Biden’s agenda hangs in balance if GOP takes Congress

By New York Times

WASHINGTON – For President Joe Biden, the Dreaming-of-FDR phase of his presidency may end in little more than a week. If Republicans capture one or both houses of Congress in midterm elections, as polling suggests, Biden’s domestic agenda will suddenly transform from a quest for a New Deal 2.0 to trench warfare defending the accomplishments of his first two years in office.

On a wide array of issues like abortion, taxes, race and judges, Biden’s opportunities would invariably shrink as he focuses less on advancing the expansive policy goals that have animated his administration and more on preserving the newly constructed economic and social welfare architecture that Republicans have vowed to dismantle.

While the president and Democratic leaders have not publicly given up on the possibility of hanging onto Congress in the balloting that concludes Nov. 8, privately they are pessimistic and bracing for two years of grinding partisan conflict.

In addition to efforts to block or reverse Biden’s domestic initiatives, Republican control of either house would result in a flurry of subpoenas and investigations of the administration that would define the relationship between the White House and Congress.

Biden’s aspirations to codify abortion rights, expand access to child care and college, address racial discrimination in policing, install more like-minded judges and guarantee voting rights would all become more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

For their part, Republicans aim to roll back Biden’s corporate tax increases, climate change spending, student loan forgiveness and IRS expansion targeting wealthy tax cheats.

Beyond simply reversing the president’s policies, Republicans promise to advance their own initiatives to further cut taxes and spending, ban transgender women from playing in women’s sports, restrict access to abortion, protect gun rights, crack down on immigration, add more police to the streets and promote energy production, much of which would be hard to pass over a Senate filibuster, much less Biden’s veto.

A change of management on Capitol Hill would represent a marked shift for Biden, who spent 36 years as a senator and eight years as vice president mastering the arts of legislative maneuvering. Despite razor-thin margins, he has pushed through a raft of far-reaching bills since taking office last year.

They include a $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus package; a $1 trillion plan to upgrade the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure; a $739 billion package to fight climate change and curb prescription drug prices; and a $250 billion program to boost the semiconductor industry.

A significant number of Republicans supported some of the spending, including for infrastructure and semiconductors, but party leaders have argued that the open checkbook represents the worst of Democratic free-spending proclivities and helped push inflation to its highest rate in 40 years.

In past eras, divided government in Washington has at times led to uncomfortable but meaningful compromises, including major tax and Social Security deals under President Ronald Reagan; landmark deficit reduction, clean air and civil rights legislation under President George H.W. Bush; and welfare overhaul and balanced budget measures under President Bill Clinton. No doubt Biden, who regularly boasts of the bipartisan deals he has forged, would seek areas of common ground.

But today’s political atmosphere is radically more polarized than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, making it harder to imagine a Democratic president and Republican legislature coming together on areas of major disagreement except in a national crisis. The prospects of accord may be even more distant in case of a comeback campaign by former President Donald Trump, who would pressure his party to resist Biden at every turn.

Taxes

Biden imposed new taxes on corporations, including a new minimum tax on large multinationals like Amazon and a tax on stock buybacks, to help fund the climate and health priorities in the Inflation Reduction Act, which he signed this summer. He also increased spending on the IRS, to raise revenues by cracking down on companies and high earners that cheat on their taxes.

Republicans want to repeal all those measures while passing further tax cuts, including extending some of the reductions for businesses and individuals passed in 2017 under Trump that are set to expire over the next few years.

They have promised to reduce federal spending. Some prominent House conservatives want to reduce expenditures on safety net programs like Medicaid and supplemental nutritional assistance, and to reduce future spending on Medicare and Social Security for some beneficiaries, which Biden opposes.

Climate change

To curb global warming, Biden has set an ambitious goal of cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half by 2030.

The measure he signed this summer included $370 billion in incentives for electric utilities to increase their reliance on low-emission energy sources like solar and nuclear, for consumers to buy electric vehicles and for businesses to invest in energy efficiency. His Environmental Protection Agency has moved to limit emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and is preparing more regulations of the energy sector.

Republicans opposed those climate efforts, and are set to mount congressional investigations into many of them. They could also seek to unwind some of the spending from the newly signed climate law and will likely challenge future regulations. They will also push legislation to speed up fossil fuel development by reducing federal regulation of new drilling projects.

Health care

After a decade of elections with health care near the top of voter priorities, the big federal health programs are less central in this election. Republicans are not focused on repealing the Affordable Care Act, sometimes called Obamacare, or making major changes to Medicare and Medicaid in the short term. If Republicans retake majorities, they plan extensive oversight of Biden’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, and much of the spending that accompanied it. They also hope to consider smaller initiatives, such as expanding access to telemedicine in Medicare and improving price transparency in health care, building on Trump administration initiatives that many Democrats also embrace. Without a president who can sign their more conservative-leaning bills or large enough majorities to overcome a veto, Republicans are likely to focus on legislative efforts that at least some Democrats can support.

If Democrats retain control, they are likely to pursue a similar set of less polarized issues. Biden already tried and failed to pass major structural changes to Medicare and Medicaid as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the new law meant in part to bring down prescription drug prices.

Judges

After a record-breaking start at filling vacancies on the federal bench, the Biden administration’s aggressive push to remake the courts would be slowed considerably – if not entirely stalled – by a Republican takeover of the Senate.

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the current and likely future Republican leader, has demonstrated his skill at thwarting judicial nominations. “If it did happen, Senator McConnell has made it pretty clear that he would not be very eager to confirm President Biden’s nominees and would do anything he could to delay filling seats until he could get a different president,” said Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin and head of the American Constitution Society. “He usually follows through on those statements and threats.”

To date, the Senate has confirmed 84 judges nominated by Biden, including a Supreme Court justice, 25 appeals court judges and 58 district court judges – the most in decades in the first two years of a president’s term. The White House has advanced a diverse set of candidates, focusing on underrepresented ethnicities as well as those with less typical professional backgrounds like public defenders and civil rights lawyers.

Even if Republicans make package deals to advance judicial nominees as has been done in the past, nominees who are considered more progressive would encounter extreme difficulties in a Republican-controlled Senate. Bracing for a slowdown, Feingold’s organization is urging Senate Democrats to confirm at least 30 more judges before the newly elected Congress takes office.

Abortion

Biden has promised to enshrine into law the national abortion protections that were repealed when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade if voters increase the Democratic margin in the Senate. “The only way it’s going to happen is if the American people make it happen,” he has said in his appeals to the public.

Republicans, who once saw abortion restrictions as a galvanizing issue within the party, are now in open disagreement about how far those should go. Strict or near-total bans on abortions have become unpopular with Republican voters.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is pushing for a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, but his proposal is unpopular even with senior Republicans, including McConnell, who consider it politically risky and a contradiction to the let-the-states-decide position the party had long articulated. Biden would certainly veto any stand-alone bill with such a limit even if it did land on his desk.

– Katie Rogers

Student loans

Biden’s order canceling up to $20,000 of student loan debt for as many as 40 million borrowers has already been targeted in a lawsuit filed by six Republican-led states, which claim the president overstepped his executive authority in issuing the policy on his own.

A Republican-controlled Congress could try to halt the policy by including language in a potential spending package declaring that Biden lacks authority to move forward with the debt relief. But Mike Pierce, the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, said other parts of Biden’s student loan agenda are at greater risk, including a plan to reduce payments on undergraduate loans to 5% of discretionary income, down from 10% to 15% in many existing plans.

Implementing the new system would draw money from an appropriated budget that could be targeted by congressional Republicans. “There’s money that goes to the Education Department to administer the student loan programs, and you can see that budget being a part of negotiations with Republicans,” Pierce said.

– Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Race

Biden has worked to put racial equity at the center of his agenda, ensuring that billions of dollars in government spending are focused on minorities and poor women. Some efforts, including a plan to forgive the debts of Black and other minority farmers, have run into lawsuits filed by white farmers who questioned whether the government could offer debt relief based on race. Republican lawmakers have echoed the criticism. The president directed federal agencies to ensure that 40% of investments for clean energy, transit, housing and workforce development reach disadvantaged or marginalized communities.

Republican lawmakers have signaled that they would try to stall the equity agenda through congressional investigations. The policies are also likely to be the focus of legislative battles and political attacks against the administration. Top Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee sent a letter to the administration last month accusing Biden of misusing his authority “in a broad, crosscutting fashion” by requiring that a portion of federal funding go to minority communities.

Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee launched an investigation this month into a Treasury Department committee tasked with reviewing aspects of the economy that have harmed communities of color. The lawmakers said the council “would distract it from its core responsibilities, which include ensuring a level playing field for all Americans.”

– Zolan Kanno-Youngs

IRS

The Biden administration is in the midst of an $80 billion bulk-up of the IRS, the tax collection agency that Republicans love to hate.

Although the overhaul of the IRS is in its early stages, the Treasury Department, which oversees the agency, has set ambitious goals for improving customer service and responsiveness to taxpayers. It has been trying to ramp up hiring and clear a backlog of millions of unprocessed tax returns.

For years, Republicans have made it their mission to neuter the IRS. They are expected to use any leverage that they gain in the elections to scale back the agency’s funding.

They have suggested that the 87,000 new hires that the IRS plans to make will become a “shadow army” intended to target conservatives, and with Republicans controlling oversight committees, there will be an intense spotlight on how the money is being spent. If Republicans retake the Senate, they will also have an opportunity to block Biden’s eventual nominee to be the next IRS commissioner. (Treasury recently announced that the deputy commissioner would become acting commissioner in November.)

Entitlements

Eager to find an issue that will resonate with voters, Biden has revived a traditional Democratic campaign attack, arguing that keeping his party in power would protect Social Security and Medicare from Republican cutbacks. In a speech at the White House last month, the president warned that Republicans will put the social safety net programs on the “chopping block” if they take power.

Any efforts from Republicans to enact changes to the entitlement programs over the next two years would be subject to Biden’s veto power.

The long-term solvency of the programs is in doubt as the trust funds that support them are facing shortfalls in the next two decades.

Republicans have not outlined a unified plan for how to deal with entitlements lately, but some have called for restructuring them or scaling them back. This, they say, would preserve them for the future. The most prominent proposal has come from Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and it would allow Social Security and Medicare to “sunset” if Congress did not pass new legislation to extend them. McConnell has disavowed aspects of Scott’s agenda.

Consumer protection

With legislative options limited, Biden has been looking to executive branch agencies to help ease the pain that Americans are feeling from inflation. On Thursday, he touted a move by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to crack down on so-called junk fees that banks charge to consumers for overdrafting their accounts or depositing checks that bounce.

Joined by Rohit Chopra, the director of the bureau, Biden said that the agency would be going after a wide range of unnecessary costs that are imposed on Americans by banks.

But if Republicans have their way, the agency could see its powers dramatically diminished. A federal appeals court ruling this month said that the bureau’s funding that comes through the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional, calling into question its power to regulate the finance industry.

The lawsuit could take years to play out, but House Republicans have already said that they want to bring the independent agency under the congressional appropriations process. The Trump administration tried to zero out the bureau’s budget, so Republican control could eventually mean that it lacks the resources to be a rigorous regulator.