Have you been paying attention the past several years? Have you seen the Republicans' penchant for obstructionism and religiously opposing anything that President Barack Obama supports? Because I've got news for you: whether you're President Bernie Sanders, President Hillary Clinton, or President Joe Biden, that shit is not going away. If anything, Boehner's resignation signals that we will see the Republican Party's rabid nihilism political nihilism escalate beyond anything we've seen thus far.
John Cole predicted how calls to bipartisanship would play out in 2009:
I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.
To President Barack Obama's credit, in spite of the insufferable opposition he has faced, he's still managed to get a lot accomplished. But the Republican Party has made quite clear that they will not work with a Democratic President. The political nihilism of the GOP base is taking over the party, and it will not discriminate regardless of who the next Democratic President is.
So really, "How will Sanders get agenda passed in Congress?" is the wrong question. The question you should be asking is "How will we get a Congress that works with the next Democratic President of the United States?"
The only acceptable response to the intransigence of the Republican Party is to GOTV and vote them out. That's what it boils down to. Easier said than done, right? Well, of course. Still a more likely prospect than the Republican Party maturing and being able to work with the next Democratic President!
We didn't get the Affordable Care Act passed because of bipartisanship. We got it passed because we won Democratic majorities and used them. Remember how many Republicans in the House voted for it? ZERO. Remember how many Republicans in the Senate voted for it? ZERO. The single greatest achievement of the Obama administration, despite his calls to bipartisanship, was in NO WAY achieved through bipartisanship. It was achieved because the 2008 Obama campaign successfully GOTV and got us Democratic majorities.
That's what it will take. GOTV.
It's true, there's a lot we can be cynical about: the trend of policy-making reflected the interests of the wealthiest in this country, the effects of GOP gerrymandering, and blatantly obvious attempts at voter suppression.
But we can see the importance of GOTV from various studies on the impact of voting on the society we have: a recent Vox article noted several very important observations: i) the higher your income, the more likely you are to be registered and voting, ii) non-voters typically want an increase in services, especially for the poor, as well as an improved standard of living and reduced inequality... and voters typically don't want those things or want them reduced, iii) high voter turnout is predictive of higher government spending (we have a key example of this with woman's suffrage), and iv) low voter turnout helps explain why our government does not cater to the interests of the average American.
And this is why the energy Bernie Sanders is bringing to the table should not be trivialized, regardless of whether you support him or not: how many people would be disengaged from the political process in the scenario where he wasn't running I wonder! To be clear though, whether you're campaigning for Hillary Clinton or Martin O'Malley, if you're GOTV, you're doing the single best thing for the Democratic Party.
That's the only cure for the sickening recalcitrance of the Republican Party. Voting them out. Because regardless of whether you're President Bernie Sanders or President Hillary Clinton, there is no working with Republicans in Congress. And the achievements of the Obama administration, particularly in 2009-2010, had less to do with bipartisanship and more to do with securing Democratic majorities.
That is what it's going to take.
"We need a mass grassroots movement that looks the Republicans in the eye and says, if you don't vote to demand that your wealthy people start paying their fair of taxes, if you don't vote for jobs and raising the wage and expanding Social Security, we know what's going on. We're involved. We're organized, you are out of here if you don't do the right thing." —Bernie Sanders