Vice President Kamala Harris has invited every female senator to the Naval Observatory for dinner next Tuesday, according to a Harris aide and Senate aide, in a show of bipartisanship among a deeply divided Congress.
If everyone invited attends, the guest list would consist of 24 female senators — 16 Democrats and eight Republicans. It would be the first known time the former California senator hosts lawmakers in the Naval Observatory since moving in April, a process that was delayed due to renovations.
The dinner marks a resurgence of what was once regular dinner parties among the women in Washington, which have become less frequent as the nation’s capital has become more polarized, an aide said.
Politico was the first to report on the dinner.
The dinner would come as the White House is in high-stakes negotiations with Republicans on President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package. The two sides remain hundreds of billions of dollars apart on a final price, not to mention how to pay for it, after Biden rejected the latest Republican offer on Friday.
Biden will speak with West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, who is leading negotiations for Republicans, and a group of additional senators working on their own bipartisan infrastructure proposal Tuesday afternoon.
The dinner provides another opportunity for the administration to discuss the issue in a more casual setting, looking to keep the conversation afloat while Biden is abroad on the first international trip of his presidency, with a visit to Europe starting Wednesday.
It would come exactly a week after Harris returned back from her first international trip to Guatemala and Mexico, a part of her politically fraught role leading diplomatic relations in the Northern Triangle to stem the flow of migration.
