The very consequential presidency of Joe Biden
The very
consequential
presidency of
Joe Biden
WRITTEN BY DR RICHARD JOHNSON
9 March 2023
US President Joe Biden entered the presidency with Rooseveltian ambitions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, is widely regarded as one of the most consequential presidents in US history. He is a hero to Joe Biden. Biden, who is the only US president to have been born during Roosevelt’s 12-year tenure (1933-45), chose to hang a large portrait of Franklin Roosevelt in the centre frame of the Oval Office.
The question is, could Biden come close to matching the achievements of his hero? Biden has reached closer to FDR’s domestic policy legacy than any of his recent predecessors, especially in stimulative public spending. Nonetheless, Biden’s achievements have been constrained by institutional and political factors, which will become even more acute in the second half of his first term in the White House. Like Roosevelt, Biden entered the presidency in a time of crisis. Roosevelt was facing an economic collapse caused by a banking failure and exacerbated by climate disaster. Biden entered as the United States was still engulfed by the COVID-19 pandemic and its serious economic fallout, as well as the political crisis concocted by his predecessor Donald Trump. Like Roosevelt, Biden believed bold, proactive government action was necessary to address the crises and provide security for ordinary Americans.
Biden’s fiscal triumphs
Biden acted swiftly. On the 50th day of his presidency, he signed the American Rescue Plan Act, a COVID stimulus bill which contained nearly USD 2 trillion in federal spending. In a key difference from Roosevelt, Biden could only rely on the narrowest of Democratic Party majorities in both chambers of Congress. The COVID stimulus package passed the Senate by just one vote.
The legislation contained dozens of provisions that stretched the American welfare state far beyond its usual boundaries, providing all Americans with cash payments and higher levels of unemployment, disability, and child benefits. The package contained a wide range of business grants and funding for state and local government, healthcare, public transport infrastructure, and digital security projects.
Whatever happens in the remaining two years of the first Biden term, the octogenarian president can already feel confident that he has left a major legacy and will be recorded as a very consequential president.
Although far-reaching, most of these programmes were temporary. More lasting investment came via the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, passed in November 2021, and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022. The former was a package of USD 1.2 trillion (USD 550 billion being newly authorised) in spending for public infrastructure projects across the United States. The Inflation Reduction Act contained about USD 500 billion in spending on climate-related projects, as well as on provisions to strengthen the Affordable Care Act and reduce the cost of prescription medication.
Together, the three bills represented a level of public investment in the American social realm not seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. The total spend of the New Deal was about USD 800 billion in current US dollars. This number is smaller than the USD 2 trillion of new spending that Biden authorised through these bills, but of course the US economy was much smaller eighty years ago. Therefore, as a share of the US economy, Biden’s plans amount to about half of FDR’s spending.
Nonetheless, securing trillions of dollars of public investment is no mean feat, and it places him far ahead of any of his recent predecessors. With the American Rescue Plan Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act alone, Joe Biden can comfortably consider himself one of the most legislatively consequential presidents of recent times. The spending which he has secured will provide a desperately needed boost and will help to restore, the public realm in the United States, which has been embarrassingly underfunded for many years.
Surprising bipartisan victories
Passing huge spending bills, though no mean feat, is one of the easier ways of securing a legislative victory in Congress. This is because while most bills are subjected to the Senate’s arcane and destructive 60-vote cloture rule to end a filibuster, some spending bills can be passed by a simple majority vote using a process known as budget reconciliation. In an age of growing polarisation, reconciliation has been used to help presidents secure some major policy achievements that would otherwise need the support of 60 senators. George W Bush and Donald Trump used reconciliation to pass their signature tax cut bills. Both the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act were passed in this way.
The filibuster has stymied many of Biden’s other legislative priorities. There has been no major legislation addressing policing, immigration, or voting rights. Bills on all of these issues might have been able to find majorities in both the House and the Senate during Biden’s first two years in office, but without the backing of at least ten Republican senators, they would not be able to overcome a filibuster.
In spite of these difficulties, Biden has scored some important bipartisan victories. A month after the appalling massacre of school children in Uvalde (Texas), Biden was able to pass a modest gun control bill. The legislation extends compulsory background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, provides funding for mental health services, and bans people with a domestic violence conviction from buying a gun for five years. While these reforms will not end the scourge of gun-related violence in the US, the legislation was significant in the very fact that it was the first piece of gun control legislation that Congress had passed in three decades.
Biden has also been able to secure congressional legislation confirming the legality of same-sex marriage. The Respect for Marriage Act repealed the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA), a 1996 law which banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage. The DOMA had effectively been overturned by the Supreme Court in the case Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which declared it a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry. However, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that declared it a constitutional right to have an abortion, has caused some campaigners to worry that if Obergefell was overturned, then the old laws banning same-sex marriage would rise from the dead.
Structural and political constraints
Although Biden garnered 61 votes in the Senate, surpassing the filibuster to codify same-sex marriage in statute, his efforts to do the same with abortion rights have been unsuccessful. It will likely take a significant change to the composition of the Supreme Court — possibly a decades’ long process — to overturn Dobbs. Biden’s appointment of one Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was a significant achievement, but it did little to shift the political direction of the court because Justice Jackson replaced fellow liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, for whom Jackson had served as a clerk early in her legal career.
In the 2022 midterm elections, Biden lost control of the House of Representatives, but, to the surprise of many, increased the Democrats’ strength in the Senate (from 50 to 51). The midterms were not the catastrophe many Democrats expected, with Republican candidates underperforming in key races across the country. Nonetheless, the loss of the House likely spells the end of any further substantial legislation, except on rare issues where Biden might be able to muster some Republican support.
Therefore, the final two years of Joe Biden’s first term will become increasingly focused on what the president can achieve through the administrative state. All presidents use executive orders and other forms of executive action to try to achieve their preferred policy objectives. Although presidents cannot unilaterally invent new laws, there is sufficient flexibility within the legal framework for them to shape the law in their preferred direction.
Joe Biden has already used his executive powers in profound ways. He has used it to cancel or reduce the tuition fee debt of millions of former university students. He has granted “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon” to all US citizens convicted of cannabis possession under the Controlled Substances Act of 1971. Biden can be expected to make even greater use of these powers in the years ahead now that he lacks a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.
Within just two years, Joe Biden has passed some of the biggest domestic spending bills in decades and achieved key legislative victories on gun control and LGBT equality. He has used his executive powers to address the mounting problem of university debt and shifted federal policy on drug possession. While many elements of his domestic policy agenda remain unfulfilled, given the severe structural and political constraints facing any US president, these are significant achievements. Whatever happens in the remaining two years of the first Biden term, the octogenarian president can already feel confident that he has left a major legacy and will be recorded as a very consequential president.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr Richard Johnson is Senior Lecturer in US Politics and Policy at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of The End of the Second Reconstruction: Obama, Trump, and the Crisis of Civil Rights (Polity, 2020) and US Foreign Policy: Domestic Roots and International Impact (Bristol University Press, 2021). Image credit: Flickr/The White House.