For five decades in Washington, Joe Biden knew that the way to influence was to be in the room where it happens. But in the second year of his presidency, some of Biden’s most surprising and legacy-defining legislative victories came while staying out of it.
A summer legislative blitz has sent bipartisan bills that address gun violence and boost the nation’s high-tech manufacturing sector to Biden’s desk, and the president is now poised to secure what calling the “final piece” of his economic agenda with Senate approval of a once-thought-dead Democrat-only climate and prescription drug deal.
And in a counterintuitive turn for the president who has long touted his decades of experience on Capitol Hill, Biden aides attribute his victories to the fact that he has been publicly playing the role of cheerleader rather than legislative marshal.
“In a 50-50 Senate, it’s true that when the White House takes over an issue, it scares a lot of Republicans,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
“I think there’s a purpose to all of this. When you step back and let Congress lead, and then apply pressure and help at the right times, it can be a much more effective strategy to get things done.”
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Democrats and the White House hope the string of legislative victories, both bipartisan and nonpartisan, just four months before the November election will help resurrect their political fortunes by showing voters what they can accomplish with even the smallest of majorities.
Biden opened 2022 with his legislative agenda stalled, his poll numbers down and a candid admission that he had made a “mistake” in how he conducted himself in the role.
“The public doesn’t want me to be the president-senator,” he said. “They want me to be president and senators to be senators.”
Letting senators be senators was no easy task for Biden, whose political and personal identities are rooted in his formative years spent in that chamber.
He spent 36 years as a senator from Delaware and eight more as president of the Senate when he was valued for his relationships and knowledge of Capitol Hill as Barack Obama’s vice president.
In the estimation of many of his aides and advisers, leaving the Senate behind was key to his later success.
Rising expectations from Democrats, who hold precarious majorities in Congress but nevertheless have unified control of Washington, drew Biden among supporters who wanted more ambitious action.
In the spring of 2021, Biden made a big show of negotiating directly with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, RW.Va., on an infrastructure bill, only to have the talks collapse.
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At the same time, a separate bipartisan group had been quietly meeting on its own, discussing how to overhaul the country’s transportation, water and broadband systems.
After the White House gave initial approval and then worked out the final details with senators, this became the version that became law.
The president then tried to strike a deal on a social and climate spending package with Sen. Joe Manchin, going so far as to invite the West Virginia lawmaker to his home in Wilmington, Delaware, until the conservative Democrat abruptly pulled the plug on the conversations a Fox News interview.
Manchin would later resume negotiations again, this time with only Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the two would eventually reach an agreement that the Senate approved Sunday after more than a year of legislative dispute.
In late 2021, White House aides persuaded the president to clamp down on his conversations with the Hill, as part of a deliberate shift to move negotiations on his legislative agenda out of the public eye.
The new approach drew criticism from the press, but the White House bet the public wasn’t interested in details and would reward results.
Biden and his team “have been using the bully pulpit and working closely with Congress,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said. The goal is to “achieve what could soon be the most productive legislative record of any president” since Lyndon Johnson.
Some of the changes, White House aides said, also reflected the changing dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept Biden in Washington for most of 2021; his meetings with lawmakers were one of the few ways to show he was working.
Eventually, Biden’s decision to take a facilitator role rather than chief negotiator, which had met with mixed success, began to pay off: the first substantive arms restrictions in nearly three decades , a move to boost domestic production of semiconductor computer chips and care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits.
White House officials credit Biden’s emotional speech after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, with helping galvanize lawmakers to act on gun violence, and even his push for broader measures than those that were incorporated into the bill with room for the GOP to reach a compromise. .
And they point to a steady cadence of speeches over months emphasizing the need to lower prescription drug costs or act on climate by keeping those issues in the national conversation amid legislative fiascos.
Lawmakers say removing themselves directly from negotiations enabled senators to reach a consensus among themselves, without the distraction of a White House that could have repeatedly pushed for something that would be unattainable with Republicans or could be seen as a compromise by some Democrats.
On the semiconductor package that Biden plans to sign into law on Tuesday, the administration held classified briefings for lawmakers that emphasized how China is gaining influence in the computer chip industry and the national security implications.
Republicans were in regular contact with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a Biden cabinet official who has developed warm relationships across the aisle.
“At heart, Joe is an American senator,” said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., the lead Democratic author of the wildfire legislation who also helped write the infrastructure bill. ‘last year.
“So he understands that allowing this to work is how you do it.”