FIFTY-EIGHT
Senator Collins was in her office the next day, Monday morning, when one of her staffers came in and reported Leader Schumer had announced on the Senate floor that he would file to use the reconciliation process. It was a procedural move but signaled Democrats’ intentions.
“I can’t believe it,” Collins said. It was less than 24 hours after the White House meeting with Biden that she had practically gushed over. In her view, she was expecting the White House to come back with a new number. “That means they’re not going to do a counteroffer and we expected a counteroffer.”
For Collins, this proved that Biden had moved firmly to the left. She liked to think she was down the middle, almost a perfect centrist. “I think I’m center-center,” she told others. She was the only Republican senator who won in a state that Biden had carried.
Collins was sure Schumer’s move on reconciliation had Biden’s blessing. She believed that Biden’s staff, especially Klain, and Schumer had pushed the president.
She also thought Schumer could be trying to solidify his liberal credentials because he faced a possible primary threat in his 2024 Senate race from a progressive star, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had become so famous she was now referred to as AOC, a leading member of the so-called “Squad” inside the House.
Progressives had been pressing Schumer for days. Senator Elizabeth Warren approached him after hearing of the Republican number of just $618 billion. “Don’t take it,” she urged.
Speaking on the floor on February 2, Schumer declared Senate Democrats ready to work with Senate Republicans but also said they were quite willing to go on without them, should they stall Biden’s plan.
“We want this entire effort to be bipartisan. We do,” Schumer said. “But helping the American people with the big, bold relief they need, that is job number one. That is job number one. So again: We’re not going to dilute, dither, or delay.”
The White House sent documents and papers to Collins attempting to justify some of their numbers. As best she could tell, one document had been prepared by the American Federation of Teachers, the teacher’s union, to justify Biden’s school aid number of $170 billion.
Schumer later that day confirmed Collins’s suspicions, saying to reporters, “Joe Biden is totally on board with using reconciliation,” he said. “I’ve been talking to him every day. Our staffs have been talking multiple times a day.”
Collins and Schumer were not on speaking terms. She had absolutely loathed the way Senate Democrats targeted her during her 2020 reelection race. Democrats poured $180 million into the campaign, which she ultimately won by nine points. She thought the Democrats’ ads were unnecessarily personal, dirty, calling her a fraud controlled by Trump and McConnell.
Collins, a Catholic, later quipped to friends, “For Lent, I gave up my anger at Chuck Schumer. It was either that or wine and I decided I’d rather have my glass of wine at night.”
She approached McConnell at the Senate GOP’s lunch later that day. The lunches were typically closed sessions where one senator picked the cuisine each week, usually something from their home state. Whenever southern senators catered the lunch, visitors to the Capitol and reporters in the halls could smell the hot brisket and corn bread.
Collins told McConnell the previous day’s meeting with Biden seemed to have gone well, but she was completely caught off guard by Schumer’s reconciliation announcement. It had blindsided her. It was such bad faith, Collins said. Getting 10 Republicans to agree on $618 billion and publicly stand by that kind of spending increase wasn’t easy, she said. Didn’t the White House get that?
McConnell was not surprised. He did not expect Biden and Schumer to move so quickly, to put their reconciliation card down that fast. But he expected they eventually would.
“Joe Biden has an A+ personality,” McConnell said a few minutes later to the large group of Republicans at the lunch, “but you shouldn’t assume he’s a centrist.”
So that became the Republican line. Biden was a nice fellow, a friend to many, but no moderate—and his staff was steering him further left.
As reconciliation picked up momentum, McConnell told senators and his aides he believed Biden was not going to coast. He was playing for history.
“He has a vision of what he wants America to look like and I do, too,” McConnell said. “And it’s different. And the reason we haven’t been having any conversations this year is he’s doing what every Democratic president wants to do, which is to push the country as far left as possible, as rapidly as possible.
“They all want to be the next FDR,” McConnell said, referring to a long line of Democratic presidents. “They know they can’t have three terms, but they’re hoping there will be a monument.”
“Look,” McConnell told others, “if you’ve made it that far in politics, your second thought, after you say, ‘My God, I can’t believe it, I got to be president of the United States,’ is, ‘I’d like to be a great president of the United States.’ ”
As the lunch wrapped up on February 2, Collins went around the room and gave Republicans her personal pool report: their old friend seemed sympathetic to negotiating but the people around him did not.
Collins recounted Klain’s head shakes, shaking her own head about the chief of staff. She thought it was inappropriate for a chief of staff to provide a visible and negative head-shaking commentary during the president’s meetings with the political opposition. And she was deeply offended for the Republicans and Biden himself. It was heavy-handed and rude.
As Biden pushed ahead, he called McConnell, ostensibly about Myanmar. The Senate Republican leader had long supported pro-democracy efforts in the country formerly known as Burma. It was one of the rare policy areas where they had real agreement.
Biden asked McConnell for policy recommendations and advice, then briefly switched to his $1.9 trillion rescue plan. What do you think?
McConnell said it was unlikely the president would see any Senate Republican support for another spending package as big as Biden had outlined. There was no way they could support something of that scope.
For McConnell, it was a statement of the obvious. He was not impolite. Just a summary judgment. A repeat of his public statements.
McConnell’s influential and plugged-in chief of staff, Sharon Soderstrom, made similar points to senior Biden aides in private discussions in early February. She never gave them an exact vote count, but she told them Senate Republicans remained wary of more unemployment insurance because it hurt businesses that were trying to reopen. Too many people were making more money by not working and staying home.
Klain saw Biden did not have some special way of persuading McConnell, no magic power as the “McConnell whisperer,” as some called Biden during the Obama years. But he did know how to negotiate with McConnell.
“For example,” Klain once said, “you’re not going to persuade Mitch McConnell that he’s wrong about the estate tax. That he didn’t have the right class at the Kennedy School to explain to him the regressive nature. That’s not what Joe Biden tries to do. He’s like, ‘Okay, you tell me what you need to get this done. I’ll tell you what I need.’ ”
Inside the White House, there was a growing belief McConnell and Senate Republicans were stalling and holding to their position for a reason: They were not sure Biden could get the whole thing passed, hold all 50 Democrats.
Let him try, they seemed to be saying with their actions, and let us see if he can really keep Manchin and the progressives, with such different ideologies, together for a final vote. And if Biden can’t do that, he might have to come groveling back to us to cut a smaller deal and save his first 100 days.
“His troops are lined up against it,” Klain said within the White House. “Maybe we’ll get a Republican vote, maybe we won’t. I don’t know. But the fundamental problem Republicans have in fighting it is it’s popular” with the public, including with Republican voters.
In the West Wing, Klain talked up what he called his “little red hen theory” of Biden’s rescue plan—and for the 2022 elections. He was taking names.
“If we pass this thing, we beat Covid, and get the economy moving, the people who helped pick the wheat and make the bread will share in the credit,” Klain said. “The people who did not, will not.”
McConnell told his staff, “When we will engage is when that fails.” Maybe Biden would get this rescue bill through but there would come a point, now or later, where he would need the Republicans at the table. That was the leverage point.
“That’s when we start dealing with each other,” McConnell said about his strategy. “I don’t blame him for not dealing with me now because I don’t like anything he’s doing.”
McConnell believed the economy was picking up, the vaccine was going out. Senate Republicans could sit tight and not look like misers to the voters they wanted to win in 2022. This was not like March 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, or like the frightening lurch into the financial crisis in late 2008.