M3: Joining us on the program today is Bill Share,
who many in the audience love to hate and some hate to love, they would say, contributor to the
Washington Monthly political magazine Real Clear Politics and also host of the history podcast,
When America Worked. Bill. Always good to have you. Great to talk to you as well. So let's
start maybe with something that will shock the audience. If you had to say, what's your biggest
criticism of Biden so far? Where do you stand? M4: Well, I would say, look, I've been very
annoying about this from the get go. I think Biden needs to find a way to get the 60 on things or at
least try to get the 60 on things. You can't do everything through budget reconciliation.
You're not going to abolish the filibuster with Manchin cinema's opposition. If you reform the
filibuster, that's not eliminating the filibuster doesn't mean that everything is going to glide
right through if that got changed. So on things like voting rights, immigration, minimum wage,
you need to find a path to 60 or it's not going to happen. And so I think you need that breakthrough.
You need that there's so much mistrust. You need a breakthrough moment to create that working
relationship. I think the relief bill was the best chance to get that. And I can't begrudge Biden for
thinking, hey, I got 50 votes in hand. I can get one point nine trillion. I can make a massive
dent in child poverty. I'm going to act when I can act. I mean, that's not an unreasonable
calculation to have made. But I do worry that it's a missed opportunity to get the 60 on something.
Is it going to be able to get the 60 on anything? M3: Right. Well, so uncovered relief. I mean,
listen, it's like if you step back, there's a story to tell that's very compelling right now,
which is he promised 2000. And to us that sounded like 2000 more. But then it became
adding fourteen hundred to the sixth to the six. And he said right away. But it took two
months and he said 15 dollar minimum wage. And then that's gone. And then you kind of
you break it down and it's OK. Right away, I mean, how quickly can this actually be done so so maybe
expectations should have been different. Two thousand total versus two thousand more? Yeah,
I don't know. I was I was thinking he meant 2000 more as well. Counting 600 from six months prior
is a little bit of a question mark to me. Minimum wage. Listen, the parliamentarian thing, it it you
know, you could overrule the parliamentarian, but then you almost certainly lose at least one
Democratic senator if you force it into the bill. So it really wasn't going to pass. And then I'm
kind of like, I guess this is OK. I don't know. M5: Well, look, just taking the bill in of itself,
forget, forget, forget my squeamishness about what comes next. Yep. It's a very popular bill. Right.
The criticism of fourteen hundred versus two thousand, that's not resonating in the country.
M3: The checks were the most popular aspect of the bill in all the polling that I saw
that's important, which is 2000 more or 2000 total is huge in the political space.
But when you pull people,
they're happy about the fourteen hundred period. M4: They're happy the fourteen hundred. I think
they are going to be happy or at least the parents are going to be happy about
the expanded child tax credit. Yeah. M5: When those monthly checks come in
and to get a win off the bat, it's no small thing you want to show your acting and he
was able to act within 50 days. That is a good shot in the arm for any initial president. So
I don't think in the short term it's all good. M4: The question now is, can he find a way to get
something else that would show, hey, I can find ten Republicans who can move us on these other
fronts? Because because the the risk is right. And right now, you mention the minimum wage
thing. There's two things about minimum wage. Fifteen, the minimum wage that are of note.
One is that you do not have 50 Democratic senators for 15. Right. They do not exist. You lost eight
vote, eight senators on down the Democratic side on that vote. So it goes beyond the parliamentary
the rules questions there. Right. So Joe Biden betrayed his promise. He didn't betray his
promise. You never had 50 Democrats. You promise that in the first place. Undeniable. So you need
to work on those eight or you need to accept less than 15 and get the 60 some way somehow. But at
the same time, Biden showed he is very reluctant to bend those rules and break those norms. And
I think he is, at least in the near term, stuck between these two positions, stuck between I'm
going to get done what we need to get done. M7: And I'm not going to let the Republicans
veto my agenda, but I'm not going to push hard to change the rules.
M6: Those two positions don't mesh. M8: Something's got to give, because if you put
a minimum wage bill on the floor, you put a voting rights bill on the floor, you put immigration bill
on the floor and they all get filibustered. And you don't move one way or the other.
M7: Then you get a much bigger frustration. Confusion? Yeah, I don't get what you're doing,
guy, but pick a pick a name. M3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for
people who are watching and they thought Bill just pulled out a second microphone that was actually
his cat's tail. So Bloomberg reported yesterday the next big focus is going to be
tax reform. Everything that is being reported as being in the bill are things Biden ran on. So
there's there's no shock there in terms of what would be in the bill. The White House restating
taxes wouldn't go up for anyone earning under four hundred thousand dollars a year. That seems
to be mostly true, although depending on what's in changes for path pass through business entities,
that may or may not actually be the case. But we have to wait and see. What I said earlier in
looking at the details of this is that I think you're going to get total Republican opposition
to doing anything that could be labeled a tax increase given the pandemic situation
and probably even some Democrats on everything other than raising the corporate tax rate. So
while a lot of it is exactly what Biden promised and what the many economists say
would be a deficit negative, revenue positive, however you want to do it,
I think that politically the next year would be very tough for most of what's in that a proposal.
M5: Well, this is the tough thing. When you say Republicans are beyond the pale,
there's no way you can get 10 on anything. It's a fool's game. It's Lucy and the football.
Don't embarrass yourself by trying to get what you can get done with 50. That only works if you have
50. Right. So taxes. And spending you can do through reconciliation. Those are budgetary
matters, so the thing that's big up on Biden's agenda coming up is infrastructure. You can do
infrastructure by and large, the reconciliation, and there's going to be a tax component to that.
But if you don't have unanimity among Democrats, not only can you not get it done, it is much more
politically embarrassing to not get it done because all the fault is on you. You said
you are going to do these things with your party and you can't get your party in line.
That's very politically dangerous. So if you don't have that expectation that you need 60 on
these things, if you if the assumption was in the populous, oh, yeah, you need 60 on these things,
we'd have bipartisan support. Republicans are the one holding this up. I'm going to punish
those guys in November. If the expectation is 50 and then you don't get it done, then you take
all the blame. And we know that Manchin, we know that Angus King. We know that some other
Democrats are squeamish about more spending without offsets, without revenue, whether
that's tax increases or spending cuts and what those tax increases and spending cuts should be.
That's where things get very dicey. M3: To talk a little bit about the
Republican Party, one of the most frequent know, I get 10 forms of these questions every week. Is
the Republican Party still? The party of Trump is the twenty, twenty four nomination. Trump's
if he wants it, what happens in 2022 with people that are really only known for being
Trump ists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Bobber and Madison Cawthorn, et cetera? To me,
it seems that these things are all sort of interrelated. Trumpet his CPAC speech
not announcing twenty four, but saying Donate to me and I'll be the kingmaker and we're going
to get the rhinos out. Is is twenty twenty two and maybe adjudicating these Trumpy and
members of Congress in twenty, twenty two. Is that a signal about the future of the party.
M6: Well, yeah, I would assume so. I mean, it seems like Trump is is still in the game. Yeah,
we can we can speculate with the to twenty twenty four or not. But he's not taking a breather. He's
not just playing golf. He is getting involved in primary battles, encouraging primary battles,
putting his thumb on the scale. You know, we'll have to see how many people get nominated or get
ousted in Republican primaries because of Trump's involvement. And then we'll see in the general
election if being Trump helps or hurts in a general election. We have had examples in the past
where Republicans went too far off the deep end and lost winnable seats. There is a great
expectation that twenty, twenty two will be a good Republican year. I mean, that term does go
well for the president's party. There's a number of tenuous House seats that are up. And I mean,
Republicans have to do some defending on the Senate side. But and there's also the
the redistricting question, will Republicans draw a line for the House races that will
advantage them in twenty, twenty two? But that's all a little unclear at this point.
But there's a certain expectation that this will be a good Republican year if Trump blows
it for them, if there are things that he could have won and Trump's involvement hurts them,
that does not that might bring out the voices in the Republican Party saying,
hey, this should not be Trump's party. M5: He is hurting. He hurt us in Georgia
in twenty twenty and he's still hurting us now. Or there may be folks that say, who cares? Who
cares if we win or lose? This is Trump's party, you know, live or die. And we're going to fight
the fight and fight the liberals and the secular media and the socialist and who wins the elections
is secondary to us. We don't know how much Trump has mutated the DNA of the GOP where they become
immune to caring about electoral considerations. M3: Right. I mean, you see polling like.
Sixty four percent of Republicans would follow Trump to a new party. Eighty something percent
want Trump to remain involved in politics in some way. It seems as though the electorate is far more
positive on Trump than the elected officials are privately from what the reports are. But it seems
the elected officials are still being careful because they don't seem to know what the power of
Trump will be in the next election cycle or two. M6: Yeah, they're afraid. They're afraid for their
own seats. And most Republicans who are in office now could only lose their seats through a primary,
not through a general. There's not a lot of crossover split ticket, purple state,
purple district Republicans at this point. M4: Now, having said that, I have a theory
that's not based on a ton of history. There's only so many examples of this. But I think you're going
to lose the presidency three times in a row before party can conclude, hey, it's not you, it's me.
M6: Democrats lost with Carter, lost with Mondale, lost with Dukakis. Then you get Bill Clinton, then
you get a guy running on welfare reform, a guy who will execute a prisoner with it with a 70 IQ,
a guy who will assist a soldier, Jesse Jackson, to his face and say, I have the base. Voters say,
well, what do you got? Do you got you got attacked in the middle? We tried it the liberal way. It
didn't work. You got to really lose a lot. Right. Or your base voters to say, I'm really sick and
tired of losing. And your average Trump die hard is not sick of Donald Trump. They have
not lost enough to care. Now, it may be that my my rule of three doesn't work with Trump
voters. Maybe they'll never care because they're so wedded to him. But I think having the one loss
clearly is not sufficient to break that bond. M3: Yeah, well, there's no doubt about that. And
especially when, you know, a lot of the Trump people were not really involved in politics
anyway. So a lot of those sort of norms may not apply and many Republicans might rationalize,
yeah, we lost one, but Trump wasn't even really like the rest of us anyway. He was sort of this
other thing. So there may be a lot of both in the Trump wing and the non Trump wing.
M4: There may be rationalizations for why they won't care what Lindsey Graham said it
pretty openly to Axios that, you know, Trump has a good side of a dark side, but clearly he brings
out a certain group of voters that the Republicans need. And so we got to stick with it. But,
you know, in his heart, Lindsey Graham's on a Trump. No, but but he's sucking up to him
as he thinks that's what the party needs to do. M5: Now, to go back to my other point about Biden
and getting to 60, I don't think this is a unanimous feeling among all Republicans,
especially Senate Republicans. We know there is a class of Senate Republicans that does
not care for Trump, whether they are. The Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski and the Susan
Collins or the folks who are saying Seah like Rob Portman and Richard Burr and Roy Blunt,
they don't they don't want the party to be a Trump party. Now, we don't know how far they will go
to cause a rift. We know that it's not something that can happen magically, organically,
because they stayed in lockstep against the rescue plan, against the pandemic relief bill. Right. If
you were to exploit those divisions, you need to work at it. And now some people might think you're
naive, Bill. You can't work hard enough. There's no way to break that. But that may be the case. I
can't mind read these Republicans. Yeah, but I do think there is evidence of differentiation between
those senators that I would like to see tried, I think, to see could could you exploit that,
widen that rift, make the case to the Romneys and the pawprints saying, look,
it's not just good for me, it's good for you, it's good for your party.
You don't want your party to be a trump your party. You don't want your party to be
a nihilistic party. Show that you can work with us. It'll be good for your party long term. I
can't I can't breathe. It's going to work, but I would certainly try it. And I think it will
make Biden look good in the trying to occupy a space where he's putting plans on the floor
that are popular with the public. And if they get blocked by Republicans, Republicans pay the price.
That's the strategy I would like to see more of. M3: Yeah, I think that it would unquestionably
make Joe Biden look good. And that may be why there will be desperation to avoid the breaking
of the ranks from from the Republican Party. But we will see which which forces is stronger in the
end. I mean, quite quite frankly, that's what it'll come down to. Bill Share, contributor to
The Washington Monthly, to Politico magazine, to Real Clear Politics and also host of the history
podcast, When America Worked. Bill, it's always great to have you on you to talk to you soon.