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Bidens offer to work with Republicans faces first real test on Covid relief

There was no ostentatious marching out by the Republicans. No condemnations about how ridiculous the other side was being. The channels were still open.

Biden also met with a bipartisan group of senators last week to begin talks on an infrastructure initiative.

Earlier this month members of the White House legislative affairs team were scheduled to meet with Senate Republican chiefs of staff during their regular lunch for an off-the-record meet-and-greet, according to three sources with knowledge of the lunch. The White House team warned there might be some scheduling bumps due to legislative events that day and the morning of the meeting the team said they had to cancel and reschedule.

Some chiefs of staff read the cancellation as the Biden White House blowing off Republicans. But other officials stressed it was a sincere time conflict and that the appearance would be rescheduled. The legislative team also stressed to Republican officials that they were eager to meet with them.

“It’s important that we get people to come and, frankly, I think some of us want to have a constructive relationship with these people,” said one Republican official. The meeting has since been rescheduled.

Notably also, Republicans are eager to express their respect for Louisa Terrell, the head of legislative affairs for the White House, and Reema Dodin, a deputy in that office.

“I can tell you as far as they’re concerned, they do want to work with us,” the official said. “We’re all sort of a little despondent at watching them steamroll us with this reconciliation but whatever, that’s not what this is about.”

Still, both Republican and Democratic officials are pessimistic about major bipartisan agreement in the immediate future.

There haven’t been some of the usual – and oftentimes ceremonial – gestures of bipartisanship that normally happen between one administration and leaders of the opposing party. Biden has not had a publicized meeting with the top four Republican and Democratic congressional leaders. The former senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who served as the Senate majority leader for Democrats from 2001 to 2003, has urged White House officials to organize one such summit.

At the White House’s daily press briefing on Tuesday, the press secretary, Jen Psaki, was asked whether the administration expected it could work with a Republican party as adversarial as it has been in recent years.

“The country is looking for action, the country is looking for progress – for solutions – on Covid, on the economy. The package that the president has proposed has the support of almost three-quarters of the public in most polls,” Psaki said.

Daschle said it was still early for Biden and he deserved “high marks for his outreach to date”. Daschle added that this is not the same Senate that Biden worked in.

“He has relationship-building to do, and reconstructing relationships that he had before with people like Mitch McConnell,” Daschle said.

Daschle added that Biden will also need to offer an agenda “that if he wants bipartisan work it’s going to need bipartisan involvement. That’s probably not possible with the first Covid relief package because he has very ambitious aspirations for what that bill should look like. I don’t think it’s likely that he’s going to get Republican support for his aspirations.”

He said: “So he has to do decide between a major accomplishment that he’s put so much of his own personal stock into or getting bipartisan buy-in, and I think he’s going to choose the former rather than the latter.”