Vice President Kamala Harris is using a personal touch to help pass Democrats’ sweeping legislative proposals, courting centrists at her private residence to find common ground within the divided party.
At the Naval Observatory, Harris recently hosted both the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus, including centrist and progressive members.
With CBC members, Harris discussed elements in the Build Back Better agenda to rally support for President Joe Biden’s care economy spending and investments in the country’s infrastructure, according to a White House official.
Half of the centrists who signed a letter penned by Problem Solvers Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, are CHC members who visited the vice president’s residence on Monday. While there, Harris talked about their priorities in Biden’s legislation, stressing “that this is a historic moment to make investments that would change the lives of working families.”
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A former senator from California, Harris spent four years in the upper chamber before capping her brief legislative career to join Biden in the White House. Unlike the president, a 36-year senator, Harris cast herself as a combative partisan during her time in the Senate, narrowing opportunities to reach across the aisle.
But this latest outreach demonstrates the vice president’s finesse to align a divided caucus.
It’s not the first time Harris has sought to bring together disparate legislators to pursue Biden’s goals.
Soon after taking office, the White House called on Harris to advocate for the administration’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package in interviews with local West Virginia and Arizona news outlets. The media appearances were received poorly by Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, at the time.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Manchin said in a local interview. “No one called me [about it] … We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward … but we need to work together. That’s not a way of working together, what was done.”
Now, Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill and social spending package hang in the balance. House progressives threatened to vote down the infrastructure deal, which passed the Senate earlier this year, with fears that sending it through would jeopardize the passage of Biden’s sweeping Build Back Better Act.
While Biden met at the White House with Manchin and fellow Democratic maverick Krysten Sinema from Arizona several times this week, Harris’s role in the negotiations is little known.
Asked on Wednesday, Psaki said she would have to check. A separate White House official declined to say.
Jim Manley, a veteran Democratic strategist and former top aide to Sens. Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid, said Democratic leaders are best positioned to work the holdouts — but Harris could still stake out a role.
“You can’t have too many cooks in the kitchen, and you can’t have too many people trying to seal a legislative deal,” Manley said.
In the evenly split chamber, Harris holds a crucial tiebreaking vote. But whether she will have an opportunity to use it to push the deal to Biden’s desk remains unclear.
On Wednesday, Manchin dashed his party’s hopes of earning support for the $3.5 trillion social welfare proposals that “spend for the sake of spending.” The reconciliation proposal requires approval from all 50 senators in the evenly divided upper chamber.
By Thursday, the negotiations had spilled into the public.
Manchin and Sinema have pressed to lower the cost. While they have publicly declined to share a top-line number they could accept, a leaked document surfaced on Thursday outlining Manchin’s priorities that capped the price at $1.5 trillion. Manchin also wants Democrats to amend the bill’s planned tax hikes, arguing they may hurt small businesses and slow the country’s economic growth.
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Still, the White House has shared few details of Harris’s participation.
“She’s been making calls herself, just like the president,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday. “If it’s constructive for her to go to the Hill, or for him to go to the Hill, have members down here, they’ll do that.”
Psaki added: “But a lot of what’s happening right now is discussion at a staff level and senior staff level to get through the intricate details, and that’s where the focus is.”
