocked a lower court’s ruling permitting abortions in such cases, an ominous turn of events that likely signals the way the Court will decide the matter.
Alice Miranda Ollstein, Jessica Piper, and Madison Fernandez of Politico explain why Democrats shouldn’t count on abortion ballot initiatives to help their candidates in the 2024 election.
A study by JAMA Internal Medicine found women in states with abortion bans are stockpiling abortion pills.
Felix Salmon of Axios wonders if consumer confidence in the United States—low despite the overall health of the economy—is set to rebound.
The United States’ debt hit a record $34 trillion. Fatima Hussein and Josh Boak of AP look at what that means for the future of the American economy.
Gas prices have fallen below $3 per gallon for most Americans. (The average price remains above $3 due to +$4 gas on the West Coast.) However, the price of gas is expected to rise to close to $4 by Memorial Day.
Austen Hufford of the Wall Street Journal reports the minimum wage is rising in many states, but many low-paid workers have already seen employee-driven pay hikes.
Evan Halper and Toluse Olorunnipa of the Washington Post note an economic record the Biden administration isn’t bragging about: The United States produced more oil in 2023 than any nation in history.
By an 8-7 vote, Israel’s high court struck down a law supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that would have curbed its power of judicial review.
A new poll found less than 25% of Britons believe Brexit has been good for the UK, while less than 10% feel it has helped with their personal finances or shored up the National Health Service (as promised by Brexiteers.)
Politico has a run-down of all the major international elections scheduled for 2024.
Vincent’s Picks: The Holdovers
By now, most of us have put the end-of-year holidays behind us, but the residue of the season—pine needles, rolls of wrapping paper, a stray ornament—remain. Therefore, before we get too far into the new year, it’s imperative to catch Alexander Payne’s new film The Holdovers, a movie currently streaming on Peacock that’s getting a lot of Oscar buzz and that some are calling a new Christmas classic.
The Holdovers, set at the end of 1970, stars Paul Giamatti (Billions) as Paul Hunham, a stern and irritable ancient history teacher employed by his alma mater Barton Academy, an all-boys boarding school in New England. Hunham, who is disliked by students and staff alike, ends up overseeing the small group of students unable to travel home for the holidays. One of those boys is junior Angus Tully, played by Dominic Sessa in his first film role. (Sessa earned the part after filmmakers auditioned students at Massachusetts’ Deerfield Academy, where the movie was filmed.) Angus is a smart student with a rebellious streak whose next screw-up will land him in a military academy; he’s stuck on campus over winter break after his mother cancels their holiday trip to the Caribbean so she can honeymoon with her new husband. When the father of one of the students swoops in to take the boys on a holiday ski trip, Angus can’t get permission from his out-of-touch mother to attend, so he ends up left behind with Hunham. They’re joined by Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph, from Only Murders In the Building) the head cook at Barton, whose son, a Barton alum, was recently killed in Vietnam.
Hunham, Angus, and Mary are three wounded souls. It’s easy to apprehend the reason for Mary’s grief. There are layers to Angus’s rebelliousness and cynicism; peel them back and viewers will find a hurt but sensitive boy. The film spends its running time digging into the sources of Hunham’s personal pain. Yet the characters are not consumed by anger or bitterness. Instead, they’re coping with the feeling of being stranded, of having their modest dreams dashed and their lives knocked so off course (“heldover” in an unending winter break, one might say) that all they feel they can do is wait their lives out. The film’s 1970 setting—symbolizing the shift from the optimism and vitality of the 1960s to a more disappointing time—reinforces the point. Just notice how many pictures of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the martyrs of a more hopeful American era, hang in the backgrounds of shots.
As is evident whenever Hunham mentions his atheism, Mary finds her strength in her faith. (The film’s biggest flaw is that it sidelines Mary’s character. Randolph is a favorite to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, which she would definitely earn with the way she draws us into Mary’s aching heart, but the role is so rich and moving that the script should have given Randolph way more screen time.) Angus is still young enough to intuit he deserves better than what the world is throwing at him, which is why he is so defiant. That sets up a contrast with Hunham, whose irascible nature conceals a stoic demeanor. (For Christmas, he gives Mary and Angus copies of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.) The world hasn’t treated Hunham well and people easily disappoint him, but he is a man of integrity, honor, and self-discipline. In a broken and often cruel world, he is determined to maintain his inner goodness.
Hunham suspects the world would be a better place if others were as devoted to cultivating their own personal virtue as he is. That’s why he has such a low view of his students, whom he refers to, among other things, as “vagabonds” for not living up to his academic expectations. But he also has a reserve of compassion for those who have been disadvantaged by the circumstances of their lives, as evidenced when he chastises a student for mocking Mary and sympathizes with a Vietnam veteran who has lost his hand. (Giamatti is careful not to turn Hunham into a one-dimensional grump.) By spending the winter break with Angus, Hunham begins to learn many of those he considers “vagabonds” are carrying more pain than they can cope with and also deserving of his sympathy. A stoic may believe we do not need to be happy to lead good lives, but by the end of The Holdovers, Hunham realizes happiness is good for the soul as well, his included.
The Holdovers marks Payne’s return to the directing chair after a six-year layoff following the critically-maligned Downsizing. It also reunites him with Giamatti, whom he last directed in the outstanding 2004 film Sideways. Payne’s filmography, which includes Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002), The Descendants (2011), and Nebraska (2013) is one of the most distinguished of the modern era, and The Holdovers earns its place alongside those works. With its dim lighting, muted imagery, and lingering transitions, the movie is also a love letter to the bygone New Hollywood era of filmmaking from the 1970s. Payne even pays tribute to his inspirations by sending Hunham and Angus to a screening of Little Big Man by Arthur Penn, whose Bonnie and Clyde ushered in that era of American filmmaking in 1967.
There’s no mistaking The Holdovers for an upbeat Christmas film, but it isn’t a sad one, either. It’s more bittersweet and melancholic, as often heart-aching as it is heartwarming. Funny at times, too. The movie begins with a boys choir singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, a song that captures in its lyric about the “hopes and fears of all the years” the mixed feelings so many experience around the holidays. The Holdovers understands that feeling well. Watch it before the spirit of the season fades.
Exit Music: “Take Me Home” by Phil Collins (1985, No Jacket Required)
And yes, xenophobia is at the root of this. You can tell when the ex-president the Republican Party appears ready to re-nominate for president for a third consecutive election echoes Adolf Hitler by claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of immigrants. Or when Republican politicians keep insisting immigrants are taking jobs from native-born Americans (even though there are currently 5.5 million unemployed Americans and 8.5 million job openings in the United States) and inherently criminal (even though the crime rate would actually increase if every migrant in the United States was deported.)