Compromise forged coronavirus measure
Relief bill a result of bipartisan group working together
Aweek before Thanksgiving, a small group of moderate senators gathered in the spacious living room of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s home on Capitol Hill to embark on what they considered an urgent assignment.
They were there — eating Tuscan takeout as they sat socially distanced, with the windows open to let the cold air circulate as a coronavirus precaution — to talk about howto get the Senate, polarized and paralyzed on nearly every issue, working again.
They were also determined to find a way to deliver a more immediate kind of relief, brainstorming how to break a monthslong partisan stalemate over providing a new round of federal aid to millions of Americans and businesses buckling under the economic weight of the coronavirus pandemic.
The stimulus deal they began discussing that evening ultimately showed that both were possible. In hatching the compromise, the centrists provided a backbone for the $900 billion relief measure that Congress approved late Monday.
Perhaps just as important,
they delivered a template for the kind of bipartisan deal-making that will be crucial to getting Congress to function again in the Biden era, when tiny majorities in both chambers will force the parties to find their way to the center to accomplish any major initiative.
“I think divided government can be an opportunity,” said Murkowski, R-Alaska. “How we take that up, how we choose to use it, is up to us.”
With President Donald Trump almost entirely absent from the talks, it took quiet prodding from President-elect Joe Biden, a month of frenzied negotiating by the moderates — on Zoom calls,
in parking lots and over latenight sessions on Capitol Hill — intense bargaining by party leaders and several near-misses with a government shutdown to produce the final product. Two dozen lawmakers and aides described the legislative drive.
That November night at Murkowski’s house, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, a former management consultant, had arrived ready with a proposal outlined on his iPad. But it was Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, whose presence at the gathering raised some eyebrows among the Republicans, who chimed in with the suggestion that set the tone.
Forget about a sweeping stimulus initiative, Durbin said. What we need here is a limited emergency plan to get the country through March.
“That was really what opened up the eyes of all of us,” Romney recalled.
Embracing his inner task master, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., the self-styled ringleader of the effort with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, scheduled meetings over Thanksgiving, on weekends and late at night. Lawmakers broke into subgroups focused on the thorny issues that had divided the two parties for months: how to structure unemployment benefits, aid to states and cities, coronavirus liability protections, funds for school reopenings and other issues.
The haggling was intense and constant. Collins said she had never done so much texting before. “This was not an instance where members started it off and turned it over to staff,” she said.
Two weeks after dinner at Murkowski’s, they honed the initial $908 billion framework over slices of pizza in a large Senate hearing room and rushed to arrange a news conference for the next morning.
“None of us thought in good conscience we could go home for Christmas with all these people thrown out of their apartments, closing their businesses, getting into food lines,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said. “It would be the ultimate Scrooge-like activity.”
The moderates did not know it, but Democratic leaders had been doing their own postelection recalibration after insisting for months that less than $2 trillion was inadequate.
Three days after the dinner at Murkowski’s house, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, drove Wilmington to meet with Biden and plan the year ahead. The president-elect’s message was plain.
“He knew we could not get everything now, but anything we could get would make his job easier when he became president,” Schumer said. “We agreed.” When the moderates introduced their plan, the top Democrats saw their opportunity. They quickly embraced it as the easiest vehicle for jump-starting negotiations.
It was a major shift for the leaders, whohad rejected Trump administration proposals twice as large.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, was making his own reassessment but remained aloof in public as usual. Two days after the moderates unveiled their outline, Collins, Murkowski, Romney and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., met with McConnell in his spacious Capitol office suite to brief the leader on their plan.
He gave the lawmakers reason to be optimistic. What you have done is get Democrats off their $2 trillion dime and to reengage, he told them. That is helpful.
There was still one important person to convince: the president, who was preoccupied with baselessly contesting his election loss.
At the White House to watch Trump award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to football coach Lou Holtz, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., sat down with the president to sell him on the emerging bipartisan compromise.
“This bipartisan working group is your best way forward,” the senator told him. Trump seemed to agree, and Graham went back to Capitol Hill and relayed to reporters that he was on board.