Democrats really don't have enough votes to pass the agenda some would like...

Democrats worry Senate will be graveyard for Biden agenda

Liberal Democrats are growing more and more worried that the Senate will serve as a legislative graveyard for President Biden’s agenda unless he and other centrists rally behind doing away with the filibuster.

The tensions for now are mostly under the surface as the party approaches an initial victory under Biden: passage into law of a giant $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill.

“I believe and I believe my caucus believes that we need big, bold action, and we’re going to figure out the best way to get big, bold action on a whole lot of fronts,” Schumer said, vowing that “people are going to be forced to vote on them.”

But the White House on Tuesday sought to avoid the issue in some ways: Biden didn’t take questions from Democratic senators on Tuesday during a brief, eight-minute call to their weekly luncheon.

I believe many in the Democratic Party are somewhat confused by what really happened in the last election. They barely won the Presidency over an unpopular incumbent. They failed to garner the outright majority in the Senate (many expected them to have 52 or 53 seats), and they lost seats in the House when they expected to gain (and now hold a razor thin advantage). On top of that, at least two of their Senators are on record as opposing any sort of legislative changes to the Senate Rules and there may be as many as five or six more who probably oppose if push comes to shove.

This Congress is as closely divided between Republicans and Democrats as we have seen in our lifetime. The obvious meaning behind that is that the country is divided and ultimately want to see something from both sides. The even more obvious manner for our Congress would move forward would be to attempt to compromise, not have one side figure out if there is a way to slam an unpopular agenda down everyone's throat. 

So why do people like Chuck Schumer and others in the House seem tone deaf to this? Well it's likely that they see this as a last chance in a while to get any of this stuff done. Most first year Presidents loose bigly in their first mid-terms and it's entirely possible (if not probable) that the GOP will take back one or both chamber in 2022. Once that happens, pretty much everything that the Democrats want to push will be invalidated. Perhaps it is now or never?

Well when you have "bold" agenda ideas that primary focus on the wants and desires of your most rapid and most extreme followers, the time for that is not when you are looking at a closely divided Government. The time for that would be in a situation like we had in 2008 when the Democrats had won the Presidency by a large amount, won the House by a large amount, and held 59-60 seats in the Senate. That situation would have called for some more aggressive legislation. 

But that is not what we have here. Schumer and the extremists need to understand and accept this.