Why President Biden Bet on a Senate That No Longer Exists

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“I’m proud to say I am a Senate man,” Joe Biden wrote, in 2007, his thirty-fourth year on Capitol Hill. “The job plays to my strengths and to my deepest beliefs.” Even by the standards of the Senate, Biden gloried in the club and its clichés. In his memoir, “Promises to Keep,” he cited the old straw that George Washington hailed the institution as a “cooling” body, a saucer where the boiled-over passions of the moment could dissipate. (Senators still cite it today, though historians aren’t sure that Washington ever said it.)

His faith in the Senate’s potential was not just empty pride. Since Biden was first elected to that chamber, from Delaware, in 1972, he had witnessed a variety of examples of feuds over big issues in which senators ultimately accepted personal political risk in the name of a larger national purpose. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appealed across the aisle to Howard Baker, of Tennessee, the Republican Minority Leader, to support a treaty transferring the Panama Canal to local control (a move primarily intended to improve Washington’s dealings with Latin America). Baker’s aides warned him that collaborating with Carter would doom his dream of becoming President, but Baker, it is said, weighed the national-security implications and replied, “So be it.” He backed the treaty and there was no Baker Presidency. (As a consolation prize, Baker is remembered as the “Great Conciliator.”)

When disputes erupted within parties, senators spoke admiringly of those who found their way to manage their ambitions within the larger goals. In 1993, during Bill Clinton’s first year in office, he pressed Democrats to support higher taxes in his economic program, but Senator Bob Kerrey, of Nebraska, wouldn’t budge. Clinton, in a profane, private phone call, accused him of dooming the prospects of his Presidency. Kerrey resented it, but eventually backed Clinton, saying, in a speech on the Senate floor, “I could not and should not cast the vote that brings down your Presidency.”

When Biden entered the Presidential race in 2019, he had abundant firsthand knowledge of how far the Senate in the era of the Republican leader Mitch McConnell had fallen from its self-image. As Vice-President, he had witnessed McConnell’s famous pledge to stymie the Obama Administration at every turn; his blockage of Barack Obama’s right to nominate a Supreme Court Justice; his exponential growth of the use of the filibuster. But that evidence competed in Biden’s accounting with his own history of finding a way to work with unsavory and obstreperous counterparts, including the segregationists Strom Thurmond and James Eastland. Biden had even found a way to a deal with McConnell in the final days of 2012, agreeing to leave tax cuts in place in order to avert the Republicans’ threat to default on the debt ceiling. It had irritated fellow-Democrats, but served as fresh evidence of Biden’s contention that nobody was truly immune to negotiation.

As the election approached in 2020, even as the toxicity of the Trump era infected more of Washington, Biden held fast to his contention that he could persuade enough of his opponents to join him. “All you need,” he told me in an interview that summer, “is three, or four, or five Republicans who have seen the light a little bit.” He added, “I don’t think you can underestimate the impact of Trump not being there. The vindictiveness, the pettiness, the willingness to, at his own expense, go after people with vendettas.”

It took a long, costly year in the White House for Biden to confess that he had bet wrong on the Senate he once knew. On Wednesday, during a marathon press conference on the eve of his first anniversary in office, Biden conceded, “I didn’t anticipate there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done.” Speaking to reporters in the East Room of the White House, he returned to the subject several times. “My buddy John McCain is gone,” he said, lamenting the absence of the late senator from Arizona, who had been a frequent partner on legislation and, not incidentally, one of the few Republican senators who ever challenged the calumnies and cruelties of Donald Trump. At one point, Biden posed a question to the audience that seemed at least as much a question to himself: “Did you ever think that one man out of office could intimidate an entire party, where they’re unwilling to take any vote contrary to what he thinks should be taken, for fear of being defeated in a primary?”

There were, of course, some who had urged Biden against believing that he could win Republican support. During the campaign, a Democrat who had served in the White House asked, of Biden’s assumptions, “Does he see his role as someone who can bring in the Never Trumpers and build some bipartisan consensus? I know from experience that’s a trap. We walked right into it. Your people lose faith, the Republicans never give you credit, you waste a lot of time—and you end up with the Tea Party.”

In the end, of course, it was not just Republicans who dented Biden’s hopes for the Senate; members of his own party lent a hand. For months, Biden and other Democratic leaders indulged and romanced the dissidents within, chiefly Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona—cutting one proposal after another to meet their demands on infrastructure, voting rights, and social-safety-net programs under the Build Back Better plan. In public, Senate colleagues avoided criticizing the holdouts, who would eventually be needed for votes in the future. Manchin stoked that belief, telling reporters, in a faint echo of Kerrey’s comments from 1993, that, for all his objections, he intended to “make Joe Biden successful.” As Democrats pushed to finalize the Build Back Better plan, patience was running thin. “You have made your mark on this bill, you’ve dramatically cut its cost,” Dick Durbin, the second-ranked Democrat in the Senate, told CNN, referring to Manchin. “Now close the deal.” Instead, Manchin killed it, announcing on Fox News that he could never support the bill as written.

In that light, it was a fitting bit of scheduling that, while Biden was in front of reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Manchin was speaking in the Senate, in an effort to prevent his party from changing Senate rules to allow passage of voting-rights legislation in the face of Republican resistance. All fifty Republicans later voted against the voting-rights bill, but Manchin did not suggest a way around it; on the contrary, he urged his colleagues, in effect, to embrace a high-toned paralysis. “The Senate’s greatest rule is the one that is unwritten,” he said. “It’s the rule of self-restraint, which we have very little of anymore.” By the end of the evening, Manchin and Sinema had voted with the Republicans against changing the rules, a moment that seemed to crystallize the frustrations of Biden’s first year of dealing with the Senate he revered.

Biden the Negotiator Confronts the Cold Reality of Capitol Hill Gridlock

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WASHINGTON — President Biden entered the White House promising to engage with Congress in a way that few presidents ever had, thanks to his three decades as a senator. A year in, with much of his agenda mired in congressional gridlock, Mr. Biden is changing his approach — a stark admission that his approach to governing so far has fallen short.

Mr. Biden will retreat from the tangle of day-to-day negotiations with members of his own party that have made him seem powerless to advance key priorities, according to senior White House advisers. The change is part of an intentional reset in how he spends his time, aimed at emphasizing his power to govern as president, rather than getting trapped in a series of congressional battles.

Four internal strategy memos drafted by White House advisers this week lay out the shift ahead of Mr. Biden’s first State of the Union address to Congress on March 1: The president will ramp up his attacks on Republicans ahead of the midterm election campaigns to help Democratic candidates. He will travel the nation more and engage with voters. And he will focus more on what he has already accomplished than on legislative victories he hopes to achieve.

The president is also planning to use his executive power to help former inmates return to society and reform police departments, after legislation on the latter issue failed to pass last year, according to several White House aides and a person familiar with the plans, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.

The mystery of Joe Biden’s 5 GOP senators

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In talking about his struggles to bring bipartisanship back, Biden recounted that : “I’ve had five Republican senators talk to me, ‘bump into me’— quote, unquote — or sit with me, who’ve told me that they agree with whatever I’m talking about for them to do. ‘But, Joe, if I do it, I’m going to get defeated in a primary.’”

Which, well, intriguing, right?

So who are the Biden 5? Well, Biden wouldn’t name them – a reporter asked – but we can probably make a few educated guesses. (For the purposes of this thought experiment – which is purely speculative and not based on any inside information – I am assuming Biden was telling the truth about candid but unreportable conversations with GOP senators.)

Start with the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump at his impeachment trial for his actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021 – since they’ve already shown some unhappiness with the former President.

That’s Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

Toomey and Burr are retiring, so it’s not either of them. Murkowski is up in 2022 but a) Trump has already endorsed a Republican running against her and b) Alaska has an all-party primary, meaning that Murkowski won’t face off against her Trump-backed challenger head to head.

That leaves us four senators: Cassidy, Collins, Romney and Sasse. I think it’s a very good bet that any of these four could be part of the Biden 5. With the exception of Collins, the group represents overwhelmingly Republican states where the only danger to their reelection chances is in a primary.

Who else could be part of the group? Could John Thune? Yes, he’s the second most powerful Republican in the chamber, but he also is a) definitely not on the Trump train b) up in 2022 and c) sitting in a ruby red state where Trump has urged a primary challenge (none has materialized).

Other options: West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, who is much more closely aligned with the Mitch McConnell wing of the party than the Trump one, who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure package and who sits in an increasingly Republican state? Or Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, an old bull whose Midwestern sensibility doesn’t line up with Trump but who is also running for another term this November? Or even South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who, prior to the Trump takeover of the Republican Party, was a voice of moderation within it?

The Point : Biden isn’t talking about who the five senators were (and are). And it does none of them any good to talk about conversations with the Democratic President in which they were critical of the leader of the Republican Party. This looks like another unsolved Washington mystery.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article listed the wrong state for Sen. Mitt Romney. He represents Utah.

President Biden stresses party unity at DNC event

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President Joe Biden said Thursday the Democratic Party was united despite a high-profile rift with two senators that blocked sweeping voting-rights legislation a day earlier.

“I know we’re disappointed by last night’s vote, Kamala [Harris] and I are deeply disappointed but we’re not deterred,” Biden said during a Democratic National Convention Grassroots Town Hall held virtually on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration.

Biden’s pledged to continue “pushing” for federal voting legislation even though the effort hit a brick wall Wednesday in the Senate, which has a 50-50 Democrat-Republican split.

Senate Republicans used a filibuster to stop the legislation. Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema sided with the GOP to vote down a rule change that would’ve allowed Democrats to wait out the filibuster and get the legislation through with a simple majority.

The votes were expected to fail due to the two Democrats’ opposition, and without a rule change, a 60-vote threshold is needed to avoid a filibuster.

President Joe Biden said the Democratic Party was intact despite a rift between two senators that blocked sweeping voting-rights legislation a day earlier. AP

“We’re gonna keep pushing,” the president added. “We’re not gonna give up. The DNC’s gonna keep pushing on voter education, on voter engagement, voter protection in states while we continue to push for federal legislation.”

He said the party would stand up to “The Big Lie,” referring to unfounded accusations that questioned Biden’s 2020 election victory over former President Donald Trump. He flung accusations at the GOP that they were trying for “voter suppression and election subversion.”

Biden called the midterm elections this year “critical” as Democrats cling to slim control of both houses of Congress, with the vice president serving as a tiebreaker vote in the evenly divided Senate.

Democratic Senator Joe Manchin sided with the GOP to vote down a rule change that would’ve allowed Democrats to wait out the filibuster. AP

“We have to keep control of the House and Senate, expand our majority,” he said. “We need to reelect and elect Democratic governors and mayors, state legislatures, candidates up and down the ticket.”

Heading into the election, he said there was party unity despite the well-documented split with Manchin and Sinema and dissent that has stymied several party initiatives including the massive social spending Build Back Better bill.

Protesters gather outside the White House to urge the Biden administration to pursue voting rights legislation on Nov. 17, 2021, in Washington. AP

“But we have unity in the Democratic Party,” Biden said. “Forty-eight of the 50 Democrats vote with me on everything and the other two vote with my on 80 percent.”

He said Republicans lack a platform beyond acting as obstructionists to his initiatives and he alluded to Trump’s continued influence on the GOP – though he didn’t name the former president by name.

Kamala Harris was disappointed about the voting rights bill being blocked, Joe Biden claimed — but the president stated they were not deterred during a Democratic National Convention held virtually. AP

“The way we’re going to do that is tell the voters what we’ve done and what we plan to do. By making it clear there’s a clear choice – a choice between a party that works for people and is focused on the future and a party that’s complete controlled by one man and is focused on re-litigating the past.”

The vice president also delivered remarks despite some technical glitches during the town hall, which largely focused on speakers outlining what they viewed as successes of the administration.

Biden lashes out at reporter’s ‘stupid question’ after Ukraine gaffe

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President Biden lashed out Thursday at a reporter for what he called a “stupid question” about Russia potentially invading Ukraine — as the White House scrambled to clean up Biden’s Wednesday gaffe that Russia may face less blowback for a “minor incursion.”

As reporters were escorted out of a science-focused meeting next door to the White House, Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich shouted, “Why are you waiting on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to make the first move, sir?”

Biden’s answer was not captured on the official video livestream, but press audio engineers recorded him saying, “What a stupid question,” according to a pool report by Yahoo’s Alexander Nazaryan.

Biden and his aides tried repeatedly Thursday to walk back the “minor incursion” remark— made during a 1 hour, 52 minute press conference — as horrified Ukrainian officials warned that Putin may see it as a “green light” to invade.

President Biden holds a virtual meeting with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus in DC. REUTERS / Jonathan Ernst

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed Biden on social media Thursday.

“We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations,” Zelensky tweeted. “Just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of loved ones. I say this as the President of a great power.”

At the press conference, Biden said, “I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, etc.”

But the president told reporters Thursday in the Oval Office that “let there be no doubt at all — that if Putin makes this choice, Russia will pay a heavy price.”

Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich was heard asking President a question following the press conference, which Biden responded by calling it a “stupid question.” Fox News

“I’ve been absolutely clear with President Putin,” Biden added. “He has no misunderstanding. If any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion.”

Biden lashed out at Heinrich at a subsequent meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

The US and its European allies say Putin has amassed up to 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders. Last week, the White House alleged Russia may stage a “false flag” attack on its own forces to provide a justification for war.

When Biden was vice president in 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea from Ukraine following a disputed referendum. Putin’s government also allegedly supports a pair of pro-Russia breakaway states in eastern Ukraine.