So what can we say about it?

• Normally, I would caution against an expected improvement in Biden’s approval ratings following legislative success. Voters don’t judge presidents by how many of their initiatives succeed in Congress — and, for the most part, neither should they. Voters care most about broad and highly visible policy outcomes, not bills signed or policies implemented. That said, Biden’s ratings are so low there are likely some easy picks, especially among younger liberal voters who soured him. It’s also possible that if there’s more good news, maybe some positive reports about Biden and Congress could do a bit to improve the nation’s generally grumpy mood.

• Overall, however, I would place legislative successes in the category of political gains, not in the category of electoral effects. Recall that President Lyndon Johnson’s Democrats suffered a substantial electoral blow after passing tons of mostly popular bills in Congress from 1965-66.

• There are various theories as to why so many bipartisan laws have been passed contrary to predictions (including mine). Jonathan Chait laid out some possible reasons last month in New York magazine. My sense is that the explanation lies in the choices made by Republican senators, not in the actions of Biden or Schumer or anyone. The most plausible explanation might be that the threat to remove the filibuster, the mechanism that imposes a 60-vote requirement to pass most laws, may have convinced many Republicans to strike enough deals to prevent Manchin and other Democrats to change Senate practices. fed up and act. Still, that wasn’t enough to get Republicans to compromise on nominations during Barack Obama’s presidency, so I admit I was taken aback when they started making deals under Biden.

• The best reason Republicans make deals is that it can produce political gains for them that they couldn’t get from filibuster, and the electoral costs to the other party of passing bills are almost certainly minimal (see above). But again, that wasn’t enough to convince Republicans to endorse compromises during the Obama years.

• That said, Biden, Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will deserve a lot of credit for getting things done if the items on the table do indeed pass. And if the new Schumer-Manchin compromise becomes law with the $1 trillion-plus infrastructure bill Biden signed last November, then the two-bill strategy Democrats have adopted to split their agenda will seem smart in retrospect. As for Biden: What seems to be helpful with him is less about negotiating skills or the personal relationships he has with senators, and more about his belief that the goal is to push through whatever Senate votes can. be found, and to adapt if one approach doesn’t work and another might. It may seem like an obvious approach to legislating, but I don’t think any of the last three presidents have actually used it.

• And, yes, much of the Democratic agenda did not survive, perhaps especially the voting and electoral reform bills that were blocked by Senate Republicans.

• Returning to the filibuster: it is easy to see that the de facto requirement for a supermajority in the Senate has given this chamber enormous advantages. Bill after bill, the House of Representatives had to accept whatever the Senate produced. With the filibuster in play, the need to win the votes of at least 10 Republican senators forced House Democrats to follow; when a simple majority sufficed (as is the case with the reconciliation procedure used for budget-related initiatives like the Schumer-Manchin compromise), then the need to keep all 50 Senate Democrats on board was what mattered. Part of the reason it worked was that House Republicans were rarely interested in legislating, so the narrow Democratic majority in the House had to pass everything.

• Last point: It is easy to speak of legislative productivity, since it is reasonably objective. Whether the bills that have been passed actually improve the nation is another matter, and inevitably most Republicans won’t like them much despite their bipartisan good faith. Most of them did not receive a majority from either party in either chamber, so they were truly Democratic bills with some Republicans contributing to passage. Still, it can at least be argued that it’s a good thing for government to identify problems and fix them, and that the results are likely to be better than those of a government that doesn’t even try. Any evaluation of the results of this Congress on political grounds is a long way off. But it’s safe to say that lawmakers have already done a lot, and it’s now entirely possible that this Congress will become one of the most productive of the past 50 years.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Editorial Board or of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and politics. A former political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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