The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Can Biden, McConnell get it done?
History of bipartisan deals faces test of changing times.
WASHINGTON— In late July 2011, with an economy- shaking Treasury default only a few days away and Congress flailing, Sen. Mitch McConnell received a Saturday phone call from Joe Biden, then the vice president.
“I think it’s time we talk,” Biden told McConnell, R- Ky., who was then the minority leader.
That opening, recounted by McConnell in his memoir “The Long Game,” initiated the second in a series of one- on- one tax and budget negotiations that produced agreements that rescued the government from imminent fiscal disaster while drawing mixed reviews from fellow Democrats.
President- elect Biden could be making a lot more of those phone calls in the years ahead.
Unless Democrats pick off two seats in Georgia, to be decided in runoff elections on Jan. 5, Biden will have to navigate a Senate narrowly controlled by McConnell, who has happily turned the chamber into a graveyard for Democratic legislation. The likelihood of a Senate under Republican rule severely constrains Biden’s legislative and personnel agenda from the start.
Yet as much as anyone across the aisle, Biden — as garrulous as McConnell is aloof — has a close relationship with the Senate leader and a track record of working
with him to strike bipartisan deals. The Kentuckian has described Biden not only as someone he liked but also as a man of his word who understands how congressional negotiations work and who knows how to give as well as take.
“He doesn’t waste time telling me why I am wrong,” McConnell said in a bipartisan parting tribute in 2016 as Biden presided over the Senate. “He gets down to brass tacks, and he keeps in sight the stakes. There’s a reason ‘ Get Joe on the phone’ is shorthand for ‘ Time to get serious’ in my office.”
Their ties have gone beyond business: McConnell attended the funeral of Biden’s son Be auin 2015, and Biden spoke at McConnell’s government affairs center in Louisville, Kentucky.
“My memory is that they actually get along reasonably well,” said Rohit Kumar, who as deputy chief of staff to McConnell sat in on the three Biden- McConnellnegotiations from 2010 to 2013. “They have a lot of respect for one another. It helps that they speak the same language.
They are senators.”
But much has changed in the Senate in the four years since Biden left public office and evenmore inthe decade since he left the chamber, where relations between the two parties are now bitter and hostile and McConnell has abandoned legislation in single- minded pursuit of the confirmation of conservative judges.
When Biden suggested during the campaign that he could work with his old friend, many Democratic senators scoffed and said McConnell would eat Biden’s lunch. And by Sunday afternoon, 24 hours after Biden had been declared the victor, McConnell still had yet to issue a statement congratulating the president- elect.
Biden’s allies say he is far from naïve about the state of the Senate and McConnell’s track record. He was, after all, part of the Obama team whose initiatives were opposed in almost blanket fashion by a man who declared his chief objective was to make Obama a oneterm president.
McConnell’s deep- seated resistance peaked with the refusal to even consider Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016. But colleagues say that Biden is not the sort to surrender before the battle begins.
“Is this going to be the Mitch McConnell ofone- term Obama threats, or is it going to be a different Mitch McConnell?” asked Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “I really don’t know.”
For now, McConnell is not talking, declining interviews during a delicate period when Trump has resisted the election results and control of the Senate remains unclear. Members of both parties and McConnell’s allies say he will be influenced by the contours of the 2022 election map and whether he wants to cement a legacy beyond the determined judicial push that placed more than 200judges on the federal courts, including three Supreme Court justices. McConnell has recently declined to directly negotiate with Democrats at all, delegating pandemic talks to the Trump administration.
Unless Democrats pick off two seats in Georgia, to be decidedin runoff elections on Jan. 5, Biden will have to navigate a Senate narrowly controlled by McConnell.