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The upset victories in the Georgia senatorial runoff elections have handed Democrats; control of the White House, the House of Representatives, and the US Senate. Democrats will be able to push through a lot of important legislation on the liberal agenda, such as a dramatic increase in the minimum wage, student loan forgiveness, an eviction ban, Medicare For All, expanded economic stimulus, and addressing the climate crisis. They will still be 10 votes short of the supermajority needed to override Republican filibusters. The billion dollars spent to elect those two Democrats in Georgia created some interesting symbolism about the rising influence of Black voters and hopes for further Democratic inroads in the South, but it didn’t defang Mitch McConnell. But, Biden and his pet Democratic Congress don’t have much of an agenda.

Point to be noted that Biden will reverse Trump’s executive orders on stuff like rejoining the Paris Agreement. But he won’t move the policy meter left of where it stood under Obama. Biden campaigned tepidly on adding a public option to Obamacare, but McConnell will almost certainly block it and anything else that requires GOP votes. The exception will be the next bloated military spending bill. Americans have been able to count on death, taxes, rising income inequality, and bipartisan support for 6 consecutive decades for blowing up brown people in countries we can’t find on a map with $640 toilet seats. The former President Obama’s presidency started in the strongest power position of any Democrat since FDR, with the economy in a tailspin and shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month.

He had a 68% approval rating, indicating bipartisan support. Democrats had picked up 21 seats in the House, giving them a 257-to-178 majority. They had a 59-to-41 majority in the Senate. Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman caucused with Democrats. They were one tantalizing vote short of a supermajority. That changed on 24^th September 2009, when the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy’s death was temporarily filled by a fellow Democrat, until February 4, 2010, when Scott Brown, a Republican won the Kennedy spot in a special election. Democratic apologists explain away Obama’s lack of progress on progressive policy goals during that halcyon period and pointed out that total Democratic control of the White House and both houses of Congress only lasted 4 months, during which they passed the Affordable Care Act.