Both the House and Senate return to work Monday, with looking ahead to another two years in the majority in the Senate and the House up in the air and in chaos. That chaos isn’t going to end. Republicans will probably get the majority, but one that will be so small on any given day, there could be a majority of Democrats in the chamber. It also means that Kevin McCarthy—or whoever ends up leader largely will be controlled by the bomb-throwing Freedom Caucus.
Which means that this lame duck session—with Democrats in control in both chambers—has to really count. Much of the heavy lifting has already been done by the House Democrats, so the bulk of the work is going to be on the Senate. Democrats need to make sure that they take away all the sharp and flammable objects they can, starting with lifting the debt ceiling, because the maniacs will blow everything up. But beyond safeguarding the government to the full extent possible, Democrats need to build on the record that helped save the Senate and expand on it for 2024. That means passing marriage equality and electoral reforms, the things they promised they would give us in the lame duck. But they shouldn’t stop there.
There are the must-pass bills: government funding (the current stop-gap bill runs out on Dec. 16) and putting the debt ceiling out of Republican reach for the next two years—however they choose to do it. That’s the absolute minimum of what they need to do to make sure that government won’t implode. Optimally, they will pass a package with all 12 of the government funding bills to last the whole of 2023, giving us a year without shutdown threats. That’s actually achievable and has been in negotiation for weeks—the people in charge of that stuff for Senate Republicans are more moderates who probably share the goal of minimizing the damage the House GOP can do.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on ABC’s This Week Sunday that the debt ceiling is one of her top priorities. “What the Republicans have said is they’re going to use the vote on the debt limit as leverage to cut Medicare and Social Security,” she said. “Our best shot, I think, is to do it now.”
There is, of course, the Joe Manchin problem—he endorsed the House GOP’s economic terrorism before the election, because of course he did. He’s Joe Manchin. Now that sucking up to Mitch McConnell can’t possibly do him any good, he might drop that schtick and help. That’s how Democrats seem to be approaching this, with Chuck Schumer and the White House also prioritizing getting the debt limit settled.
That’s really the bare minimum of what Democrats need to get done while they can. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who was clearly prepared for Democrats to hold the chamber, set an ambitious agenda for the next several weeks in a New York Times op-ed this weekend, calling on her colleagues to “[make] this lame-duck session of Congress the most productive in decades.”
Her objectives include picking up on the issues that “a few lobbyist-friendly Democrats in our own party blocked.” That includes reversing the Trump tax cuts, enacting voting rights and electoral reforms, and protecting abortion rights. “Continuing to reduce inflation and putting money in people’s pockets, expanding the workforce through affordable child care, lowering housing costs by increasing supply, raising taxes on the superwealthy, tackling corporate price gouging—this is not a progressive wish list,” Warren wrote. It’s ambitious, but if Majority Leader Schumer and the rest of the Democrats decide to do it, they can—Manchin is about to lose his king-maker status as the make-or-break vote, and they need to let him feel his impending irrelevance.
One of those tests comes this week with the delayed vote to make marriage equality the law of the land, no matter what the Supreme Court decides to do in the future. Senate Democrats postponed that vote back this fall, wanting to wait until after the election on the flimsy promise that there would be 10 Republicans who would join with them to pass it, as long as it was done in the lame duck. We’ll find out this week whether those 10 Republicans are really there.
Schumer also is reportedly prioritizing Electoral About Act reform-, another supposedly bi-partisan high priority that’s been stuck in the never-never land of negotiations with Susan Collins. It would make it much harder for Trump or DeSantis or whoever the next fascist authoritarian the GOP comes up with to try to use Congress and the electoral count for his coup, closing loopholes and correcting vagaries in the 1881 law.
There’s an outside chance for some kind of immigration reform, centered around the American DREAM and Promise Act, finally extending a path to legalization for young immigrants known as Dreamers in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Finally, there are dozens of nominations still pending. Those have dropped down the priority list, since the House has nothing to do with nominations, and the Democrats will retain the Senate majority—they can come back to those next year. It means redoing the nomination and hearing process, but that’s certainly doable. It would be nice to get them cleared, but it’s a lower priority under the circumstances than everything else.
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