Yahoo Finance How Biden plans to handle his first meeting with the ‘Big Four’, according to insiders
The last time Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell met with the sitting president of the United States, the date was 16 October 2019. The House had just voted 354-60 to approve a resolution condemning Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria, and was in the midst of the inquiry that would lead to his first of two impeachment trials in the Senate.
It wasn’t long before things went off the rails. The chaos culminated in a moment captured by a White House photographer, in which Pelosi — according to her recounting of events the next day — stood, pointed directly at Trump, and asked why “all roads lead to Putin” with him before leading Schumer, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and other Democrats out of the White House.
Five months before that, it was Trump who walked out on the Speaker, blowing up an agreed-upon infrastructure deal because Pelosi had accused him of “engaging in a cover-up” by refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas.
Between one impeachment, myriad investigations, and the former president’s fixation on whatever he saw on cable television on any given morning, the relationship between top Democrats and the White House was irretrievably broken by the time Pelosi walked out of that October 2019 meeting. She and Trump would not say a word to each other for the remainder of his presidency. But this week, President Joe Biden is hoping his first meeting with the so-called “big four” will set the tone for a more productive working relationship, particularly on the matter of his $2.25 trillion infrastructure proposal known as the American Jobs Plan.
For Biden, the most important ingredient needed to develop that relationship will be an answer to a question that has befuddled presidents of both parties since the founding of the republic: What do they want?
Not since the assassination of John F Kennedy thrust then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson into the presidency has there been a chief executive who was better prepared to answer that question. Even though he spent eight years as vice president under Barack Obama, Biden is still very much a creature of Congress. Only 17 people in the entire history of the country spent more time in the Senate than the 36 years and 13 days that Biden represented the people of Delaware, and fewer still have played a role in as many high-stakes legislative deal-making sessions.
“I don’t think anyone knows more about how these members of Congress want to be engaged by the White House and by the president than President Biden,” said one Capitol Hill veteran, a Democrat who worked in the White House with Biden during the Obama administration. “I think he is now perhaps uniquely positioned to know how to manage these meetings in that way.”
The former Obama administration official recalled how Biden became the Obama White House’s go-to negotiator whenever a major bill became mired in the partisan gridlock that defined the 44th president’s time in office. One pertinent example of this is during the talks that ended the 2013 government shutdown instigated by GOP Senator Ted Cruz in hopes of defunding the Affordable Care Act.
“[Biden] convened numerous meetings on very complicated and sensitive matters with Congress all the time on President Obama’s behalf, so he’s not new to this,” the source added.
Yet despite Biden’s extensive experience in dealing with Congress, he will have to confront an elephant in the room that none of his predecessors would have even dreamed of. In addition to participating in Wednesday’s meeting with the president and other congressional leaders, McCarthy, the House Republican Leader, will also participate in a House Republican Conference vote to remove Wyoming’s Liz Cheney as its chair. The California Republican — who has designs on Pelosi’s gavel should the GOP retake the House in 2022 — announced support for ousting Cheney earlier this week.
His Senate counterpart, McConnell, announced plans to repeat the scorched-earth opposition strategy he pioneered during the Obama administration, telling reporters in his home state of Kentucky that “one hundred percent of [his] focus” was on “stopping this new administration”.
So far, the Biden administration’s strategy for dealing with such potential sources of awkwardness is simple: Ignore it.
When asked on Wednesday about Cheney’s impending defenestration by her own colleagues in service of Trump’s stolen election lies, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied that Biden “has invited bipartisan leaders to come to the White House to have a discussion about where we can find common ground, and how we can work together”.
Psaki called the decision to go ahead with the meeting “an example of how [Biden] feels he can represent the American people and pursue an agenda that would help benefit people, whether they voted for him or not.”
But even as Biden ignores the bickering on the other side of the political aisle, his White House is not going to let Republican intransigence handicap him.
As one person close to the administration explained, the meetings with leadership and with other Republican Senators later this week are part of a plan to do “everything in their power to demonstrate their sincerity to create space or opportunity for bipartisan agreement,” while leaving the door open to walk away from negotiations if Republicans continue to push offer after offer in bad faith, solely for the sake of delay.
“They will do everything they can to find that common ground, and if they can’t find that common ground, at the end of the day, they’re going to do what they think is in the best interest of the American people,” they said.
For her part, Psaki appeared to confirm this at her daily briefing on Tuesday when she told reporters: “I think it’s pretty clear that most people, not only in the country but also even in elected office, believe that our infrastructure is outdated, believe that we need to create jobs, believe that we need to compete with China. Those are all areas where frankly Democrats and Republicans have worked together for decades and we are working on some different pieces of legislation in Congress now.”
“There are a lot of ways to approach a meeting like this… and the way the president is thinking about it is that… you could spend the entire meeting talking about areas of disagreement — there’s no shortage of those — or you could spend it seeking opportunity for common ground, and he’s going to use the latter,” she said. “We expect that members will come with different items on their agenda, and the president just looks forward to having a constructive meeting because he knows that they’re common values among Americans and that if we just spent all of our time competing and sniping at each other, we can’t help address the challenges we’re all facing.”
Psaki repeatedly reiterated the president’s desire to seek “common ground,” even when pressed directly on whether it was useful for Biden to invite a man who is leading a movement that rejects the legitimacy of his presidency to the White House. She dismissed the vote on Cheney as an internecine Republican matter that is not part of Wednesday’s agenda.
Yet despite such dismissals, the question of whether Republicans will cooperate or simply work to undermine Biden because their base considers him a usurper will factor into the administration’s evaluation of whether to continue talks after Wednesday.
“He needs a willing partner on the other side,” the Democratic source said. “At the end of the day, there’s this threshold question: Do the Republicans want an issue or do they want to be a part of advancing bipartisan priorities for the American people? You can’t have it both ways.”
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