Biden’s Agenda and the Filibuster

On March 2, 2021, when he had been president less than two months, Joe Biden met with a group of liberal historians in the White House East Room. The subject was Biden’s “determination to be one of the most consequential presidents” in U.S. history, according to an account in Axios. The group talked a lot about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal — Biden’s model for the “think-big, go-big mentality” that characterized the first months of his presidency. The president has “giant plans teed up that could make Biden’s New Deal the biggest change to governance in our lifetimes,” Axios wrote.

It was all a little ludicrous, given one fact: Democrats had the barest of majorities in the House and no majority at all in the Senate, where a 50–50 tie gave them control only with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. Roosevelt had huge majorities in both houses of …