Looking Back at a Year of Democratic Accomplishments
As 2022 closes, it's appropriate to take stock of the historic year of Democratic accomplishments.
Image credit: Julie Frontera via DemCast
As 2022 comes to a consequential finale, it’s fitting to take a few minutes to consider what a consequential year it was for the Democratic party.
The year started with significant legislation, the “No Surprises Act,” designed to eliminate surprise bills from health insurance providers for out-of-network care.
It was followed by ordering all federal employees and federal contractors to be paid at least $15 per-hour minimum wage.
By April, the U.S. economy had added an additional 431,000 new jobs.
This was also the month President Joe Biden signed into law the Postal Service Reform Act that, among other things, “requires the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to establish the Postal Service Health Benefits Program within the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program under which OPM may contract with carriers to offer health benefits plans for USPS employees and retirees.” It also guarantees mail delivery six days per week, and repeals the provisions under the George W. Bush-era Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), requiring the postal service to calculate all its anticipated pension costs for 75 years and set aside five billion dollars per year to cover future employees.
Then there’s “the Safer Communities Act,” the most significant piece of gun safety legislation in 20 years, that includes millions of dollars allocated for mental health, school safety, crisis intervention programs, and incentives for states to incorporate juvenile records into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. It also incentivizes more states to pass “red-flag laws,” designed to permit law enforcement or family members to petition courts for temporary firearm removal if individuals pose potential danger to themselves or others, and extends current laws barring convicted felons and those convicted of domestic violence to abusive dating partners with domestic violence convictions or restraining orders, colloquially referred to as the “boyfriend loophole.” Gun purchasers under age 21 now must undergo expanded background checks. “Ghost guns” are now illegal.
Despite republican opposition, Biden also signed the PACT Act, “the most significant expansion of benefits and services for toxic-exposed veterans in more than 30 years.”
We will finally start manufacturing some technology again in America thanks to the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America (CHIPS) and Science Act” that will “strengthen American manufacturing, supply chains, and national security, and invest in research and development, science and technology, and the workforce of the future to keep the United States the leader in the industries of tomorrow, including nanotechnology, clean energy, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence.”
We mustn’t ignore the massive Roosevelt-esque Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), landmark legislation that provides the largest investment — $385 billion — in history to fight climate change, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030; lowers energy, prescription drug, and health insurance costs; and reduces the federal deficit by requiring a 15% minimum corporate tax rate on companies that report more than $1 billion in profits, and 1% tax on stock buybacks.
By September, the economy boasted an additional 263,000 jobs.
Then in October, the same Joe Biden who was so vehemently opposed to legalization his entire political career and refused to alter his stance even when running for president, issued federal pardons for thousands of Americans with simple marijuana possession convictions, and announced his administration would be taking steps toward marijuana decriminalization.
Just before schools returned to session in late August, Joe Biden scored another accomplishment when he signed an executive order authorizing the federal government to cancel up to $20,000 in Pell Grant student debt.
As we got closer to the holidays, Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying into federal law the right to same-sex and interracial marriages anywhere in the country, regardless of where the marriages were performed.
A month later Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that includes a reform to the 1887 Electoral Count Act, an important step in helping prevent a repeat of the attempted coup against our government that occurred January 6, 2021.
In the revised law, the vice president’s role in the counting of presidential electoral votes proceedings is now purely ceremonial. Where previously it only took one House member and one senator to object to a state’s slate of electors, kicking off a potentially days-long debate, the new law raises the threshold for an objection to 20% of each chamber’s members.
Joe Biden nominated and got confirmed the first African American woman to the US Supreme Court.
He rallied our allies in defense of Ukraine against Russia’s unprovoked aggression.
He ended the 20-year illegal war in Afghanistan — the longest in US history.
These are just some of the year’s biggest federal legislative accomplishments credited to a Democratic House majority and the Biden administration, all with a slim majority in the Senate with two recalcitrant Democrats, Joe Manchin of WV and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Add these to last year’s victories for the American people, and we have an administration that has done more for working people in just two years than we have experienced in the past 80.
Of course, we still have a lot to do.
We haven’t gotten everything we need.
While this Congress and administration have done more to combat climate change than any before it, there is much more we need to do to stave off the climate emergency’s imminent impacts. President Biden needs to declare a climate emergency.
Congress needs to act on its constitutional authority to regulate the Supreme Court, and President Biden needs to seriously threaten to expand it as President Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s.
We need to move toward a single-payer Medicare-for-all type national healthcare system, as every other developed country has done.
We need to join the rest of our capitalist allies in making public colleges and universities tuition free.
We need to pass comprehensive paid family leave so people — particularly women — do not have to choose between going back to work and staying home to care for newborn children during their most important years of nurturing.
We need to fully fund our public schools and stop funding them with property taxes.
We need to make voting easier, make election day a national holiday, and fun campaigns at the federal level.
We need to pass a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United that states money does not equal free speech and corporations are not people.
We need to make joining unions easier and unambiguously stand behind union members over corporations.
While the Inflation Reduction Act addresses this, we need to raise taxes on the richest Americans and corporations back to where they were at least when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, but ideally back to where Franklin Roosevelt raised them, creating the middle class.
We need to bring our manufacturing jobs back from overseas. American companies that refuse to should lose the ability to exploit the tax system that has made them mind-bogglingly rich.
We need to pass a “wealth tax.”
We need to raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15 a hour.
We need to repeal the Reagan tax cuts, Bush tax cuts, and Trump tax cuts.
We need to seriously consider making the federal government the employer of last resort, as we did during the New Deal. Part of that should include a universal basic income.
We need to cut defense spending and start investing more in eliminating poverty, income inequality, and corporate welfare.
We need to re-instate an assault weapons bans so we take battlefield weapons off the streets. While we’re at it, we should require guns be treated like cars — registered from manufacture to destruction and gun owners be required to hold liability insurance.
And, once and for all, abolish the debt ceiling. There is literally no reason for Congress to have to vote on whether or not we pay our bills. It’s a republican ploy politicians promote on right-wing hate media whenever they want to push the lie that they are the party of “fiscal responsibility.”
