![]() He stressed his oft-repeated refrain that you couldn’t question someone’s motives in politics, only their judgment. As McConnell looked on, Biden warmly paid tribute to the man who had devoted the last two years to smothering his administration’s agenda. The coup de grâce was a December 2010 deal McConnell had personally struck with Biden to howls of outrage from Democrats, trading thirteen more months of unemployment insurance at a time of nearly double-digit joblessness for a host of more permanent giveaways to the wealthy.īiden’s fifty-minute speech the following February painted things differently, however. And he blocked further measures to boost jobs and the economy that Republicans had once advocated, sabotaging economic recovery. In the process, McConnell whittled down the administration’s economic stimulus proposal to, after accounting for inflation, the smallest such measure in thirty years. This meant rejecting the hallowed Washington tenets of compromise and bipartisanship, forcing the Democrats to cobble together sixty-vote, party-line majorities for every measure, and using his knowledge of Senate procedure to slow legislation down. Behind closed doors, Republican leaders plotted to reverse each Democratic gain by 2012 through an aggressive united front of opposition to each and every move the new administration made.Īdmitting that his single-biggest priority was making Biden’s boss a “one-term president,” McConnell spent the next two years leading a historic campaign of obstruction in the Senate against the Obama agenda. Only two years earlier, with another charismatic figure as their nominee and popular rage against the Bush administration further inflamed by the worst financial crash since the 1930s, the Democrats had swept to a level of domination in Washington not seen for thirty years, fueling talk of the GOP as a “permanent minority” party. McConnell, who would be speaking alongside Biden, was also the chief architect of the “shellacking” Biden’s party and administration had just received. He was speaking at the behest of the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, which, like the Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium on whose third floor he prepared to deliver his remarks, drew its name from the source of its corporate funding: Mitch McConnell, Kentucky’s longest-serving senator, who had ascended to the Senate Republican leadership over a twenty-six-year-long career founded on his unparalleled ability to raise money from powerful interests. Topics ranged from its foundations and evolution to the influence of antebellum political giant Henry Clay, “The Great Compromiser” who had staved off civil war through a series of famed bargains that also had the effect of extending the life of slavery.īiden was on enemy territory. There were few people better qualified to talk on the subject: Biden had spent virtually his entire adult life in the body and was one of the most outspoken proponents of its culture of chummy dealmaking. It was only three months after the Democratic Party’s 2010 electoral “shellacking” when Vice President Joe Biden found himself in Kentucky keynoting a conference about the US Senate. ![]() Joe Biden on reaching across the aisle, January 2019. How can we be one America if we continue down this road? It’s like we’ve divided the country into pieces. You can now order a copy of this important new book direct from Jacobin for only $10, with free shipping. The following is an excerpt from Branko Marcetic’s forthcoming book Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
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