“I’m proud to say I am a Senate man,” Joe Biden wrote, in 2007, his thirty-fourth year on Capitol Hill. “The job plays to my strengths and to my deepest beliefs.” Even by the standards of the Senate, Biden gloried in the club and its clichés. In his memoir, “Promises to Keep,” he cited the old saw that George Washington hailed the institution as a “cooling” body, a saucer where the boiled-over passions of the moment could dissipate. (Senators still cite it today, though historians aren’t sure that Washington ever said it.)
His faith in the Senate’s potential was not just empty pride. Since Biden was first elected to that chamber, from Delaware, in 1972, he had witnessed a variety of examples of feuds over big issues in which senators ultimately accepted personal political risk in the name of a larger national purpose. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appealed across the aisle to Howard Baker, of Tennessee, the Republican Minority Leader, to support a treaty transferring the Panama Canal to local control (a move primarily intended to improve Washington’s dealings with Latin America). Baker’s aides warned him that collaborating with Carter would doom his dream of becoming President, but Baker, it is said, weighed the national-security implications and replied, “So be it.” He backed the treaty and there was no Baker Presidency. (As a consolation prize, Baker is remembered as the “Great Conciliator.”)
When disputes erupted within parties, senators spoke admiringly of those who found their way to manage their ambitions within the larger goals. In 1993, during Bill Clinton’s first year in office, he pressed Democrats to support higher taxes in his economic program, but Senator Bob Kerrey, of Nebraska, wouldn’t budge. Clinton, in a profane, private phone call, accused him of dooming the prospects of his Presidency. Kerrey resented it, but eventually backed Clinton, saying, in a speech on the Senate floor, “I could not and should not cast the vote that brings down your Presidency.”
When Biden entered the Presidential race in 2019, he had abundant firsthand knowledge of how far the Senate in the era of the Republican leader Mitch McConnell had fallen from its self-image. As Vice-President, he had witnessed McConnell’s famous pledge to stymie the Obama Administration at every turn; his blockage of Barack Obama’s right to nominate a Supreme Court Justice; his exponential growth of the use of the filibuster. But that evidence competed in Biden’s accounting with his own history of finding a way to work with unsavory and obstreperous counterparts, including the segregationists Strom Thurmond and James Eastland. Biden had even found a way to a deal with McConnell in the final days of 2012, agreeing to leave tax cuts in place in order to avert the Republicans’ threat to default on the debt ceiling. It had irritated fellow-Democrats, but served as fresh evidence of Biden’s contention that nobody was truly immune to negotiation.
As the election approached in 2020, even as the toxicity of the Trump era infected more of Washington, Biden held fast to his contention that he could persuade enough of his opponents to join him. “All you need,” he told me in an interview that summer, “is three, or four, or five Republicans who have seen the light a little bit.” He added, “I don’t think you can underestimate the impact of Trump not being there. The vindictiveness, the pettiness, the willingness to, at his own expense, go after people with vendettas.”
It took a long, costly year in the White House for Biden to confess that he had bet wrong on the Senate he once knew. On Wednesday, during a marathon press conference on the eve of his first anniversary in office, Biden conceded, “I didn’t anticipate there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done.” Speaking to reporters in the East Room of the White House, he returned to the subject several times. “My buddy John McCain is gone,” he said, lamenting the absence of the late senator from Arizona, who had been a frequent partner on legislation and, not incidentally, one of the few Republican senators who ever challenged the calumnies and cruelties of Donald Trump. At one point, Biden posed a question to the audience that seemed at least as much a question to himself: “Did you ever think that one man out of office could intimidate an entire party, where they’re unwilling to take any vote contrary to what he thinks should be taken, for fear of being defeated in a primary?”
There were, of course, some who had urged Biden against believing that he could win Republican support. During the campaign, a Democrat who had served in the White House asked, of Biden’s assumptions, “Does he see his role as someone who can bring in the Never Trumpers and build some bipartisan consensus? I know from experience that’s a trap. We walked right into it. Your people lose faith, the Republicans never give you credit, you waste a lot of time—and you end up with the Tea Party.”
In the end, of course, it was not just Republicans who dented Biden’s hopes for the Senate; members of his own party lent a hand. For months, Biden and other Democratic leaders indulged and romanced the dissidents within, chiefly Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona—cutting one proposal after another to meet their demands on infrastructure, voting rights, and social-safety-net programs under the Build Back Better plan. In public, Senate colleagues avoided criticizing the holdouts, who would eventually be needed for votes in the future. Manchin stoked that belief, telling reporters, in a faint echo of Kerrey’s comments from 1993, that, for all his objections, he intended to “make Joe Biden successful.” As Democrats pushed to finalize the Build Back Better plan, patience was running thin. “You have made your mark on this bill, you’ve dramatically cut its cost,” Dick Durbin, the second-ranked Democrat in the Senate, told CNN, referring to Manchin. “Now close the deal.” Instead, Manchin killed it, announcing on Fox News that he could never support the bill as written.
In that light, it was a fitting bit of scheduling that, while Biden was in front of reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Manchin was speaking in the Senate, in an effort to prevent his party from changing Senate rules to allow passage of voting-rights legislation in the face of Republican resistance. All fifty Republicans later voted against the voting-rights bill, but Manchin did not suggest a way around it; on the contrary, he urged his colleagues, in effect, to embrace a high-toned paralysis. “The Senate’s greatest rule is the one that is unwritten,” he said. “It’s the rule of self-restraint, which we have very little of anymore.” By the end of the evening, Manchin and Sinema had voted with the Republicans against changing the rules, a moment that seemed to crystallize the frustrations of Biden’s first year of dealing with the Senate he revered.
For voters, activists, and reporters who have come of age in the era of intractable divisions, it can be difficult to relate to a time when Congress found a way to compromise. “It is so dramatically different from the place I worked,” Ira Shapiro, a Senate staffer from 1975 to 1987 and the author of “Broken: Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country?,” told me on Wednesday. “There were certainly times when the Senate brought legislation to the floor when you didn’t know what the outcome would be, whether it was energy legislation, or labor-law reform, or the Civil Rights Act of ’64.” Shapiro went on, “You were counting on debate on the floor, persuasion in the cloak rooms, time for the interest groups to do their lobbying, coalitions to form, and compromises to be offered. But those were times when people were operating in good faith, and bipartisan compromises were possible.”
Biden’s pitch, as a candidate, always contained the sources of both his strength and his vulnerability. His odes to unity and his faith in government seemed positively countercultural, after four years in which Trump had bathed Americans in his sulfurous brand of cynicism. During the campaign, Biden’s broad, if vague, assurances that Washington could be redeemed effectively contrasted with Trump’s undisguised politico creed—a jumble of whataboutism, contempt for human rights and American ambition, a Putinist assumption that everyone operates in bad faith. Even voters who found Biden uninspiring gravitated to him out of sheer exhaustion with the Trumpian gloom.
As Biden passed his first anniversary, the assessments of his tenure mapped, in predictable fashion, on to the terrain of Washington. The White House pointed to the creation of 6.4 million jobs, more than had been created in any previous year; to an unemployment rate of 3.9 per cent that was far below the level when he took office; and to generational investments in infrastructure. But his approval ratings were dismal—lower than those of any post-Second World War President except for Trump at the end of his first year—and no matter how many times it was noted that the President was only at the end of the first quarter of his term, columnists already seemed to be competing to declare game over as early as possible. If Washington ever had a “cooling” saucer, it has rarely been harder to find.
Among the assessments of Biden’s first year, it was tempting to fault him for a stubborn naïveté, but Ira Shapiro understands the impulse to see the Senate redeem itself. “I doubt that Biden was under any illusions about the changes in the Senate, or about McConnell. I think he believed that the multiple crises in the country were clear enough that people, in good faith, would come together and make our government work. And he would’ve thought—most of us would’ve thought—that the fundamental assault on our democracy would be clear enough that at least Sinema and Manchin, and, perhaps, one or two Republicans, would recognize the threat.” He added, “The tragedy is we’re still living in McConnell’s America, aided and abetted by Manchin and Sinema.”
