In 100 Days Joe Biden has Transformed America ...
... but without the help of 54,945 voters in Georgia it never would have happened.
Later this week, President Joe Biden will mark his 100th day in office and a presidency already defined by a historic set of policy accomplishments.
None of this would have been possible if not for 54,945 voters in the state of Georgia.
That number is the margin of victory for Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff over his Republican opponent, David Perdue, in Georgia's January 3 Senate runoff (Senator Raphael Warnock also won his runoff by a slightly larger margin than Ossoff). If just 27,473 voters (less than one percent of the more than 4.4 million votes cast) had switched their votes from Ossoff to Perdue, much of what Biden has accomplished - and is still seeking to do - would never have happened. The margin was even narrower the first time Ossoff and Perdue faced off in November 2020. Then Perdue got 49.7 percent of the vote and beat Ossoff by 1.8 points. If he had received just 13,470 more votes, or 11.7 percent of the 115,039 votes that went to the Libertarian candidate, Shane Hazel, Perdue would have stayed Georgia's senior senator.
With Perdue winning reelection, Republicans would have maintained control of the US Senate. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell would have remained Majority Leader. With that narrow majority, Republicans could have dismembered Biden's legislative agenda piece by piece. Those $1,400 checks - not so much. An expanded child tax credit that could potentially cut child poverty in half - maybe another time. Billions for state budgets, schools and universities, extended unemployment benefits, and vaccine distribution - let's cut a few zeroes off those numbers.
Back in February, Senate Republicans countered Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-relief package with a plan to spend a fraction of much - approximately $600 billion. That was a proposal from 10 of the less conservative members of the Senate GOP caucus. There's no guarantee even that proposal would have been brought to the Senate floor for a vote. The American Rescue Plan is one of the biggest and, arguably, most progressive spending bills ever enacted by Congress. It passed with 50 votes in the Senate and simply would not have happened without those Democratic wins in Georgia.
What about Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure bill to rebuild highways and bridges, invest in broadband, improve the electrical grid, invest in manufacturing, retrofit homes, and help make the US economy more resilient in the face of climate change? It likely would have been significantly pared down, and Biden's proposal for higher taxes on wealthy Americans to pay for it would have gone nowhere.
How about Biden's $1.8 trillion "American Families Plan" that aims to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on child care, universal pre-k, free community college, and ensure that America is no longer the only developed country not to offer its citizens paid family leave? That, too, would be dead on arrival. Right now, Democrats in Congress are pushing the White House to include in the legislation a plan to allow the government to negotiate prescription drug prices and debating whether to use the money to shore up Obamacare or expand Medicare. Without the Georgia senate victories, this would merely be an esoteric debate.
Indeed, more than $4 trillion in wildly popular proposed spending to remake the American economy, prepare the country for global warming, create millions of jobs, and transform the country in a more progressive image would have been dismissed out of hand by the Republican-controlled Senate. It likely would never have gotten a vote.
What about Biden's diverse and progressive Cabinet? Without a Democratic majority, it would likely look a lot whiter and a lot more moderate. As for the president's recent spate of judicial nominees - maybe the GOP-controlled Senate would get to it, and maybe it wouldn't.
This does not take away from the ambition of Biden's proposals or what he's done without Congress. The effectiveness of the administration's vaccine distribution efforts and the executive orders that have reversed some of President Trump's most onerous policies are significant accomplishments. But Congress and the making of actual laws is where the real action will always be. Biden has used the narrowest of congressional majorities to push a legislative agenda that is rivaled only by the New Deal and the Great Society. It's extraordinary and humbling to consider how close it came to not happening.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a book about the 1968 presidential election, in which I argued that the outcome of that crucial vote reflected the nation's turbulent political, social, cultural, and racial forces. Republican nominee Richard Nixon used the white backlash to the civil rights and anti-war movements - and frustration with the country's direction - to defeat Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey. His victory would move the country increasingly rightward and help the GOP hold on to the presidency for 20 of the next 24 years. But, if a mere 42,000 voters in New Jersey, Missouri, and Alaska had chosen Humphrey rather than Nixon, the election would likely have gone to the House of Representatives, and Humphrey would have become president. If that had happened, we'd be living in a very different country today. In retrospect, it's possible to pinpoint decisions made by Humphrey - like waiting until the Fall to call for a change of US policy in Vietnam - and external events, such as Robert Kennedy's assassination, that had they gone differently could have led to a Democratic win on Election Day. Even in that seminal year, personality and contingency loomed large.
In 2021, that Democrats won two Georgia Senate seats is consistent with the fact that the state is increasingly trending blue. After all, Joe Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win there in more than two decades. But what if Stacey Abrams and other voting rights organizers hadn't put together a phenomenal registration and get out the vote operation? What if President Trump hadn't bad-mouthed Georgia Republican officials and raised the issue of $1,400 stimulus checks that gave a boost to Ossoff and Warnock's campaigns? What if the GOP senate candidates were better or more popular?
The answer is we'd be living in a very different country today.
What, exactly, is the transformation? Only one of those bills has been passed and the others won't pass without significant paring down. Besides its makeup, what exactly has the cabinet done for life in America so far? Or judges? Not having Trump around has significantly quelled certain social media obsessions, sure. I'm happy to see a transformation, but this claim seems a bit premature
so what happens in the midterms?