How Biden's impromptu comments upended a political win

It was all going according to President Joe Biden's tightrope plan to pass the most ambitious economic agenda in generations. Right until the moment that Biden, a politician with a history of rogue comments, veered off script.

After weeks of closeddoor negotiations, Biden strode to the cameras on the White House driveway on Thursday, flanked by an equal number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, to proudly announce an overall infrastructure agreement totaling $1.2 trillion over eight years that could cement his legacy as a bipartisan dealmaker.

Biden and his top aides had successfully struck a limited agreement with key centrist senators to rebuild roads and bridges while carefully signaling to liberals that he still intended to embrace a measure - likely to gain only Democratic support - to spend trillions more on climate, education, child care and other economic priorities. It was an "I told you so" moment for a president who is supremely confident in his ability to navigate legislative negotiations.

But in a stray comment during a news conference an hour later, the president blurted out that he would not approve the compromise bill without the partisan one.

"If this is the only thing that comes to me, I'm not signing it," he said, answering a question about the timing of his legislative agenda. "I'm not just signing the bipartisan bill and forgetting about the rest."

It may not seem like much, but it was enough to upend Biden's proud bipartisan moment. On the one hand, he was saying out loud what liberals in his party wanted to hear. But to the centrist senators and Republicans, it made explicit a notion that had only been hinted at before - that Biden not only intended to sign a second, more ambitious package, but that he would also go so far as to veto their bipartisan plan if the larger bill did not materialize.

"We never had an inkling that there would be any kind of linkage," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a key negotiator, said in an interview. "We always knew that there'd be another bill, but not that the success of the infrastructure package was going to be in any way dependent on the other bill."

For more than 24 hours, the White House engaged in damage control, with top advisers calling senators from both parties. On Friday, the president's spokeswoman gently tried to distance the administration from his comments.

It was not enough. And on Saturday, as lawmakers and aides continued to stew and the prospects of a legislative victory seemed to fade, Biden conceded that he had misspoken. The drama does not appear to have sunk the deal, but Biden admitted that his comments on Thursday left "the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to." That was "certainly not my intent," he added.

The agreement Biden heralded on Thursday initially looked like an unfettered triumph for a president who promised voters he could deliver legislation that was both boldly progressive and widely bipartisan. It was weeks in the making.

By late May, Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., had cobbled together eight other centrist colleagues to discuss the possibilities of a bipartisan framework that could replicate the success that led to the passage of a $900 billion coronavirus relief bill in December.

"The easy stuff, I could just put a check mark on it and move on to the next one," Sinema said in an interview. "The hard stuff is where you spend your time."

Looming over the talks was the likelihood that liberal Democrats would use a fasttrack process known as reconciliation to bypass the 60vote filibuster threshold. Meetings grew ever more tense, and the senators invited Steve Ricchetti, a top adviser to Biden; Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council; and Louisa Terrell, director of the Office of Legislative Affairs.

For days, they crisscrossed the Capitol - including Sinema, who broke her foot running a marathon, on a crutch - to haggle in back rooms, often ordering in pizza, salads and wine. Portman's hideaway grew so cramped with the additional staff that an aide to Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, braved the Senate bureaucracy to secure a fan for the room. During one late-night session, Ricchetti took it upon himself to walk around the table and pour wine for each senator, according to two people familiar with the moment.

Tempers flared, senators and aides acknowledged in interviews, as the senators clashed over how to finance the framework amid a Republican refusal to increase taxes and the White House's objections to user fees for drivers.

On Wednesday, many of the centrist senators joined Biden at a funeral for former Sen. John Warner of Virginia, before returning to the Capitol for what would be a final round of meetings with his legacy of striking bipartisan accords on their minds.