Just a day after President Biden huddled with 10 Republican senators to discuss a compromise COVID-19 relief package, Senate Democrats advanced a budget resolution designed to pass the legislation without them as the White House signaled it would not back down from its desired $1.9 trillion price tag.
“It was civil. It was constructive,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said of the bipartisan meeting at Tuesday’s press briefing. “This is how democracy is supposed to work.” She then expressed support for using the reconciliation process, which would allow Senate Democrats to move the package without Republican defections — with the help of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
It was also a stark illustration of the tensions between Biden’s talk of unity and his commitment to delivering a Democratic legislative agenda with his party in narrow control of both houses of Congress, befitting both the strategy that won him the White House and his decades trying to balance Capitol Hill deal-making with being a party loyalist before that.
To win the presidency, Biden assembled an electoral coalition that stretched from centrist suburbanites who frequently voted Republican before former President Donald Trump won in 2016 all the way to the hard Left typified by Bernie Sanders, the socialist who now chairs the Senate Budget Committee, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young Democratic congresswoman from New York who leads the “Squad.”
It worked.
Biden was elected because he did better than Hillary Clinton in turning out Sanders voters and other elements of the liberal base. He returned Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the Democratic column and flipped Arizona and Georgia by making inroads among white, college-educated voters in the suburbs.
But it set up the possibility he would disappoint one group of supporters or the other — and that choice may have come earlier in the Biden administration than expected.
Sanders vowed to “make sure that Biden becomes the most progressive president since FDR.” But former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who got more speaking time at last year’s Democratic convention than Ocasio-Cortez, told jittery voters who worried that Biden “may turn sharp left and leave them behind” that their concerns were unfounded. “I don’t believe that,” Kasich said. “I know the measure of the man. Reasonable. Faithful. Respectful. And no one pushes Joe around.”
How that dilemma applies to the coronavirus spending package was made clear by Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat. “I think the Republican offer is sincere, but Biden and Republicans have VERY different ideas for how we address this crisis and voters very deliberately chose Biden’s agenda,” Murphy tweeted on Monday. “Some compromise is always warranted, but we have an obligation to see the voters’ intent through.”
That doesn’t mean Biden might not prefer legislation be passed on a bipartisan basis. “President Biden’s years in the Senate have conditioned him more than other presidents towards engagement with Congress,” said Kevin Madden, a political strategist who has advised GOP candidates. “The first meeting was a positive sign, and it was long enough and substantive enough that it went beyond just the pageantry or optics of bipartisanship. So many tests still remain, though. For bipartisanship to really work, meetings like these have to be standard operating procedure. We should have so many of them that they’re actually not news.”
Democrats know Biden’s success hinges on how well he is seen as dealing with the virus and its accompanying economic devastation. “In the last resort, voters will judge the new president more on results than rhetoric,” said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon. “To quash the pandemic and fix the economy, he must go big. If that means alienating Republicans to get the nation back on its feet, he is willing to accept the situation.”
Even without Republicans, Democratic coalition management hasn’t always been easy. Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia, took issue with Harris giving an interview with a local television station in his state to tout the COVID-19 package, about which Manchin has some misgivings, without giving him a heads-up. “We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward, but we need to work together,” he told a Huntington, West Virginia, news channel. “That’s not working together.”
“Not only is he a key partner to the president and to the White House on this package, but on his agenda,” Psaki said of Manchin by way of cleanup in Monday’s press briefing. “We will remain in close touch with him.”
In eight years as vice president, Biden was often former President Barack Obama’s point man for working with congressional Republicans due to relationships formed during 36 years in the Senate. But the Obama years were short on successful bipartisan compromises, as Obamacare and the 2009 stimulus package were passed on largely party-line votes.
Democrats nevertheless sense some momentum. “Early polling shows that almost all Democrats and most independents support his aggressive executive orders even though Republicans disapprove,” Bannon said. “As long as Biden can keep the support of independents, he will enjoy more unity than Donald Trump did.”
