When President Joe Biden sat down to meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and hash out their differences over the debt ceiling, it highlighted the tension in the Democrat’s political persona.
Biden has long advertised himself as a bipartisan deal-maker and a Washington institutionalist who knows how to reach across the aisle to get things done. But he’s also a fierce partisan who likes to throw sharp elbows at his Republican foes.
This shows up when it comes time to deal with House Republicans over how to raise the debt ceiling and address high levels of federal spending (negotiations the White House has repeatedly said are unnecessary in the first place) that could decide whether the country faces economic calamity.
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In its readout of the Biden-McCarthy meeting, the White House played up both sides of the president’s dual personality. “They covered a range of issues and President Biden underscored that he is eager to continue working across the aisle in good faith, after passing historic bipartisan laws during his first two years in office,” the statement read.
Does that mean a deal with the new speaker is imminent, delivering spending cuts while avoiding default? Not so fast.
“President Biden made clear that, as every other leader in both parties in Congress has affirmed, it is their shared duty not to allow an unprecedented and economically catastrophic default,” the statement continued. “The United States Constitution is explicit about this obligation, and the American people expect Congress to meet it in the same way all of his predecessors have. It is not negotiable or conditional.”
That doesn’t sound like a deal.
Biden, according to the readout, “welcomes a separate discussion with congressional leaders about how to reduce the deficit and control the national debt while continuing to grow the economy.” A clean hike in the federal borrowing limit first, Republican policy priorities later.
This Biden tendency was evident during his first two years in office. As the White House mentioned, some of his biggest legislative successes (on infrastructure, toxic burn pits, and semiconductors) were bipartisan. But he also advocated a highly partisan agenda overall despite an evenly divided Senate and a narrow House majority.
Biden got two of his biggest spending bills, the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed through the partisan reconciliation process. This budgetary mechanism was employed to avoid requiring the support of Republican senators and allow legislation to be passed exclusively by the Democrats on a party-line vote. On issues such as abortion and voting, he stuck with liberal bills that could not even secure unified Democratic backing rather than more measured versions that could attract some Republican votes.
While pushing his voting bills, Biden told a crowd in Atlanta that “Republicans today can’t and won’t” support voting rights for racial minorities. He discussed his bills interchangeably with the bipartisan Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was extended on a bipartisan basis multiple times.
At the same time, while Biden was encouraging Congress to pass abortion rights legislation, he urged voters to elect more Democratic abortion rights supporters in November. The bill in question did not receive the votes of Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who support legal abortion in most cases, or Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).
Biden evinced these competing traits during the 2020 campaign, when he played up his penchant for bipartisan deal-making to win over suburban voters while he wooed backers of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) with promises of the most progressive agenda since the New Deal. He carried this with him during his 36 years in the Senate, when he led the tanking of Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in proceedings that poisoned the judicial confirmation process for decades while palling around with Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC).
It is therefore unsurprising that these attributes are now on full display during the debt ceiling talks. At a Democratic fundraiser on the eve of his meeting with McCarthy, Biden praised the speaker as a “decent man” but said the California Republican “had to make commitments that are just absolutely off the wall for a speaker of the House to make in terms of being able to become the leader.”
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Biden’s team has both touted his role in the debt ceiling negotiations as vice president and said that the experience proved negotiating with Republicans was a fruitless exercise. “In 2011, the Obama-Biden administration negotiated in good faith, but congressional Republicans' recklessness caused a historic blow to our economy," said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on the day of Biden’s meeting with McCarthy, referring to America's S&P Global Rating being downgraded after that partisan stalemate.
It’s another test of whether what worked for Biden in Senate cloakrooms can succeed in the Oval Office — and of whether his partisan record or his bipartisan aspirations will prevail.