Arab News
The modern American presidency, like water, always runs along the path of least resistance. Once a president’s window to enact domestic legislation closes — as it invariably does at some point in his first term — he then shifts course, setting his sights on foreign policy. Constitutionally, this amounts to far more fertile ground, as America’s founding document gives the executive branch a great deal more power to conduct foreign policy than it does domestic policy.
Historically, this process has happened even to presidents with significant domestic achievements to their name. For all the brilliant overall luster of his presidency, it was during Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office that the lion’s share of the “New Deal” programs to combat the Great Depression were enacted. Likewise, following his landslide victory in 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s seismic civil rights legislation (and the formulation of his “Great Society” domestic programs) came early on in his term. The same holds true on the right. Ronald Reagan’s landmark tax cuts came shortly after his victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, but before the midterms of 1982. More recently, Barack Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, “Obamacare,” came about after his famous electoral win in 2008 and was the first and last major piece of domestic legislation he got over the line. So, in this larger historical sense, what is presently happening to Joe Biden comfortably fits into the overall historical narrative of the modern American presidency. Presidents achieve their domestic legislative successes early and then — once that political avenue has been halted — like water, move along the path of least resistance to focus on foreign affairs. Nevertheless, the speed of Biden’s domestic legislative decline is as striking as it is unusual. Following his electoral victory in 2020, Biden rode a year-long wave of domestic political success, enacting both the trillion-dollar COVID-19 emergency legislation and his bipartisan infrastructure plans. However, the even more expensive progressive wish-list bill, the Build Back Better plan, fell afoul of two immovable objects: Ideological tensions within the Democratic Party and a dramatic change in circumstances due to the stratospheric rise in inflation. Since the Democrats swept to power in both houses of Congress and the White House in 2020, there has been an endemic structural tension between Biden’s maximalist domestic agenda (as he adopted much of the progressive left of the party’s desire for dangerously high rates of spending) and his scant majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The upper chamber, split in half at 50-50 (with Vice President Kamala Harris there to break ties), left Biden entirely at the mercy of any single Democratic senator who was uncomfortable with the political direction the White House was moving in. As Biden tacked ever to the left, moderate Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia (and, to a significant but lesser extent, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona) balked at the cost as well as the scope of Biden’s domestic agenda. Late last year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office made plain that, shorn of its accounting trickeries, the actual 10-year cost of the BBB plan would amount to $5 trillion, much higher than had been advertised. It was then that Manchin openly revolted, adamantly refusing to go along with such excessive spending.
