President Joe Biden faces a crucial moment on Wednesday in what is shaping up as an important week for his infrastructure priorities when he holds his first bipartisan meeting with the top four members of congressional leadership at the White House.
According to the White House, the meeting will include Vice President Kamala Harris; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican; and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican.
Wednesday’s meeting will mark McConnell and McCarthy’s first time in the West Wing since Biden took office, according to an administration official. While Biden has kept up public promises to find bipartisan areas to compromise, both McConnell and McCarthy have — at least publicly — have largely promised they’d do everything to stop Biden’s agenda.
That opposition has taken different forms — McCarthy voted against certifying Biden’s win in the Electoral College in the hours after the January 6 riot at the White House and McConnell has said publicly that “100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration.”
But those topics aren’t expected to come up on Wednesday. Ahead of the meeting, the White House indicated that the President will focus on potential areas of consensus.
“There are a lot of ways to approach a meeting like this … you could spend the entire meeting talking about areas of disagreement. There’s no shortage of those. Or you could spend it seeking opportunity for common ground. And (Biden) is going to choose the latter,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday.
“His hope is that this can be a discussion about where we can find common agreement, where there is an opportunity to work together moving forward,” she added, specifically pointing to different proposals related to infrastructure — one of the President’s pressing legislative priorities.
Other areas of shared concern, Psaki said, are semiconductor chip shortages and workforce competitiveness.
The meeting comes as the White House has intensified its negotiations with members of Congress over Biden’s broad spending proposals. Members of the administration have said they have a goal of seeing real progress on infrastructure legislation by Memorial Day, which is just about two-and-a-half weeks away.
White House staff held a series of internal meetings over the weekend to prepare for this week’s meetings and have stayed in close contact with lawmakers and congressional staff on infrastructure, a White House official said.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has worked the phones with daily calls to lawmakers to discuss the administration’s proposals, per one official. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm this week is courting bipartisan members of Congress, governors, and stakeholders in the labor and business sectors, another official told CNN.
The Biden administration’s roughly $2 trillion infrastructure spending plan is one part of a two-part proposal. The President plans to pay for this part of his package by raising corporate taxes.
The second part of the proposal, which is focused on the care economy and education, and would cost some $1.8 trillion. The President intends to finance the package in part by hiking taxes on the rich.
Biden is meeting with several members of Congress this week to move his plans on infrastructure forward. He met with key moderates, West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, at the White House earlier this week, as well as longtime ally Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat who has worked with Biden for decades. Manchin and Sinema are key votes, as both Democrats oppose changing the Senate’s rules to allow legislation to pass with a simple majority instead of the required 60-vote threshold needed to end debate, which could greatly affect the size and scope of the President’s legislative agenda.
The President will also meet on Thursday with a group of Republican senators to discuss “the best ways to invest in American infrastructure” on Thursday. One of those senators, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, has spearheaded a narrower counter proposal to Biden’s infrastructure plan.
