Last Wednesday evening, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema voted with the Republicans against changing Senate rules to allow passage of voting-rights legislation, crystallizing Biden’s frustrations with the Senate he once revered.
“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, “,” 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.
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.
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, 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.
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 “,” told me on Wednesday.
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