Biden-McConnell : Will two 80-year-old dealmakers control the crazies on Capitol Hill?
THU, JAN 12, 2023
IN 1972, Joe Biden was first elected to the US Senate. But just weeks later, and before he was sworn into office, his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident.
Two terms later in 1984, Biden was re-elected for his third stint in the Senate. That same year, a young Republican from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, was elected for the first time to the Upper Chamber. And not unlike Senator Biden in his upset victory in 1972, McConnell surprised the pundits with a razor-thin win over a veteran incumbent.
Born nine months apart and regarded as ardent admirers of the institution of the Senate, the two senators have a work relationship that has evolved into a personal friendship over the 30 years that they overlapped in the chamber.
In December 2016 after Republican Donald Trump was elected as US president, Senator McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, participated in a tribute to then Vice-President Biden. In his comments, the Republican senator acknowledged the tragedies that will forever trail the then outgoing VP, with the deaths of his wife and daughter in 1972, and his 46-year-old son, Beau Biden, from brain cancer in 2015.
In a moving tribute to his former Senate colleague, Senator McConnell noted that Biden has been “...tested, knocked down, pushed to the edge of what anyone could be expected to bear. But from the grip of unknowable despair came a new man — a better man: stronger and more compassionate, grateful for every moment, appreciative of what really matters.”
In that same year, McConnell also proposed renaming part of a bipartisan bill to speed up government approvals of drugs and increase medical research after Beau Biden.
And as Senator McConnell put it during the tribute, despite their political differences, not only did he like Biden personally but he also liked working with him as a senator and later as President Barack Obama’s vice president. The two pragmatic and mostly centrist politicians apparently do like doing business with each other and making deals.
“We got results that would not have been possible without a negotiating partner like Joe Biden,” said the Kentucky senator. “I don’t always agree with him, but I do trust him implicitly”, adding that “he doesn’t waste time telling me why I’m wrong”.
“There’s a reason ‘get Joe on the phone’ is shorthand for ‘time to get serious’ in my office,” said McConnell.
It seems quite remarkable that those remarks were made four years before Trump, the Republican loser in the 2020 presidential race, would launch an unprecedented and vicious campaign of lies and deceit against the winner in that election, President Biden. As a personal friend and political partner of the new president, McConnell sought to forge a working relationship between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.
So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when the two 80-year-old politicians were starting to send some signs recently that they were open to start working together.
Visiting Kentucky last week (Jan 4), President Biden and Senator McConnell made a rare joint appearance to mark the upgrading of a bridge on the Kentucky-Ohio border, paid for by funds from the US$1 trillion infrastructure bill that passed Congress with bipartisan support.
“We disagree on a lot of things but here’s what matters,” said the president during the ceremony, calling Senator McConnell “a man of his word” and stressing that the event “sends an important message to the entire country: We can work together. We can get things done. We can move the nation forward if we just drop a little bit of our egos and focus on what is needed for the country.”
“The country needs to see examples like this,” agreed Senator McConnell, calling the bipartisanship deal “literally a legislative miracle”.
The plea for bipartisanship cooperation was made just as a political battle was looming in the House of Representatives, as hard-right and pro-Trump Republicans tried to disrupt the election of Republican Kevin McCarthy from California as Speaker, seeking to squeeze from him concessions that would make it impossible to pursue any cooperation between the two parties in the House.
The rebels have achieved their goal after the new Speaker made concessions that give the right-wing lawmakers the power to prevent the passage of spending bills and force the shutdown of the government, or, worse, default on its debt obligations and trigger a financial crisis.
So in a way, we have here a clash of two political visions. On one side, there are the hard-line Republicans looking to create turmoil in the House, blocking the Biden administration’s agenda in the next two years, creating gridlock and leading to a series of crises that would weaken the American economy and erode US global influence.
On the other side, there is a display of bipartisanship by Democratic President Biden and Republican Senate leader McConnell, who insist that both parties need to work together to achieve common goals on the domestic and foreign policy fronts, including preventing an economic recession and continuing to provide support to Ukraine as it resists Russian aggression.
And then there is what can be described as the Trump subtext. Trump, who has suffered recently a few setbacks in his efforts to get re-elected as president in 2024, including the losses of his endorsed candidates during the November midterm elections, hopes to exploit the divisions among the Republicans in his favour and regards Senator McConnell as his chief adversary in the GOP.
While endorsing McCarthy for Speaker last week, the former president lobbed a racial slur at Senator McConnell’s Taiwan-born wife. “If Republicans are going to fight, we ought to be fighting Mitch McConnell” and his wife, Trump wrote on Truth Social of Elaine Chao, his former Transportation Secretary. He called her Senator McConnell’s “boss” and added a derogatory nickname that Chao called a “racist taunt” and asked the media not to repeat it.
The Republicans who now control the House with a narrow majority are expected to try to stall President Biden’s agenda and launch investigations into the conduct of some of his family members and administration officials.
As he prepares for the 2024 elections, President Biden’s strategy would be to paint the Republicans as being beholden to their party’s more extremist MAGA elements that are tied to the former president.
But Biden also has an interest in trying to get more of his agenda through Congress by winning Republican support on the margins, especially in the Senate, and is counting on Senator McConnell to play ball with him on certain issues, in particular on ensuring the passage of spending bills and preventing any government shutdown.
Some of the Trumpists in the House have expressed scepticism about, if not opposition to, continuing providing economic and defence aid to Ukraine. Both President Biden and Senator McConnell, long-time foreign policy internationalists, have an interest in preventing that from happening by containing the pressure from the isolationist forces on Capitol Hill.