The case for Biden

Lessig
4 min readJul 12, 2024

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Joe Biden insists it must be him. And he has an argument that may not persuade you he will win, but that should persuade you that he’s likely better than any other Democrat if he did.

Because infuriatingly unmentioned by most accounts of this presidency is a pretty important and astonishing fact: Joe Biden has managed to pass more major bi-partisan legislation of consequence than any President since LBJ.

The American Rescue Plan Act (2021)

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021)

The CHIPS and Science Act (2022)

The Inflation Reduction Act (2022)

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (2022)

The PACT Act (2022)

The Respect for Marriage Act (2022)

The SECURE 2.0 Act (2022);

The Electoral Count Reform Act (2022)

(and, but for Trump, immigration reform as well)

No doubt, not just Biden: Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were extraordinary Democratic leaders as well. But the three together do make the best argument for aging leadership: They get sh*t done. Of course, when the House passed to the Republicans, progress stopped. And, of course, Biden did fail — I’m told this really was his failure: Manchin and Sinema blocked it, but a fumbled deal would have removed that block—to negotiate the passage of the For the People Act/Freedom to Vote Act. But there is no way to look at this series of victories, each critically bi-partisan, and not believe that but for the experience of a multi-decade career in the United States Senate, not much of this would have happened.

This is similar to the story of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. LBJ was furiously frustrated that the Kennedys did not use him to engineer the passage of those two bills while Kennedy was alive. The contempt of some and the scorn of most others in the Administration led Kennedy to try to push these reforms on his own. But Kennedy had no comparable experience to Johnson in the Senate. And by the time he was murdered, most thought the prospects of major civil rights legislation were dim. Johnson, as President, turned that around, using the skills that six years as majority leader had taught him. He, too, could get sh*t done.

Though there are many great Biden alternatives, really none have this kind of experience. State governors—Whitmer, Newsom, Shapiro, Pritzker—have experience in their own legislatures, but that doesn’t automatically translate to Congress (Reagan did it well; Carter, not so much). Booker and Klobuchar come from the Senate, as did Harris, but none had the experience of Biden. Mayor Pete was, well, a mayor.

Of course, in both Johnson’s and Biden’s cases, a functioning Congress was necessary to getting sh*t done. Johnson did lots under Eisenhower, and he would never bring a bill to the Senate floor unless it had bi-partisan support. But the parties today are very different, and the ability to get anything done today depends upon one party having a functional majority in both Houses. The collapse of support around Biden leads many now to predict that the GOP will have the majority in both Houses. And indeed, the great terror of this election is that if Biden’s support continues to collapse, and we lose both houses and the presidency, 60 years of progress could be lost in the next two.

But Biden may well be right that only he and his party can do all the things they believe must be done. Yet that is true only if he wins, and wins with a substantial majority in Congress behind him.

His record is thus a great reason to want him to have a second term. But his record rendered in the way that modern American media renders it — meaning, his actual record, left essentially invisible—is not a great reason to expect that he would win.

I do think an alternative to Biden could win in a landslide. And I do believe that a landslide could build a Congress that would pass critical legislation, even without a Senate whisperer.

But it is infuriating to live in an age when the public is so easily gaslit — aided by a press unwilling to say, “Actually, Senator …” That fact, more than even getting old, must make being Joe Biden extremely difficult. You could almost hear it in his voice last night — “What more,” in essence, he kept saying, “could you possibly want?”

Indeed. Still, so many do want more. Even here, however, he gave us hope. To Stephanopoulos, he said he’d only listen to the “Lord Almighty.” To the last reporter last night, he said he’d listen to his staff if they told him there was no way he could win.

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