“It’s a place that reflects — you know, we’re a big country. And you’ve got to listen to the other person’s perspective. And there’s never a time to brook prejudice or meanness, but there are different points of view, culturally, based on where you live.”
“That’s what the Senate did,” Biden told reporters just after swearing in the new class of senators. “It tends to homogenize that in time, bring you together.”
Seventeen days later, Biden watched on the Capitol’s East Front as Donald Trump was sworn in as president, setting off a four-year run of pugilistic politics that transformed the American system.
Today’s Senate is completely different from the chamber Biden left in early 2009. As he prepares to occupy the job he has pursued ever since his first Senate race 48 years ago, the august body that restored Biden’s faith now stands as his biggest obstacle to success.
Republicans hold a 50-to-48 majority, with two seats up for grabs during the Georgia runoff elections on Jan. 5. If Democrats don’t capture both seats, Biden’s agenda and appointments will hinge on how much Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wants to play ball.
Biden has publicly expressed confidence that he can work with McConnell, who called Biden a “trusted partner” during their dealmaking days under President Barack Obama. But Obama himself eviscerated McConnell in his new memoir, “A Promised Land,” recounting how Biden once pleaded for the GOP leader’s cooperation on a key piece of legislation Obama supported.
When Biden tried to explain the merits of the legislation, McConnell shot back: “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care,” according to Obama’s recounting.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has made clear that she does not intend to play nice with McConnell. “He’s been known to come to my office and say, ‘I’m not doing anything Donald Trump doesn’t want,’ ” Pelosi told reporters Friday, explaining how she now intends to reverse that role on McConnell.
“Our leverage and our power is greatly enhanced by having a Democratic president in the White House,” Pelosi said.
Some Democrats are worried that Biden is out of step on this issue, harboring naive views of a bygone era of a nearly all-male, backslapping Senate.
By early next year, just 31 senators will have served with Sen. Biden, before Obama won the 2008 presidential election. More than two dozen will have taken office after Trump was elected president.
But Biden’s views of the Senate are more nuanced than his public pronouncements.
In early 2016, he agreed to a plea from Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to serve as the top surrogate for Democrats trying to flip the Senate so Hillary Clinton could advance her agenda, should she defeat Trump.
“The one most important ingredient a sitting president needs is the Senate of the same party. It is really, really important,” Biden said in early August 2016 in his West Wing office, one of several interviews with The Washington Post that came during four campaign trips across the nation.
Almost two years into McConnell’s tenure as majority leader, Biden diagnosed a hyperpartisan Senate that had suffered from legislative atrophy. “I don’t like to see what’s happened to it. I don’t like to see how it has — how it’s devolved, how there’s very little personal relationships up there,” he said.
Literally, Biden said, no one wanted to break bread together: The senators-only dining room on the Capitol’s first floor once served as a daily hub, young senators sitting to the side as old committee chairmen cut deals at the main table, but had now become a thing of the past.
“Not only is there nobody in there, there’s no tables in there anymore. There are lounge chairs, you know, like in a normal room,” Biden said in August 2016. “That’s what it looks like. I’m thinking to myself, Jesus criminy Christ!”
During that campaign, Biden campaigned hard for younger candidates such as Jason Kander, a Missouri Democrat who had served as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan. The vice president thought Kander, then 35, could be a new version of young Joe Biden, helping return the Senate to a more personality-driven place.
“I think folks are looking for authenticity,” he said in a St. Louis diner with Kander at his side.
By Election Day, Biden made plans to join Schumer, who was set to succeed retiring Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), at the Senate campaign headquarters to celebrate the new majority — only to be foiled by Trump’s victory and the GOP holding on in the Senate.
Kander narrowly lost to Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who will serve as emcee of Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony.
The next four years saw three brutal Supreme Court confirmation battles, a 35-day government shutdown and Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, during which Republicans accused Biden of being corrupt.
That all took some toll on Biden’s thinking.
While he campaigned as a unifier, his closest allies talked about ending the legislative filibuster, should Democrats win the Senate majority. He created an ad hoc committee to review the size of the Supreme Court.
These moves represented dramatic apostasies to the Senate that Biden still mused about.
He has come a long way since that last trip to the Senate in early January 2017, when he retold the story about how, in his first or second year in office, the majority leader admonished the young senator for questioning a conservative’s motives.
“It’s always appropriate to question another man and woman’s judgment. It’s never appropriate to question their motive, because you don’t know them,” Sen. Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) told young Biden.
The outgoing vice president paused for a few seconds after finishing a story he had already told thousands of times, reflecting on the Senate he used to love.
“So, that’s why I thought the place was so incredible. I really did,” he said.
He was already speaking in the past tense.
