OPINION:
The Congressional Progressive Caucus has compiled an 88-bullet-point wish list of a far-left agenda that it wants the Biden administration to impose by what it calls “executive action.”
That is to say, unilaterally by presidential fiat.
That’s because the 101-member caucus knows that few, if any, of its “Executive Action Proposals for the 118th Congress,” issued last week, would ever make it through the Republican-led House, much less overcome guaranteed Senate filibusters.
The far-left caucus’s hundreds of proposals include everything from ending cash bail and establishing a commission to “study and develop reparations proposals” for slavery to funding abortion travel from states that sharply restrict the procedure to states with few if any restrictions and requiring all health insurance plans to cover so-called gender-affirming care.
Apparently, the Congressional Progressive Caucus — co-chaired by Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — learned nothing from how the November 2013 “nuclear option” blew up in the face of then-Sen. Harry Reid.
At the time, the Senate majority leader, Mr. Reid, rammed through President Barack Obama’s liberal judicial nominees over Republican opposition by abolishing the filibuster as it related to district and appeals courts.
Mr. Reid and his fellow Senate Democrats apparently believed their party would never again lose the presidency and control of Congress, so there wouldn’t be any political price to be paid for that anti-democratic (lowercase “d”) move.
Mr. Reid’s Republican counterpart — Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then as now the minority leader — warned the Nevadan at the time that Democrats would be sorry for doing away with the judicial filibuster.
“You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think,” Mr. McConnell said presciently, in what was simultaneously a threat and a promise.
Regret it Democrats did when the GOP took back the Senate in 2014 and Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. The Republicans made good on the threat, extending the elimination of the judicial filibuster to Supreme Court nominations. It enabled Mr. Trump to name three conservative justices to the high court, and there was nothing the Democrats could do about it.
“I don’t think we should’ve made that change when we look back at it,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Democrat, lamented in 20/20 hindsight in September 2018, echoing the sentiment of many of her suddenly rueful Senate Democratic colleagues.
Fast-forward to last week. On March 30, the Congressional Progressive Caucus issued the group’s fever-dream manifesto, which also calls for the Biden administration to require the “provision of abortion care as a condition of participation for hospitals in Medicare,” to cut work requirements for receiving public benefits, to encourage local jurisdictions to decline “to prosecute smaller crimes to advance racial and economic justice” and to “eliminate all eligibility barriers to health services under [Obamacare] to DACA recipients.”
If President Biden were to impose these and the scores of other components of the progressives’ extremist agenda by executive order, then a future President Trump or President Ron DeSantis would be absolutely justified in doing the same thing — starting by unilaterally repealing those executive orders and then imposing a diametrically different conservative agenda in the same ham-handed fashion.
That would be just as politically anti-democratic (again, lowercase “d”). Still, the temptation would likely be too great to resist — in the same way there are now calls from conservatives for GOP district attorneys to find something to charge Mr. Biden with as payback for the political persecution by Democratic DAs of Mr. Trump.
In short, the Congressional Progressive Caucus would do well to heed the admonition: Be careful what you wish for.
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