Is common ground still possible? Biden determined to try with Senate.

It’s one of President-elect Joe Biden’s favorite anecdotes about his formative years in the Senate.

Not long into his 36-year career there, the young Senator Biden was greatly disturbed to hear conservative GOP Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina excoriate Sen. Bob Dole’s Americans with Disabilities Act. 

“I can’t believe anyone could be so heartless, and care so little about people with disabilities,” Senator Biden told Democratic majority leader Mike Mansfield at the time. “It makes me angry.”

Senator Mansfield replied with a story. Several years before, Senator Helms and his wife had seen an item in the local paper about a young man “in braces who was handicapped at an orphanage,” as Senator Mansfield put it. All the boy wanted for Christmas was to be part of a family. So the Helmses adopted him.

“Joe, never question another man’s motive,” Senator Mansfield cautioned. “Question his judgment, but never his motive.”

This lesson, described in Mr. Biden’s farewell Senate speech in 2009, frames his approach to politics. Over the course of his career, he became friends with some of the most unlikely senators, including segregationists Strom Thurmond and John Stennis – people with whom he deeply disagreed on many points, but with whom he could also find common ground. He eulogized both Senators Thurmond and Helms, who was known as “Senator No,” at their funerals.

And that’s just it. Many of the friendships that Mr. Biden forged in the Senate were with people who have since retired or died. The same is true of the Senate he knew – one built on personal relationships and trust, even if glaringly deficient in other ways, such as gender and racial diversity. Those hallowed halls were invaded Jan. 6 in a shocking, violent attempt by President Donald Trump’s supporters to stop Congress from counting certified Electoral College votes confirming Mr. Biden as the winner of the presidential election. Five people were killed in what Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described as a “failed insurrection” by a mob that was “fed lies” and “provoked by the president and other powerful people.”

Now President-elect Biden is trying to pick up the pieces and glue the country – and Washington – back together. He faces a daunting task in a divided Congress that Democrats only narrowly control, and where a significant number of House and Senate Republicans voted to object to the election results. Complicating matters is a historic post-presidential impeachment trial of Mr. Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” Characteristically, Mr. Biden plans to start his presidency with outreach – inviting all four Democratic and Republican congressional leaders to a church service with him on the morning of his Jan. 20 inauguration.

“Biden is counting on his relationships in the Senate to help him move his legislative agenda,” says Jim Manley, former spokesman for then-Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid. “One of the problems, of course, is that the good old days are long gone.” Only 31 senators remain who served with Mr. Biden. While personal relationships still count for something in the Senate, he says, “I’m afraid that given how partisan things have become, it doesn’t mean as much as it used to.”

Mr. Manley says that after watching 139 GOP House members and eight senators “vote to steal” the election hours after rioters stormed the Capitol, he has a hard time believing things will change anytime soon. He describes “a poison” coursing through the Republican Party that may take years to eliminate and which will make it very tough for Mr. Biden to move legislation, such as his proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus plan to fight the pandemic.

Personal relationships may “mitigate conflict a bit,” says Ross Baker, an expert on the Senate at Rutgers University. “But are they game changers? Probably not.”

Yet others are more hopeful – including, apparently, Mr. Biden and the record 81 million voters who supported him. His history of reaching across the aisle, of befriending polar opposites, of spending hours sitting with someone like Senator Helms and going over the Chemical Weapons Treaty word by word, is real, according to allies.

“This is the way he’s conducted himself. He’s not coming up with some newfound toy,” says Bobby Juliano, a longtime friend of Mr. Biden’s who is now an independent consultant with strong ties to organized labor. The lesson of congressional politics, he says, is less about making permanent friends than being sure not to make permanent enemies.

“People may disagree with Joe on one or two or even 10 issues, but nobody finds him disagreeable,” noted Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, in a Senate tribute to him in December 2016. She recalled the time she brought her younger brother to a White House holiday party. They ran into the vice president just as he was leaving. But instead of heading home after a long day, he gave them a 45-minute private tour of the West Wing. “I still remember the shocked look on the face of the Marine at the situation room when we arrived there.”

One of the most important Biden relationships on the Hill will be with Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware – his “eyes and ears” with both parties, as Mr. Juliano puts it. The two are close, and Senator Coons now holds Biden’s seat, serving on the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, the same ones his mentor once chaired.

In Biden fashion, Senator Coons makes a point of getting to know Republicans, and is viewed as Mr. Biden’s emissary to GOP senators. In an interview last month, he told the Monitor that media commentators are underestimating the hunger for civility and normalcy in the Senate – not to mention the country.

After the storming of the Capitol, Senator Coons called for GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to resign for leading the charge to overturn the election. In a statement, he said that he believes in reconciliation, citing the example of the late civil rights icon John Lewis. But “true reconciliation only comes after repentance. I’m looking to see whether my colleagues reflect on the violence of January 6th and take any responsibility that can lay the groundwork for reconciliation.”

He also said that reporters are mistaken in believing that Mr. Biden’s relationships in the Senate ended when he left. He points to his friend’s eight years as vice president working with members of Congress, plus all the campaigning he has done with Democratic Senate candidates over the years – driving to events, working rope lines with them, flying to the next stop. “That means he’s got real relationships,” he said last month.

A key one will be with Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who will become the majority leader of a 50-50 Senate where former Sen. Kamala Harris – as vice president – will be the tie breaker.

Senator Schumer, who is in discussion with Senator McConnell about a potential power-sharing agreement, is “cut from the same cloth” as Mr. Biden, says Matt House, a former Schumer spokesman. They are both “pragmatists and progressives” and have a “very good” relationship, says Mr. House, in an interview last fall. Their legislative careers overlapped, and when the New Yorker was a freshman senator, he discovered he was claiming an issue – college affordability – that Senator Biden had already staked out as his own. In no uncertain terms, Senator Biden’s office told Senator Schumer to back off, until one day on the Senate floor, the senior lawmaker placed his arm on his junior colleague’s shoulder and said, “Go ahead, take the issue. I know what it’s like for new senators to carve their own path.”

Still, as Senator Coons reminds, “Whether he’s the majority leader or the minority leader, you can’t move anything through this body without Mitch McConnell.” The relationship between Mr. Biden and Senator McConnell “has been strained by what happened during the Obama administration,” when the Kentucky Republican took up his position as chief Obama blocker, including denying even a hearing for Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland – now Mr. Biden’s nominee for attorney general.

Still, Mr. Biden and Senator McConnell were able to work through the very serious fiscal crises during the Obama administration.

“Obviously, I don’t always agree with him, but I do trust him implicitly,” the Kentuckian said during his 2016 tribute to the vice president. “He doesn’t break his word. He doesn’t waste time telling me why I am wrong. He gets down to brass tacks, and he keeps in sight the stakes. There is a reason ‘Get Joe on the phone’ is shorthand for ‘Time to get serious’ in my office.”

Indeed, in the Obama White House, Mr. Biden was known as “the McConnell Whisperer.”

“Trust begets trust,” says Patrick Griffin, former congressional liaison for President Bill Clinton. If the White House – be it the president, a Vice President Kamala Harris, or any other key figure – can talk with congressional leadership off the record and in confidence, parameters of a deal can be set and embarrassments can be avoided, he says. “You can be candid about what you can and can’t do.” 

President Clinton, being an outsider, had a couple of buddies on the Hill, says Mr. Griffin, but “nobody who would die on the cross for him.” President Obama – still a freshman senator when he was elected to the highest office in the land – went on golf outings with former House Speaker John Boehner, the Republican from Ohio. But “he was doing this more as a grim exercise, rather than a real effort to have recreational time with a congressional leader,” notes Professor Baker at Rutgers.

President Trump may have phoned plenty of lawmakers, but these were transactional relationships, often based on fear. The “gold standard,” says Professor Baker, was Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. As former Senate majority leader, he interacted daily with the Republican minority leader, Everett Dirksen. As president, he phoned Senator Dirksen multiple times a day, and the two often ended their days together over bourbon – either at the White House or in Senator Dirksen’s office. President Johnson could not have passed civil rights legislation without Senator Dirksen’s help.

But Senator McConnell is not going to be influenced by cocktails at the White House, says a former Republican leadership aide. For him, “It’s about the policy. It’s not the personality.” If Mr. Biden wants to work in the middle, Senator McConnell will work there, too, the former aide says.

He points to a major transportation bill that Senator McConnell negotiated with former Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2015 – one of the more productive years in recent Senate history, when Senator McConnell became majority leader at a time of divided government. “The two couldn’t be more different, but they had a common interest in getting a deal done, and neither one could say their party won.” He added: “I don’t think those two ever spent five minutes together in a room before that deal.”

The former GOP aide suggests the new president’s relationship with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be the one to watch, because of the historically narrow margin she has with her caucus. Indeed, Mr. Biden will have to keep an eye on his left flank, which is going to require a delicate balancing act, says Mr. Juliano.

“The Bernie Sanders crowd and the ‘mod squad’ will be pushing for the sun, the moon, and the stars, and the Republicans will be pushing him for nothing, nothing, nothing,” he says.

Mr. Juliano believes Mr. Biden can restore Washington to a more civil, cooperative period, something that Mr. Biden appears to believe in his core. He talked about just such transformation in that same Senate exit speech, when he related an unexpected encounter with retiring Mississippi Sen. John Stennis, whose office Senator Biden was going to take over.

Senator Biden had entered his future office to check it out. Unknown to anyone, the retiring senator was there in his wheelchair. Despite their stark differences over segregation, the two men had become friends, deepened by a time when they had shared a hospital suite at Walter Reed.

Talking to his younger colleague, Senator Stennis touched an enormous mahogany table which he used as his desk, telling him it was “the flagship of the Confederacy,” where the Southern segregationist senators had gathered every Tuesday in the 1950s and 1960s “to plan the demise of the civil rights movement.” He said it was time for the table to pass from a man who was against civil rights to one who was for them.

As Senator Biden left to go, Senator Stennis said that the civil rights movement did more to free the white man than the Black man. “How’s that?” Senator Biden asked. “It freed my soul; it freed my soul,” Senator Stennis answered.

“I can tell you that by his own account, John Stennis was personally enlarged by his service in the Senate. That’s the power of this institution,” Mr. Biden told his fellow senators. “It opens a door for change. I think it opens a door for personal growth, and in that comes the political progress this nation has made.”