FIFTY-SIX
Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican and moderate, was being driven to the Bangor airport by her husband, Tom Daffron, on Sunday, January 31, when President Biden phoned.
“Just got your letter,” Biden said in his instantly recognizable chipper and encouraging voice.
Collins, now beginning her fifth term in the Senate, had orchestrated a letter to Biden from 10 Republican senators. They had sent it to the White House earlier in the day with a counteroffer to Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue plan. The Republicans proposed less than one third of what Biden had outlined—$618 billion.
She instantly recognized the old Joe on the phone, engaged and unhurried. He wanted to update and chat. They knew each other very well. They had overlapped during her first 12 years in the Senate and another eight when Biden was vice president and president of the Senate.
Collins did not want to cut off the new president, but she also did not want to miss her flight to Washington. She asked her husband to keep circling the airport.
“I really have to catch my plane,” she finally said.
Biden said he would be happy to meet as the Republicans had requested in their letter. How about tomorrow?
“May I inform the other nine Republicans?”
Please wait until you have landed in Washington, Biden said. Collins thought the request unusual, but she realized he probably wanted to inform his staff. Biden had long been a compulsive phone addict, always anxious to pick up the phone to reach out or meet when he saw a problem, especially an opportunity to negotiate. Collins had just sent the letter hours earlier to the White House, which might not have been fully staffed on a Sunday.
When Ron Klain saw the letter, he was flabbergasted. One third of Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan was a staggeringly low number, certainly not serious.
The letter was filled with optimism and appeals to bipartisan action, beginning, “As you proclaimed in your Inaugural Address, overcoming the challenges facing our nation ‘requires the most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity.’ ”
The letter also said, “In the spirit of bipartisanship and unity, we have developed a COVID-19 relief framework that builds on prior COVID assistance laws, all of which passed with bipartisan support.” But the opening bid did not seem to match the professed comity.
Biden, however, told Klain he would not reject the proposal. That did not mean he would embrace it. He just wanted to hear more. Perhaps these Republicans were willing to move on from Trump and cut a deal with him. Perhaps the number in the letter was fluid. He would have them over. His style, of course, was to listen. Do not let one letter define everything. It was an overture.
Once back in Washington, Collins was informed the White House had reached out. Biden would see them at 5 p.m. the next day, Monday, February 1. She called up the nine other Republicans in her group, from Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to Senator Todd Young of Indiana to Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
Collins whipped them into gear, playing assignment editor. Each senator was to present and focus on a key part of the rescue plan. They were going to show Biden he was proposing far too much too soon, with too much unnecessary spending.
Collins informed Leader Mitch McConnell about the coming meeting with Biden. He gave his blessing but told her he did not want to be directly involved at this point. Ten of them going over to see Biden could serve as McConnell’s trial balloon, his chance to take Biden’s measure. He would watch how Biden, his newly empowered former colleague, handled a big-money, big-stakes negotiation. He would also get a better sense of where the president might be heading.
McConnell also knew Collins had long been a member of a broader group of about 20 Republican and Democratic senators who liked to meet privately to discuss bipartisan ideas. They often got together for dinners and hush-hush meetings. McConnell tracked those discussions but rarely fretted about them. They talked a lot but there was little evidence they went anywhere.
Politics was ruthlessly partisan, McConnell believed. Bipartisanship was fine—if it was the only way to achieve something concrete that he could not get any other way, and without giving up too much in a deal with the Democrats.
Biden had learned over the decades that meetings—particularly long meetings—could be useful to move people off their talking points. Most senators only knew the short version of proposed legislation, which could run hundreds of pages. A long discussion might eventually open some areas for compromise. But it took time. As Obama’s vice president, he had led a marathon of 11 working-group meetings with Republicans from May 5 to June 22, 2011, on a long-term resolution to the federal debt. The talks broke down, he knew all too well. But they had come close.
The context for the upcoming meeting was important. Biden’s rescue plan was a tax-and-budget bill. If the Democrats chose, they could invoke a Senate rule called “reconciliation.” Under arcane Senate rules for legislation involving budgets, only a majority vote was required. It would also not be subject to the filibuster, which effectively required 60 votes for passage. With the 50-50 Senate and Vice President Harris’s tie-breaking vote, the rescue plan could pass, 51 to 50, if Biden could keep all 50 Democrats in line—a big, uncertain task. But maybe a possibility.
A masked President Biden entered the Oval Office at 5 p.m. on Monday, February 1, on the 12th day of his presidency. He took the presidential seat with his back to the fireplace.
He was friendly but this was not entirely the old Joe strolling in, all laughs and smiles, catching up with pals and talking about a sports team. He seemed to be saying this is business time. He had a stack of memos in his hand and a notebook in his lap.
One light touch: his dark socks with small blue dogs poking out of his pant legs.
Vice President Harris was to his right in the other chair. Collins, sitting upright in a hunter green dress, was to Biden’s left on the couch nearest to him. All were wearing masks and seated far apart.
“Thanks for coming down,” Biden said softly as he looked around the room. They thanked him profusely. “Thank you, Mr. President.”
“No, no, no,” Biden said, “I’m anxious to talk.” He paused. “I feel like I’m back in the Senate, which I liked the best of everything I did.”
The nine Senate Republicans in the room chuckled. They also came armed with folders and notebooks. The 10th, Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, joined by speakerphone. Klain, Ricchetti and other aides sat in the back.
The good news, Collins began, was they agreed with Biden’s $160 billion proposal for vaccine distribution and testing as a direct, necessary response to the pandemic.
But then she and other Senate Republicans addressed the core of their objections to the $1.9 trillion. They did not believe the economy was in dire straits. The $900 billion aid package just passed by Congress in December was more than enough.
“Now,” Biden told them, “let’s go through where we’re in disagreement.” He wanted the details, to get to the “granularity,” the word he used more and more in meetings.
The Republicans seemed to speak with one voice. Biden was proposing $465 billion for direct payments or stimulus checks of $1,400 to individuals. The Republican proposal was for $220 billion, less than half. Instead of the additional $1,400 check in his plan, which came on top of the $600 checks already in the December package, why not shrink the new check to $900? Maybe $800 or $700? They piled on.
Senator Murkowski of Alaska suggested $1,000.
Biden was listening but he did not give any ground.
Klain began shaking his head. No. If there had been one winner for Biden on politics and policy, it was the $1,400 check. Added to the $600 sent out in the previous stimulus plan in December, it amounted to $2,000.
The $2,000 was a promise made by the two new Democratic senators from Georgia. They had both won in a long-standing red state by telling crowd after crowd they needed to vote for them to get the extra $1,400. Biden had been right there with them. The result was a 50-50 Senate.
Klain shook his head again.
Collins looked over at Klain. Who was this random man in the back making a spectacle? Rudely shaking his head? She did not recognize him behind his mask. She turned to Senator Rob Portman of Ohio. “Do you know who that guy is?”
Ron Klain, Portman whispered.
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a fiscal conservative who had been the lone Republican senator in the upper chamber to vote to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial, also noticed Klain’s head shakes. A former member of corporate boards, Romney knew the power of little gestures.
“I think Ron thinks this a nonstarter,” Romney said, turning to the room.
Some Senate Republicans and Biden aides laughed uneasily. Klain did not answer. It was crazy, in his view, to want to discuss how Biden might not do the one thing he made clear he would do.
Klain later realized he was perhaps shaking his head a little more vigorously than he had intended. He had not meant to be venal or dismissive. But he thought the Senate Republicans’ position was ridiculous, a flat-out denial of a major Biden win.
Biden brought up what Klain had been thinking about: Georgia.
“We won the elections in Georgia on this issue,” Biden said.
The room fell quiet for a moment. No Old Joe. He was playing and talking practical politics.
Romney, sitting across from Biden and Collins on another couch, kept the discussion moving. He brought out some charts he had carried in. He proceeded to argue, CEO-style, that some states did not need money at this point in the pandemic, even if some struggling cities did. He started to explain his formula for how aid for states and cities should be allocated.
Romney said nearly half of the states had seen their revenues increase, so why give them more? And others, he said, had not yet spent the money Trump and Congress had passed and allocated last year.
Romney’s argument perplexed Klain. He knew the Republican proposal included no state or local aid. Biden’s proposal was a whopping $350 billion. Why was Romney talking about a formula? Zero times anything is still zero. The idea that these people were lecturing them about a formula, when they had put nothing on the table. It was bullshit, Klain thought.
He shook his head again.
Portman, a former Office of Management and Budget director and U.S. trade representative during George W. Bush’s presidency, weighed in. Like Romney, he was known as a calm, business-minded Republican who remained close to the Bush family. Unlike Romney, Portman was far less antagonistic toward Trump, who was still beloved by Ohio Republicans.
Portman also had reason to hope Biden might be willing to deal. He had announced a week earlier he would not seek a third Senate term in 2022. Biden had called him. The conversation had gone well.
But he was also realistic. Days earlier, Portman had spoken with Steve Ricchetti by phone, urging him to tell the president he was starting off on the wrong foot if they were going to plow ahead without looping in Senate moderates, along with the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House.
Ricchetti had disagreed. He said President Biden and Senate Republicans did not see this crisis the same way. They were looking at different data, talking to different experts. The president was determined to go big. He could never be convinced to sit on his hands in his first few months.
Portman urged Ricchetti to have Biden think hard about that position. Whatever Biden did in the coming weeks could define his presidency.
“This is a Sister Souljah moment for Biden,” Portman had told Ricchetti, a reference to Bill Clinton’s rebuke, in 1992, to the Black female activist’s call for Black people to kill white people for a week instead of killing Black people. It was widely seen as an attempt by Clinton to define himself as a centrist and to court suburban voters.
Portman had told Ricchetti, “Take the microphone and say, ‘You know what? We sent this package up there. It’s our campaign agenda. We believe in it. But we’re all going to take a deep breath and we’re going to stop.’ ” He said Biden could easily start over and do something bipartisan and smaller. Unite the country. Ricchetti was polite but they were speaking different languages.
In other meetings and calls with Senate Republicans in late January, Brian Deese and Jeff Zients also had not given any indication Biden might back down. Ricchetti was part of a White House chorus.
Sitting in the Oval Office on February 1, Portman tried again, this time directly addressing Biden, to pull him back from his left-leaning temptations. He told Biden he was not enthralled by parts of the rescue plan he believed had nothing to do with the pandemic. That included the child tax credit, he said, and he noted the Internal Revenue Service had told him and others it would probably take a long time to implement it.
Passing the child tax credit will not immediately help families dealing with the virus, Portman said. He said the economy was improving, with the nation’s gross domestic product poised to bounce back.
We have worked together in the past, Biden said.
I know that, sir, Portman said.
Biden would not back off his approach or his numbers.
Klain vehemently disagreed with Portman’s characterization of the child tax credit. Would implementing it be hard? Of course. Asking the IRS to do anything was a challenge. But it was doable. He started to shake his head again.
Collins glared at Klain.
White House aides perked up when Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia began to speak. Capito, though a Republican, was close to Joe Manchin, her state’s Democratic senator. Manchin was the critical Democratic vote. Whatever she said could be an indicator of what Manchin might want.
Capito said Biden should consider a shorter time frame for the $400 unemployment insurance benefit that was part of the president’s plan, which was in addition to the $1,400 checks. Biden’s plan called for the $400 to be paid through September 2021. The Senate Republicans called for the $400 to be paid only through July.
Capito said keeping that benefit on a tight leash was her paramount concern. If it went on too long, she worried too many people in West Virginia would decide against returning to work. In her state, the weekly unemployment payment would amount to $724—or about $19 an hour, which was more than twice the $8.75 minimum wage in West Virginia.
Biden said he was happy to discuss Capito’s suggestion. He then declared, “I’m definitely sticking with September.”
Let’s get back to areas of agreement, Biden said turning to Collins. “You have a way of doing small business in your bill.” He knew aid to shuttered businesses was one of her core issues. She had been a regional director for the Small Business Administration in George H. W. Bush’s administration before being elected to the Senate.
“I have a way of doing small business. They’re roughly the same size,” Biden said. Both had plans for $50 billion. “You know what? I will put aside mine and I’ll do it your way. We could replace my small business plan with your small business plan. We can do that.”
Collins was receptive. “Good,” she said. “Our goals are the same.”
The discussion continued—civil and circular. Biden stuck to his $1.9 trillion, frequently looking down at one of his memos or his notebook. The Republicans stuck to $618 billion.
Biden adjourned the meeting. He said his staff would follow up with them. “Brian Deese will be in touch with you,” he said. “Right, Brian?”
Klain believed Biden had handled the meeting well.
Some of the Republicans later told others they began to wonder if this was all show. Was Biden just having a meeting as cover to say he tried? It would be hard to believe. Joe was not that type of guy to lead them on and then bolt, right? And he had given them an hour more than scheduled.