The Joe Biden vs Chris Coons approach to the failure of bipartisanship
Both Biden and Coons think that there is some special potency to their brand of bipartisanship, but there are differences in how both men explain away the ongoing ineffectiveness of bipartisanship.
For both of them, bipartisanship is a magic key that will unlock every door and solve every problem, but when bipartisanship inevitably fails as it always does in the age of Rove/Bush/Trump/McConnell, Coons typically believes that the pursuit of bipartisanship by Democrats wasn’t obsequious enough. Coons views the failure of bipartisanship as a failure of Democrats to compromise sufficiently.
Biden, on the other hand, simply misremembers the past and lives in a fantasy world in which bipartisanship always works in spite of 30 years of evidence to the contrary.
Matt Viser
✔
@mviser
Joe Biden remarks that he called about a dozen Senate Republicans to encourage them to vote on Merrick Garland. Then he says with Trump gone, Republicans will again find political courage.Left unsaid: Republicans stalled on Garland before Trump was nominated, or elected.
Related: In a short 255 word News Journal Op ed on gun control, Coons invokes the magic of bipartisanship four times.
From his standard posture of weakness, he coweringly appeals to Pat Toomey and takes Mitch McConnell at his word that he is “ready to find a way to transform these common-sense, bipartisan bills”. blah blah blah.
It is going to work this time. Just compromise harder, everyone!
In Delaware, bipartisanship means protecting Delaware’s business priorities. Incorporation, Chancery, Chamber, usurious interest rates, escheat, massive incentives to businesses, add your own outrage.
That’s the context which informs our entire congressional delegation past and present, and every bleeping governor we’ve ever had.
Biden and Coons can’t acknowledge that the Delaware Way is not transferable to the Federal government as it’s currently constituted.
I agree that being bipartisan just for the optics is a wasted endeavor, but in todays’ reality where neither political party can afford the other any success at all, it’s the only way wholly accepted appropriations and legislation can get done.
This is the most intelligent comment you’ve ever left here. Thank you.
Of course our system requires deliberation and negotiation. The trouble with Coons is his servile approach – always wanting to negotiate from a postion of weakness.
Now, if you look at the big picture (protecting Delaware’s business priorities. Incorporation, Chancery, Chamber, usurious interest rates, escheat) it makes perfect sense because it gets the outcomes Coons is going for anyway. So let’s not pretend that Coons style bipartisanship is based on some wholesome sense of democratic process.
Bipartisanship is also a divisive ideology. Radical corporatism.
What they all said⤴️
Also, for the record, Coons supports Israeli apartheid.
You can pull a story like this nearly everyday. So here’s one from today!
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20191112-israel-demolishes-4-palestinian-homes-east-of-jerusalem/amp/
I have a strong sense we’ll be talking a lot more about these issues very soon. The most pressing of which is that there is a very good chance we paid for the equipment that demolished those homes.
Serwer agrees
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/adam-serwer-civility/600784/
Joe biden has fond memories of negotiating with James Eastland, the senator from Mississippi who once declared, “I am of the opinion that we should have segregation in all the States of the United States by law. What the people of this country must realize is that the white race is a superior race, and the Negro race is an inferior race.” Recalling in June his debates with segregationists like Eastland, Biden lamented, “At least there was some civility,” compared with today. “We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition; the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”……..Trump himself, a man whose rallies regularly descend into ritual denunciations of his enemies, declared in October 2018, as Americans were preparing to vote in the midterm elections, that “everyone will benefit if we can end the politics of personal destruction.” The president helpfully explained exactly what he meant: “Constant unfair coverage, deep hostility, and negative attacks … only serve to drive people apart and to undermine healthy debate.” Civility, in other words, is treating Trump how Trump wants to be treated, while he treats you however he pleases. It was a more honest description of how the concept of civility is applied today than either Biden or Gorsuch offered.
………..The true cause of American political discord is the lingering resistance of those who have traditionally held power to sharing it with those who until recently have only experienced its serrated edge. And the resistance does linger. Just this fall, a current Democratic senator from Delaware, Chris Coons, told a panel at the University of Notre Dame Law School that he hoped “a more diverse Senate that includes women’s voices, and voices of people of color, and voices of people who were not professionals but, you know, who grew up working-class” would not produce “irreconcilable discord.” In his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. famously lamented the “white moderate” who “prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” He also acknowledged the importance of tension to achieving justice. “I have earnestly opposed violent tension,” King wrote, “but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.” Americans should not fear that form of tension. They should fear its absence.
Of course you realize Eastland was a Democrat.
Yeah, we’re all idiots here. He was one of those Dixiecrats who opposed the Civil Right Act and the Voting Rights Act with every fiber of his being.
As LBJ said, passage of those bills guaranteed that the Democratic Party would be dead in the south for decades. Hence, the exodus of several senators to the Rethuglican Party where they could push their racist views with impunity.
Again, up your game or take it elsewhere. Last warning.
You’re wrong. Only one Senator changed parties. Strom Thurmond. The Democrats were the party of segregation. Remember Al Gore, Sr and his ilk?
Wrong. Harry Byrd flipped from D to Independent, and did not caucus with the D’s. Later, Richard Shelby flipped from D to R.
And just take a look at the representatives who have switched from D to R, almost entirely from the south, while serving in Congress:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Representatives_who_switched_parties
Don’t forget Robert Byrd and the sheets flapping in the breeze on the way to a lynching.