Just a few months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Mitch McConnell made plain how he and his colleagues planned to approach the White House and its Democratic majority on Capitol Hill. “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” he told reporters last spring. It was no empty threat; he’d spent much of Barack Obama’s tenure doing just that. That Biden, who as Obama’s vice president had a front row seat to McConnell’s obstructionism, would nevertheless make bipartisanship the north star of his legislative agenda struck many as overly-optimistic at best and foolish at worst.
Biden has, predictably, endured a number of frustrations in the first six months of his presidency at the hands of McConnell and a Republican party devoted to Donald Trump. But he has also scored some big victories, seeing through legislation that, while imperfect, represents significant progress for the country. First there was his COVID relief bill, which he enacted despite opposition from the GOP. Now there’s the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, which passed in the Senate Tuesday with the help of McConnell and a handful of his colleagues.
Biden hailed the passage both as a boon to the country and as proof that “democracy can still work”—that is, that the compromise and unity he preached on the campaign trail and has pursued as president isn’t so outmoded after all. “I know a lot of people...didn’t think this could happen,” Biden said in remarks at the White House Tuesday. “Bringing the country together and doing things in a bipartisan way, it was characterized as a relic of an earlier age.”
“As you may well remember, I never believed that,” Biden continued. “I still don’t.”
But Biden has also shown that for all his reverence for bipartisanship, he’s aware of its limits—and, hours after the infrastructure bill’s 60-39 passage, Senate Democrats approved a $3.5 trillion budget in a party line vote to set the stage for a “soft infrastructure” plan that the GOP uniformly opposes. “Make no mistake,” McConnell said of those proposals, whatever spirit of compromise that had possessed him now vanished, “this reckless taxing and spending spree is like nothing we’ve seen.”
The two votes—one bipartisan, one along party lines—seem, at first glance, to paint contradictory pictures of Washington in 2021. In one, compromise is possible despite the divisions, overheated rhetoric, and glowering presence of Trump, who had demanded the GOP mobilize against the legislation. “Don’t do it Republicans,” Trump warned in one tirade. “Patriots will never forget!” That the GOP, loyal as they are to the former president, defied him and handed a political win to Biden would seem to suggest that a course of compromise might not be so ill-considered after all. But then there’s the other picture: One where human infrastructure like universal kindergarten and family leave benefits and initiatives to help an environment that scientists warn is in grave danger is cast as “far-left radicalism” and can only be enacted by bypassing Republican sabotage.
But what the two votes really illustrate is the points at which these competing states of play intersect and diverge. McConnell is an obstructionist at heart, but as minority leader, he can only stonewall Democrats if the filibuster is in place. The threat that his opponents could weaken or abolish it, however unlikely Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have made that prospect, appears to have put pressure on him to prove that he is willing to at least do something other than stand in the way. “I’ve never felt that we ought to be perceived as being opposed to everything,” McConnell told the Washington Post, completely contradicting his statement in May that “100 percent of my focus” is on defeating the Biden agenda.
“Perceived,” may be the operative word here. The GOP still has little appetite for playing nice with Biden and Democrats, but McConnell seems aware that it’s in his interest to have something to point at to argue against changing the filibuster—or, as Democrats did in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, move to advance their priorities with no Republicans on board. Reflexively oppose everything and you’re an obstructionist. Allow a win on a popular proposal, though, and you can more convincingly argue that denying other legislation makes you a careful gatekeeper. “Bills that deserve to pass this chamber,” McConnell said Tuesday, “are not having a hard time passing it.”
It’s a sleight of hand that allows McConnell to claim credit for the uncontroversial investments in roads and bridges, while positioning himself as the adult in the room trying to keep his intemperate counterparts in line. But it’s not true: Democrats may have gone it alone on “soft infrastructure,” but the proposals are no more extremist than their efforts to protect Americans’ voting rights or to seek accountability for the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, each of which McConnell and the Senate GOP have blocked. The lack of bipartisan unity on those and other Democratic priorities does not reflect how “radical” Biden is, as the minority leader has suggested. It reflects how radical much of the GOP remains.
Democrats won’t be able to make good on their promises by relying on Republicans to act in good faith, as they acknowledged in their 50-49 budget vote early Wednesday. But standing together to “go forward in addressing the long-neglected needs of working families,” as Bernie Sanders put it, is one thing. Uniting on a fleshed-out plan to do that could be a bit more complicated. Sanders, the point person on the human infrastructure legislation in the Senate, promised on the floor that it will “not only provide enormous support to the kids of this country, to the parents of this country, to the elderly people of this country,” but will also “restore the belief that in America we can have a government that works for all, not just the few.” But Democrats may have different ideas of what that looks like, with Manchin and other moderates expressing concern about the cost of the plan, among other things.
Those differences will have to be bridged in order to pass the bill through reconciliation, as they are aiming to do by the middle of next month — something that won’t be easy, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer conceded Wednesday. “With 50 votes at a time when Republicans on too many issues refuse to cooperate at all...we all need to be unified, and everyone knows that,” he told reporters. “Is it going to be easy on reconciliation? Absolutely not.” But Biden and Democratic leaders have managed to thread the needle on other priorities. Having successfully brokered a compromise with Republicans on infrastructure, they seem confident that they’ll be able to do the same among members of their own party. “At the end of the day, we have to come together,” Schumer said. “If past is prologue, we have a good, decent chance.”
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