Unlike Trump, Mitch McConnell didn’t want to overthrow the government; he just wanted to prove that it doesn’t work. During the Obama years, he accomplished this by either engineering or exploiting a series of crises, mostly involving shutting down the government or refusing to lift the debt ceiling. It has to be assumed that he plans to do the same thing to Biden; after all, it succeeded last time. How can he be resisted?
By doing the following:
- Use reconciliation to expand the safety net on a relatively universal basis in order to establish that government can, in fact, help average Americans;
- Try to avoid raising the temperature on the culture wars;
- Make it clear that the political environment is different today than it was in 2010, and that creating unnecessary crises consequently carries with it a whole different set of risks than it did before; and
- Don’t back down from any unprovoked GOP aggression, particularly on the debt ceiling. It only makes things worse in the long run.