15 February 2025 - 2:30pm
In a rare show of policy unity across the partisan divide, senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have teamed up to co-sponsor a bill aiming to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. In appealing to the popular campaign pledge made by President Donald Trump, these champions of economic heterodoxy seem to give new life to the “horseshoe theory” of politics, which suggests that the socialist Left and populist Right have much to agree on in opposition to an exhausted political centre.
Their collaboration is, of course, nothing new: they had previously teamed up at the height of the pandemic to offer Americans $1,200 stimulus cheques. But while there is philosophically a lot of common ground to be staked between these factions, the fact of the matter is that neither the Republican nor the Democratic coalitions are likely to make such partnerships tenable.
For instance, the Right-wing side of this so-called realignment has not been well served by the current tack of DOGE, which looks to either cut, weaken or even abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB, which is the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren and is tasked with scrutinising predatory financial practices such as excessive credit card billing, would help to enforce a bill like this. It is not clear how Hawley intends for his proposal to be implemented, since he has not openly rebuked his own party’s designs on the regulatory body.
What’s more, the enthusiasm with which Republicans in both the executive and the legislature are contemplating making cuts to entitlements, along with the GOP’s wider drive toward austerity, has alienated potentially sympathetic allies. This includes Sanders, who had initially been at least partially open to the MAGA agenda, on the grounds that it could reduce the fusion of corporate and government power.
And if personnel is policy, then things look very grim indeed for the realignment as a whole. The one other senator who’s been most receptive to policies in this mould, and who’s been particularly cooperative with the Warren wing of the Democrats on consumer advocacy, is JD Vance. But he has been rendered virtually powerless in day-to-day governance by his elevation to the vice presidency. The same applies for the similarly populist-adjacent Marco Rubio, now at the State Department. This means that a genuine anti-corporate Republican like Hawley is in a much weaker and more isolated position in Congress, compared to any time in the last eight years.
Rather than a harbinger of greater alignment between populist Right and Left, the latest Hawley-Bernie tandem may instead signal the swansong for this kind of ideological formation, which had seemed so promising back in 2016 when it was Bernie and Trump himself who seemed to be converging on everything from trade to immigration. Capping credit card fees is a genuinely helpful pro-middle class idea, but the fact that it is likely to fall by the wayside illustrates just how powerless the horseshoe alliance has become.
