'The luxury of shuttle diplomacy': McConnell could use ties to McCarthy and Biden to end debt fight

WASHINGTON − As Republicans took control of the House in January amid a chaotic fight over who would lead them, President Joe Biden made a point of showcasing his ability to work with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

“He's willing to find common ground,” Biden said of his longtime negotiating partner as the two stood together in Kentucky, touting how a bipartisan infrastructure package would finally help a major bridge project there.

The most significant bipartisan compromise they brokered over their decadeslong relationship may have been the 2011 deal to avoid a default on the nation’s debt when Biden was vice president. Now that the federal government is again facing potential default if Democrats and Republicans can’t resolve their impasse, it might seem logical that Biden and McConnell will once again find the way out.

Though Biden has yet to develop much of a relationship with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he has called McConnell a “real friend” and “trusted partner.”

But McConnell insists he’s not a player this time.

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“This will ultimately, in my view, be solved when the speaker and the president reach an agreement,” McConnell said last week.

That’s the message he said he’ll be bringing to Tuesday’s meeting between Biden and the four top congressional leaders.

Republicans are trying to give McCarthy as strong a negotiating hand as possible.

“We stand with Speaker McCarthy,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “We will support whatever the speaker negotiates.”

But Democrats say there’s no deal that doesn’t happen without McConnell.

“McConnell always says he’s not involved until he is,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., a veteran of the 2011 debt limit crisis, told USA TODAY.

If nothing else, there’s the fact that some Senate Republicans will need to back any deal to prevent a filibuster.

 “At the end of the day, McConnell has to be involved because the Senate has to vote,” Van Hollen said. “No matter how you do this, you need 60 votes in the Senate.”

But one of McConnell’s strengths is assessing what’s politically doable, said Rohit Kumar, who was McConnell’s chief negotiator in the 2011 debt-limit standoff.

“Not, what do I want? What do I hope for? But what is actually achievable given the current arrangement of forces and the votes that are available?” said Kumar, now the head of PwC's Washington tax policy group. “And the most efficient way to figure out that result is for Speaker McCarthy and President Biden to jointly agree on that proposal.”

Behind the scenes, McConnell can help facilitate conversations, Kumar said. But he can’t be the chief GOP negotiator.

“Politically, a McConnell-Biden agreement that was forced upon the House will land quite differently than a McCarthy-Biden agreement, even if it is the exact same agreement,” he said.

The White House declined to discuss the role McConnell could play.

“We do not comment on private discussions between President Biden and congressional leaders,” said spokesman Andrew Bates.

A spokesman for McConnell likewise would not go beyond McConnell’s public comments.

That’s not surprising to Jim Kessler, a former legislative director for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who is now the senior vice president for policy at the center-left think tank Third Way.

“He’s the player who says the least but sometimes has the most impact,” Kessler said.  “I don’t know when McConnell will utter his first line. He’s sort of like Orson Welles in `The Third Man.’ He’s suddenly going to appear out of the shadows. But he’ll wait as long as possible.”

In 2011, after Biden and McConnell had worked out the details on an underlying agreement on spending cuts, they resolved the final dispute over Pentagon funding as the clock ticked toward default.

“The ultimate solution originated in the Senate, and it was McConnell who finally pitched it to Biden,” The Associated Press reported at the time.

Washington faced the same divide in political control as it does now. Democrats held the White House and the Senate; Republicans had the House.

But McConnell said other things have changed.

“Many people point back to 10 years ago when President Biden and I were involved in reaching an agreement,” he told reporters Tuesday. “That was a different set of players than we have today.”

The newcomer is McCarthy. And he did what many didn’t expect him to be able to do: pass a bill through the House that would avoid a default in exchange for trillions of dollars in spending cuts and rolling back some of Biden’s policy initiatives.

“Look at what he did. He got 217 House Republicans to agree to something,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told reporters when asked if McCarthy will be the GOP’s best messenger at the White House meeting or if McConnell should take a larger role. “It’s remarkable what Kevin did.”

Senate Republicans have been remarkably disciplined in repeating that message and standing behind McCarthy.

A major difference from 2011 is Republicans have a much smaller majority in the House.  And, to win the votes he needed to become speaker, McCarthy agreed to make it easier for a fellow Republican to try to take away his gavel. The last thing McConnell wants to do, Kumar said, is anything that could increase the jeopardy of the Republican speaker.

That dynamic, and the fact that the government could run short of money to pay its bills as early as June 1, makes it imperative that the impasse be resolved by McCarthy and Biden, he said.

“The luxury of shuttle diplomacy,” in which McConnell could use his relationships with both McCarthy and Biden to help broker a compromise, is “probably no longer available,” Kumar said.

But Scott Mulhauser, a veteran Senate staffer and former aide to Biden, said McConnell needs to step up to the plate.

“McConnell is making the calculus that staying out of this fight for now is the best math for him and his stewardship of Senate Republicans,” Mulhauser said, “but it leaves a giant hole and no solution as the country perches on the brink of defaulting on its debt.”

Contributing: Joe Sonka, The Courier Journal, and Bart Jansen, USA TODAY