The fight that Democrats must wage and can’t lose

And the poll numbers to back it up

Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.

I’m writing this introduction from the Minneapolis airport, waiting to board a flight back to New York after a weekend spent celebrating my college roommate’s wedding. We spent four years living with five of our other best friends, and we’ve all managed to remain close even as we’ve spread out across the country and continent, gone into different professions, and, in some cases, become parents.

What’s remained constant, beyond our friendship and ill-advised late night fast food orders, is our student debt. More than a decade since graduating, there was enough outstanding debt between about 10 of us to purchase a big house, even with sky high interest rates. When student debt payments restart in September, many millions of Americans who would have had some or all of their debt canceled will find themselves writing out checks or facing accruing interest for the first time in three years. It is not going to be helpful to the economy or Biden’s re-election prospects.

Tonight we’re looking at the student debt situation, which took another major twist this weekend, as well as what polling numbers tell us about Biden should respond to that crisis as well many other right-wing challenges to our foundational values and quality of life. It should not shock you that the Supreme Court is involved.

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Relief for working class people is most important, but student debt is truly a universal issue and one of the few policies that has a ready-made solution that could help everybody instantly.

The White House should have put another pause on repayments after the Supreme Court ruling, and with just weeks to go, the situation has become even more urgent. While the administration has been pursuing an aggressive but more piecemeal and lower-impact alternate approach two annoying conservative think tanks filed a lawsuit on Friday seeking to block that one, too.

President Biden should be on somewhat more solid footing with this plan, which is being implemented under the Higher Education Act. Then again, that’s assuming that the Supreme Court decides to follow its own logic or supposed legal principles, which is not a particularly good bet.

Therein lies the real problem: No matter how carefully a rule is written or brilliantly a case is litigated, this Supreme Court, as presently constructed, is determined to turn this country into a perverse right-wing fantasyland featuring a government that is powerless to protect people, regulate business, or reflect popular opinion.

Yet no matter what Justice Alito says, the court is not immune from accountability or pressure. It wouldn’t take much effort for Democrats to launch a serious offensive on the legitimacy of the court, nor would it require much political capital. Public faith in the court just hit an all-time low thanks to its ongoing run of outrageous decisions and egregious corruption (another revelation about Clarence Thomas’s billionaire patrons emerged this weekend).

We’re actually seeing an incredible example of discernment and awareness from a public that isn’t necessarily known for such those characteristics. This is how unpopular the Supreme Court is right now: According to two recent polls, 40% of Americans approve of the court, while 43% of voters would choose Donald Trump in another head-to-head matchup with Biden.

Yet Biden has remained silent on the issue that plagues his administration most, while Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin has stubbornly refused to launch what should be the most slam dunk investigation in years. I know this is a regular lament here at this point, and I promise that I’m working on ways to amplify it to much larger audiences in order to ratchet up the pressure.

Putting up a fight

It’s the centrality of this situation to every aspect of our politics that makes it something that requires constant revisiting.

Causing and compounding president’s struggling poll numbers is the Democratic Party’s sputtering grassroots fundraising operation. There’s a lot that goes into convincing small donors to hand their hard-earned cash to a political campaign, and Democrats’ obnoxious email program and its churn-and-burn tactics likely deserve some of the blame. But fundraising is also a proxy for voter enthusiasm, and it’s no surprise that base voters are not exactly rushing for their wallets.

Only 20% of Democrats say they’re enthusiastic about a second Biden term, a dismal number that’s even worse among younger voters. Just 9% of Democratic voters aged 18-29 are pumped for Biden 2024, while a mere 7% of voters 30-44 admit enthusiasm about re-electing the president.

Among the less-than-enthusiastic respondents, a plurality of them are most concerned about Biden’s age, which is as far as I know something that the White House can’t fix. But if you look at the issues about which young Democratic voters are most concerned, there’s definitely a lane available that would allow the president to readjust his trajectory. Critically, pursuing such a strategy would be huge for down-ballot candidates, as well.

As much as the right wants to make student debt into culture war fodder, it’s really an economic issue. Right now, Biden gets his worst marks on the economy, driven by young people. fewer than 10% of voters ages 18-29 say that economic conditions are “good” right now, with a whopping 64% say the economy is in “poor” shape. It’s not much better for voters 30-44, of whom 54% say that economic conditions are “poor” at the moment.

Democrats will swear up and down that economic indicators are great — unemployment is at a record low, wages have grown, inflation has been largely tamed, manufacturing is returning — and that Biden just needs to better tell that story. That’s half-true, because while the overall numbers are really impressive and encouraging, most people judge the economy by their cost of living and monthly savings. Even college grads, now the majority of the Democratic Party’s coalition, are not so happy with the economy as they experience it, and needless to say, forcing tens of millions of people to start shelling out $300 to $400 a month isn’t going to improve peoples’ outlook.

The economic questions goes far beyond the court’s decision on student debt.

This coming term, the Supreme Court will hear a case in which conservative lawyers are going to argue that it’s unconstitutional to tax unrealized gains, which is to say that they want to preempt closing one of the least popular tax loopholes on the books. As we reviewed last week, one of the lawyers arguing that case just co-wrote a humiliatingly slobbering piece on Alito in the Wall Street Journal, and it’s likely that the indignant justice will be part of a majority decision granting billionaires the right to hoard cash.

At the same time, conservatives are also gearing up to sue the Biden administration over ambitious new pro-worker protections that are likely to be announced soon by Julie Su, the acting Secretary of Labor. That’s in part due to Democratic senators who think refusing to confirm Su will allow them to show off their independence to voters and avoid campaign commercials from dark money business groups, but having a Supreme Court that is unafraid to take a wrecking ball to all administration initiatives will be what encourages those suits.

Then there are the so-called “social” issues.

Though Republicans have been weaponizing the southern border for years and have now gone as far as to order the drowning of young children seeking to cross over into the United Statew, polling shows that a vast majority of Americans — including non-college whites — support a pathway to legal citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Most reporting doesn’t reflect this reality, especially as a few specific Hispanic communities have begun to trend a bit more Republican. It won’t be like that for long, as it’s only a matter of time before the Supreme Court will hear another challenge to DACA, the Obama-era program that allows immigrants brought to the US as young children to stay in the country in a quasi-legal limbo. Many DACA recipients and their families are already fearing that the court will throw out the program entirely, and so a sign of strength in the form of an aggressive pursuit of the court’s corruption could not only chasten its conservatives but mark the president and Democratic Party as allies that will actually take action. That would be a dramatic reversal from the White House’s current reputation, forged by a broad continuation of Trump’s border policies.

Biden inherited this court, and while vigorously shooting down any notion of expanding it when Democrats won their trifecta probably didn’t help matters, there was generally nothing he could have done to prevent the gutting of abortion rights and the EPA, among other decisions made during his first two years in office. At this point, though, he doesn’t have so many built-in excuses.

For example, because the Dobbs decision happened months before the election and the first battles it prompted happened at the state level, pro-choice voters turned out en masse for Democrats in 2022 despite a lack of forceful response from the White House. But as the brutal impact of red state abortion bans further emerges, and lower courts continue to affirm bans that had been challenged, the clamor will continue to grow for federal intervention. Shrugging their shoulders at the suffering and promising to codify abortion rights in 15 months should they pull off an unlikely trifecta isn’t going to cut it, in part because the administration continues to shrink from fights.

It’s no coincidence that young people are the most pro-choice — 70% of voters aged 18-44 say abortion should be always or mostly legal — and the least enthusiastically pro-Biden. You can insist to them that the president’s hands are tied, but surrender doesn’t turn out voters. Conservatives spent 45 years turning out anti-abortion voters by actively fighting to overturn Roe v. Wade and taking small steps every year.

Instructively, they’re still fighting to further bury reproductive rights even where they don’t have a majority — look no further than Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, by far the dumbest person in the Senate, holding up all defense nominations until the Pentagon changes its abortion policy.

If Republicans are willing to do something so irregular and universally unpopular to cater to 30% of the American public, there is no world in which Democrats would pay a price for launching a legitimate investigation into the corruption of a reviled court that just recently stripped away rights supported by 70% of the country.

Who knows what could happen — maybe the corruption they find is so undeniably blatant (as if it weren’t already) that a conservative justice or two has to step down or recuse themselves from certain cases, inviting very different challenges and decisions. Absent that, further disgrace and delegitimization of this far-right supermajority would be very useful, as it would dominate the media narrative and charge up public enthusiasm for creating the majorities that could oust those justices or expand the court. The investigation and subpoena-enforced testimonies would be historic and history-shaping, and at the very least, it would entirely obliterate the idea that the justices are not accountable for their actions and can lord over hundreds of millions of Americans with impunity.

But more important than anything else is the message that such firm action would send. People will follow and fight for people that fight for them, and after three years in office spent idly watching the court strip Americans of sacred rights and refusing to use every available tool to restore them, Democrats desperately need to become the party willing to fight the hard fights.

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