Can Biden, McConnell find way to comity?

It is counterintuitive but true: Joe Biden would benefit from Republican control of the Senate. And Mitch McConnell, by modulating senatorial strife, can secure his status among America’s most accomplished legislators, and most consequential conservatives.

A Republican-controlled Senate could insulate Biden from progressive pressures to waste time and squander public support by pursuing causes that are certain to fail and/or offend temperate Americans.

Dealt a hand he despised by the 2016 election, McConnell has concentrated on the Senate’s advice-and-consent role in filling the most important appointive offices. Thirty percent of all circuit judges — 53 of them — have been confirmed in the past four years. Portions of the judiciary McConnell has shaped will be serving in 2050.

Today it is painful to watch his final accommodation to the post-2016 reality he has loathed. His chilly comments on President Trump’s resistance to post-election reality (Trump is “within his rights” to “look into” allegations of voting irregularities) reflect only this: Preservation of McConnell’s Senate majority depends on many Trump voters in Georgia’s two senatorial runoffs Jan. 5.

Soon, however, McConnell can turn to restoring constitutional equilibrium between the legislative and executive branches. Moderated Senate behavior would be a radiating balm for the nation and would restore Congress as a counterbalance to the overbearing modern presidency.

No president has had as much congressional experience as Biden. With a combined 72 Senate years (so far), Biden and McConnell are custodians of the Senate’s institutional memory.

Already the longest-serving Republican leader, McConnell in 2023 will pass Montana Democrat Mike Mansfield as the longest-serving leader of either party.

In 1970, Mansfield made a Senate rule that has enabled behavior that has damaged the institution and embittered national politics. He created the “two-track” system, whereby the Senate can set aside a filibustered bill and proceed to other matters. Hitherto, filibusters had to hold the floor, testing their stamina but inconveniencing the majority, thereby incentivizing accommodation of the minority’s concerns.

The two-track system incites promiscuous filibustering, and erases the implicit principle — rules that lubricate civility often are uncodified — that extraordinary majorities should be required only for extraordinary matters.

Trivialized filibusters — effectively, a 60-vote requirement for too many things — have fueled the clamor for something neither Biden nor McConnell desires: abolition of the filibuster, which would make the Senate even less deliberative and more acrimonious. But rather than repealing Mansfield’s mistake, it would be wholesome if McConnell and Biden could have recourse to implicit understandings.

It could be transformative if they could tacitly agree that post-1970 filibustering has become injurious. And if McConnell could convince Biden to make his administration’s first significant proposal something — say, infrastructure — that has low ideological salience, involves splittable differences, and includes something for everyone. This could turn down the political thermostat, and wean Washington from its addiction to the gesture-politics of virtue-signaling to inflame the parties’ most fervid members.