President-elect Joe Biden said he’s ready to throw some figurative punches to get his agenda through a gridlocked Congress.
Chatting with newspaper columnists over the phone this week, Biden was asked how he would respond to charges that he is overly optimistic about opportunities for bipartisan cooperation and otherwise averse to bulldozing his agenda through Congress.
“I respectfully suggest that I beat the hell out of everybody else. I won the nomination, got everybody to come around, and won by over 7 million votes,” Biden said during a conversation that included the Washington Post. “So, I think I know what I’m doing, and I’ve been pretty damn good at being able to deal with the punchers. I know how to block a straight left and do a right hook. I understand it.”
Biden said to expect “a lot more cooperation” with Republicans than might be expected. “Reality has a way of intruding,” he said.
He stressed that while he was “ready to fight,” he doesn’t view such legislative “blood matches” as productive. “Nothing gets done,” he said.
Despite his electoral victories in the 2020 presidential election, Biden may be a rare Democratic president to enter office without party control of both branches of Congress.
To secure the Senate, Democrats will need to win two of Georgia’s runoffs for seats now held by Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
Democrats’ majority in the House will be a slim three-vote margin following Biden’s nomination of Rep. Deb Haaland for interior secretary.
Biden spent 36 years in the Senate before he was elected vice president in 2008, and he talks confidently about his expectations for bipartisan action.
“We’ll be in dire trouble if we don’t get cooperation, and I believe we will,” he said in remarks earlier this month when asked if he had spoken yet with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Congressional negotiators have spent months negotiating a second COVID-19 package after passing the CARES Act this spring.
