Biden looks down on McConnell in the debt ceiling battle with Speaker McCarthy
WASHINGTON — With Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives in January amid a messy battle over who will lead them, President Joe Biden has worked to show he can work with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-C.
“He’s willing to find common ground,” Biden said of his longtime negotiating partner as the two stood together in Kentucky, noting how a bipartisan infrastructure package would finally help a major bridge project there.
Perhaps the most significant bipartisan compromise they brokered in decades was the 2011 deal to avoid defaulting on state debt when Biden was vice president. Now that the federal government is once again facing potential default if Democrats and Republicans can’t work out their deadlock, it might seem logical that Biden and McConnell will find a way out again.
Although Biden has not yet developed much of a relationship with Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, he has called McConnell a “true friend” and “trusted partner.”
But McConnell insists he is not a player this time around.
“This will eventually be resolved, in my opinion, when the speaker and the president come to an agreement,” McConnell said last week.
That’s the message he said he would take to Tuesday’s meeting between Biden and the four top congressional leaders.
Republicans are trying to give McCarthy as strong a negotiating hand as possible.
“We stand with Speaker McCarthy,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “We will support whatever the speaker negotiates.”
But Democrats say no deal can’t happen without McConnell.
“McConnell always says he’s not involved until he’s one,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, a veteran of the 2011 debt-limit crisis, told USA TODAY.
If nothing else, there is the fact that some Republican senators will need to back any deal to prevent a filibuster.
“At the end of the day, McConnell has to participate because the Senate has to vote,” Van Hollen said. “No matter how you do it, you need 60 votes in the Senate.”
But Rohit Kumar, who was McConnell’s chief negotiator in the 2011 debt-limit standoff, said one of McConnell’s strengths is assessing what is achievable politically.
“No, what do I want? What do I wish for? But what can actually be achieved given the current arrangement of available powers and votes?” said Kumar, who is now chair of the Washington tax policy group at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “And the most effective way to find out this outcome is for House Speaker McCarthy and President Biden to agree together on this proposal.”
Kumar said McConnell could help behind the scenes facilitate the talks. But he can’t be the GOP’s chief negotiator.
“Politically, the McConnell-Biden agreement forced on the House will land very differently than the McCarthy-Biden agreement, even if it is the exact same agreement,” he said.
The White House declined to discuss what role McConnell could play.
“We do not comment on private discussions between President Biden and congressional leaders,” said spokesman Andrew Bates.
Likewise, McConnell’s spokesperson will not go over McConnell’s public comments.
That’s no surprise to Jim Kessler, the former legislative director for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, DNY, and now senior vice president for policy at the center-left think tank Third Way.
“It’s the least he says but sometimes it has the most impact,” Kessler said. “I don’t know when McConnell will utter his first line. He’s like Orson Welles in The Third Man. He’ll suddenly appear out of the shadows. But he’ll wait as long as he can.”
In 2011, after Biden and McConnell worked out the details on a basic agreement on spending cuts, they resolved the latest dispute over funding for the Pentagon as the time for default approached.
The Associated Press reported at the time: “The Final Solution originated in the Senate, and it was McConnell who finally offered it to Biden.”
Washington faced the same division of political control as now. Democrats hold the White House and Senate; Republicans had the House of Representatives.
But McConnell said other things have changed.
“A lot of people are pointing back to 10 years ago when President Biden and I worked out a deal,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “This was a different group of players than we have today.”
The newcomer is McCarthy. And he did what many did not expect him to be able to do: pass a bill through the House of Representatives that would avoid default on trillions of dollars in spending cuts and roll back some of Biden’s policy initiatives.
“Look what he’s done. It’s great what Kevin has done,” Senator Rick Scott told reporters when asked if McCarthy would be the best messenger for the GOP at the White House meeting or whether McConnell should do a bigger role.
Senate Republicans have been remarkably disciplined in echoing that message and standing behind McCarthy.
The main difference from 2011 is that the Republicans have a much smaller majority in the House of Representatives. And to get the votes he needed to become Speaker of the House, McCarthy agreed to make it easier for his fellow Republican to try to get off the gavel. Kumar said the last thing McConnell wants to do is anything that could make the Republican president more dangerous.
This dynamic, he said, and the fact that the government may be short of funds to pay its bills as early as June 1, makes it necessary for McCarthy-Biden to resolve the impasse.
Kumar said the “luxury of shuttle diplomacy” in which McConnell could use his relationships with both McCarthy and Biden to help broker a compromise, “may no longer be available.”
But Scott Muhlhauser, a veteran Senate staffer and former Biden aide, said McConnell needs to live up to responsibility.
“McConnell does the calculus that staying out of this fight right now is the best math for him and his oversight of Senate Republicans,” Mullhauser said, “but it leaves a huge hole and there is no solution because the country is on the brink of default.” on its debts.”
Contributing: Joe Sonka, The Courier Journal, and Bart Jansen, USA TODAY
