News Biden and McConnell have history but can they work together?

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When they were both in the Senate, Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, maintained a strong working relationship that survived some of the most partisan legislative fights in decades.

That relationship will now face a new test when Biden is sworn in as president of the United States and McConnell will be the highest-ranking Republican in the country.

It’s a setup familiar to Biden: when he was vice-president, Barack Obama had to battle with an adversarial McConnell, who at one point said the top priority of Senate Republicans was to make Obama a “one-term president”.
“I had a great conversation with Mitch McConnell today,” Biden said on Tuesday. “I called him to thank him for the congratulations. I told him that while we disagree on a lot of things there are things we can work together on. We agreed to get together sooner than later. And I’m looking forward to working with him.”
More significantly, the two have a history of working together through their decades in Congress. Biden was first elected as a senator for Delaware in 1972; McConnell was first elected to the Senate for Kentucky in 1984.

Since then, they have been co-sponsors on 318 bills, according to a Guardian tally. During a contentious debt limit fight in 2011, Biden was the preferred Obama administration liaison for McConnell. Biden has long prided himself about his deep bipartisan ties in the Senate.
“Joe told me of one run-in he’d had on the Senate floor after the Republican leader blocked a bill Joe was sponsoring; when Joe tried to explain the bill’s merits, McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, ‘You must be under the mistaken impression that I care,’” Obama wrote. “But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness – all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.”

 

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