In the end, it came down to two 70-year-old men, talking on the phone.
They are not the most powerful men in Washington: Each, in his own way, is a second fiddle. Joseph R. Biden is vice president. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is the Senate minority leader, in charge only of the senators who are not in charge.
But these two men — rivals, colleagues and wary friends for almost 28 years — were the ones called upon to try to close a deal that had eluded all the negotiators before them.
Their last-minute resolution of the “fiscal cliff” crisis Monday night provided a glimpse into the ways in which personality quirks and personal relationships still matter in a Washington defined mostly by partisanship and raw political power.
Raw power had its chance.
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) didn’t have enough strength to strike a bargain with the president and make it stick with his House colleagues.
President Obama, intent on showing his own strength, alienated those from whom he sought compromise.
Both of those leaders said they wanted a big, historic deal to solve some of the country’s financial problems. They could not manage it. Instead, they got what Biden and McConnell could wrangle on the phone at the last minute: a small deal that solved few of the big problems outside the immediate crisis.
On Monday, while they talked, the rest of Congress waited. And complained. “There are two people in a room deciding incredibly consequential issues for this country, while 99 other United States senators and 435 members of the House of Representatives — elected by their constituencies to come to Washington — are on the sidelines,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said on the Senate floor.
Thune was wrong about one thing: In a day of phone conversations, Biden and McConnell were never actually in the same room.
But Thune was right that legislators had, essentially, been cut out of the legislative process.
“At least we would have had an opportunity to debate this, instead of waiting now until the eleventh hour,” Thune said.
By now, however, nobody on Capitol Hill should have been surprised at how this would end.
Monday marked the third time in two years that a congressional cliffhanger had ended with a bargain struck by McConnell and Biden. The first time came in late 2010, during a year-end showdown over the expiring Bush-era tax cuts. The second was in August 2011, during the fight over the “debt ceiling.” In both cases, Washington’s new power players — Obama and the tea-party-infused House GOP — couldn’t reach an agreement. They were saved by a bargain struck in Washington’s oldest tradition, not much changed from the days of Henry Clay except the size of the dollar figures and the presence of a phone.
Two men, both with 20-plus years in the capital, working out the final touches alone.
Washington’s two unofficial “closers” are remarkably different. The smiling, garrulous Biden has a reputation for empathy: You could spot him as a politician from 40 yards away. McConnell is reserved, deliberate and highly calculating. He only looks like a politician within the arcane, closed world of the Senate.
‘Fiscal cliff’ resolution falls to Biden and McConnell, longtime Senate colleagues
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‘Fiscal cliff’ resolution falls to Biden and McConnell, longtime Senate colleagues
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‘Fiscal cliff’ resolution falls to Biden and McConnell, longtime Senate colleagues
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