You can argue that you secretly, in your heart of hearts, wanted something that you never put up for a vote. But who will believe you?
Obama betrayed his promise to close Guantanamo for the same reason: He didn't think he had the votes in the Senate. No one remembers that now. Americans who care about the issue remember that Obama was unwilling to spend political capital to shut down the camp.
Biden's adherence to Democrats 'count-votes-first practice' on his Build Back Better infrastructure plan was more understandable. After conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin announced that he wouldn't support it, the White House pulled the $1.75 trillion bill from Senate consideration because it would have highlighted internal divisions within the party. Sometimes, however, a rogue member of your own caucus must be reined in. If Democrats wanted to show their left-leaning base voters that they were fighters, they would have disciplined Manchin by taking away his committee memberships and held the vote despite inevitable defeat. Then they could have run ads against Republican senators who opposed a giant jobs package.
Democrats have failed to hold votes on increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, student loan forgiveness, or bold action to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis. While it is true that these ideas might go down to defeat against a united GOP and 'Democrats in Name Only' like Manchin, young voters in particular would like to see them put up for a vote and fought for. And those "nays" could be leveraged against vulnerable Republicans.
Republicans understand the optics of appearing to fight for a cause dear to their voters even if it's doomed, especially if it's doomed. Knowing full well they didn't stand a chance at succeeding, the GOP voted 70 times to repeal Obamacare.
After Donald Trump won in 2016, however, they didn't move to repeal or truncate because the ACA was popular. "Now that it makes a difference, there seems to not be the majority support that we need to pass legislation that we passed 50 or 60 times over five or six years," Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama admitted. Fighting and losing, even pretending to fight only when defeat is assured, gets more results than pointing at your supposed actual accomplishments.
It may well be that corporate Democrats are too beholden to their major donors to, say, increase the minimum wage. Unless the polling changes in a big way, Democrats will have an opportunity to virtue-signal about the minimum wage, and student loan forgiveness, the same way the Republicans did on the ACA beginning early next year.
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