Good morning. Congress is known for being dysfunctional. Why hasn't it been over the past two years? |
 | | Congress has been productive.Tom Brenner for The New York Times |
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Describing Congress as dysfunctional seems unobjectionable, even clichéd. I've done it myself this summer. Yet as the current session enters its final months, the description feels off. The 117th Congress has been strikingly functional. |
On a bipartisan basis, it has passed bills to build roads and other infrastructure; tighten gun safety; expand health care for veterans; protect victims of sexual misconduct; overhaul the Postal Service; support Ukraine's war effort; and respond to China's growing aggressiveness. |
Just as important, the majority party (the Democrats) didn't give a complete veto to the minority party. On a few major issues, Democrats decided that taking action was too important. They passed the most significant response to climate change in the country's history. They also increased access to medical care for middle- and lower-income Americans and enacted programs that softened the blow from the pandemic. |
Congress still has plenty of problems. It remains polarized on many issues. It has not figured out how to respond to the growing threats to American democracy. The House suffers from gerrymandering, and the Senate has a growing bias against residents of large states, who are disproportionately Black, Latino, Asian and young. The Senate can also struggle at the basic function of approving presidential nominees. |
The current Congress has also passed at least one law that seems clearly flawed in retrospect: It appears to have spent too much money on pandemic stimulus last year, exacerbating inflation. |
As regular readers know, though, this newsletter tries to avoid bad-news bias and cover both accomplishments and failures. Today, I want to focus on how Congress — a reliably unpopular institution — has managed to be more productive than almost anybody expected. |
I'll focus on four groups: Democratic congressional leaders; Republican lawmakers; progressive Democrats; and President Biden and his aides. |
Earlier this year, Chuck Schumer — the Democratic leader in the Senate — seemed to have lost control of his caucus. He devoted Senate time to a doomed voting-rights bill, while his talks with party centrists over Biden's economic agenda looked dead. |
Critics believed that Schumer, fearing a primary challenge for his own seat in New York, was making pointless symbolic gestures to the left. And Schumer did seem strangely anxious about his left flank. |
But he also continued to negotiate quietly with the crucial Democratic Senate centrist, Joe Manchin, while urging Senate progressives to accept the deal on health care and climate policy that he and Manchin were making. |
His performance was impressive, especially because Schumer could not afford to lose a single Democratic vote in the Senate, and evoked the successes of his predecessor as Senate leader, Harry Reid. It also resembled the skillful management of the House Democratic caucus by Nancy Pelosi over the past 20 years. She also runs a diverse caucus that holds a narrow majority. |
2. Congressional Republicans |
In recent decades, congressional Republicans have almost uniformly opposed policies to address some of the country's biggest problems, including climate change and economic inequality. That opposition has continued in the current Congress. |
But Republicans have not reflexively opposed all legislation in this Congress — as they tended to do during Barack Obama's presidency, Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg Opinion points out. In the current session, some Republicans worked hard to help write bipartisan legislation on other issues. |
Below is a list of Senate Republicans who voted for at least three of five major bills (on infrastructure, China policy, gun safety, veterans' health care and the Postal Service). Note the presence of Mitch McConnell, the Republicans' Senate leader: |
 | | Eleven voted for two bipartisan bills, and 13 voted for one. | The New York Times |
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Only five Republican senators did not vote for any of those bills: James Lankford of Oklahoma, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Richard Shelby and Tommy Tuberville, both of Alabama. |
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party can sometimes seem self-defeating these days, focused on internal purity rather than policy changes. (Ryan Grim wrote a remarkable article in The Intercept in June about the meltdowns at some liberal groups.) |
But progressive members of Congress have been strikingly practical this year. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and most House progressives understood that keeping Manchin on board offered the only hope of ambitious climate legislation. They refused to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. |
As a result, the current Congress will end up being one of the most progressive of the past century. Its successes don't measure up to the New Deal, the Great Society and maybe not Obama's first two years (with legislation on health care, climate and economic rescue). Yet the current session can compete with any other one. |
That's true partly because most Democratic presidents in the 20th century failed to pass their biggest domestic priorities. Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman all fall into this category. |
Their disappointments helped spawn jokes about Democratic disarray. "I don't belong to an organized political party," the humorist Will Rogers once said. "I'm a Democrat." |
Those jokes now seem outdated. Biden is the second straight Democratic president to shepherd a big agenda through Congress. During the first of those two presidencies, of course, Biden was the vice president, and he helped manage congressional relations. |
 | | Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and President Biden in Washington in February.Oliver Contreras for The New York Times |
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What's Biden strategy? He and his top aides rarely take opposition personally. They don't get too down when things look bad. They trust and respect their party's congressional leaders. They keep talking — and talking — with members of Congress and looking for areas of compromise. |
For his efforts, Biden has been able to sign a string of major bills in recent months. The signing ceremony for the climate bill is scheduled for today. |
 | | Rudy Giuliani is scheduled to appear before a special grand jury tomorrow.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times |
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 | | Supporters of William Ruto in Kenya yesterday.Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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The Republican Party has turned strongly anti-environmental, Paul Krugman writes. But why? |
Journalism like this is only possible with subscribers. |
Lives Lived: Nicholas Evans's "The Horse Whisperer," a 1995 novel that became a film, broke publishing records along with readers' hearts. He died at 72. |
| SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC |
Mark your calendars: N.B.A. opening night is set for Oct. 18. The Boston Celtics will host the Philadelphia 76ers in the first game of a doubleheader, The Athletic's Shams Charania reports, and the Golden State Warriors will receive their championship rings ahead of a matchup with the Los Angeles Lakers. |
Same as it ever was: The programs in the A.P. college football preseason poll won't shock you. Alabama is ranked No. 1 for the ninth time, Ohio State is No. 2 and Georgia, the defending champion, is No. 3. Some voters didn't know what to do with No. 14 U.S.C., though. |
Is Manchester United already too far gone? After an embarrassing loss Saturday, the club appears divided by dynamics that could give you chilling flashbacks to high school (even Cristiano Ronaldo eats alone, sometimes). They're last place in the Premier League table with no clear path to the top. |
 | | "The Satanic Verses" being burned in Britain in 1988.Derek Hudson/Getty Images |
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Salman Rushdie had wondered in recent years whether the public was losing its appetite for free speech, a principle on which he staked his life when Iran sought to have him killed for his 1988 novel, "The Satanic Verses." As Rushdie told The Guardian last year, "The kinds of people who stood up for me in the bad years might not do so now." |
After Rushdie was stabbed onstage Friday, the initial denunciation gave way to a renewal of the debate over free speech, Jennifer Schuessler writes in The Times. Some of Rushdie's supporters lamented growing acceptance, on parts of the political right and left, of the notion that speech that offends is grounds for censorship. |
 | | Joe Lingeman for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Cyd Raftus McDowell. |
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The pangrams from yesterday's Spelling Bee were javelin and javelina. Here is today's puzzle. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
P.S. The Times's Pam Belluck won the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting for her Covid coverage. |
Matthew Cullen, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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