Leubsdorf: Biden makes his case for unity, but are GOP lawmakers listening?

Biden seemed to recognize that setting the right tone was merely the start. “Now, the real work begins, folks,” the new president tweeted soon after the ceremonies.

The key to his early relationship with Congress, where Democrats have but the slightest majorities, will be its response to his proposal for a $1.9 trillion package of assistance to individuals, small businesses and the states to mitigate the impact of the pandemic and vaccinate millions against it.

While the Democrats’ 10-seat majority might be sufficient in the House, the Senate requirement for 60 votes on most measures means Biden will need 10 GOP votes in a body now divided 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris able to cast the deciding Democratic vote.

He asked Republicans to “hear me out,” declaring, “we can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature.”

Biden’s emphasis on unity, echoed by every inaugural speaker from the two ministers to 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman, was hardly unique. Most recent presidents from both parties have made similar inauguration appeals.

The American people “didn’t send us here to bicker,” President George H. W. Bush declared in 1989. “They ask us to rise above the merely partisan.” And 12 years ago, President Barack Obama said, “we are made for this moment, and we will seize it — so long as we seize it together.”

But Obama failed to attract significant Republican support for a more modest plan to cope with an economic situation that was serious but less dire than the one Biden faces. House Republicans promptly opposed it, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, then as now the GOP Senate leader, vowed to make Obama a one-term president. But the Democrats had big enough majorities to pass several major measures, including the Affordable Care Act, before losing House control in 2010.

In recent years, both parties have been reluctant to move beyond partisan bickering. Over the past four years, they rarely tried. Last year, it took lawmakers eight months to pass a COVID-19 relief bill most Democrats said was inadequate.

Still, no president since Franklin Roosevelt has faced a crisis so deep as the current one: the raging COVID-19 pandemic that has killed 400,000 Americans and the resulting loss of jobs by millions, and the further acrimony from the bitter post-election period in which many Republicans questioned the validity of Biden’s victory.

Biden hopes he can reach compromises with McConnell, with whom he served for 24 years in the Senate and later cut deals as Obama’s vice president. “Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path,” he said.

But the new president’s goals, laid out even before assuming office, are ambitious, including a stepped-up federal anti-pandemic effort that seeks to vaccinate 1 million Americans daily against the virus during his first 100 days in office and massive infusions to prevent a second economic recession in two years. Upon taking office, he issued an array of executive orders overturning regulations aimed at environmental, abortion rights and health restrictions issued by former President Donald Trump’s administration.

Wednesday’s ceremonies went off smoothly and without incident, a welcome relief in a city where thousands of National Guard troops were mobilized to prevent a repetition of the Jan. 6 insurrection in which pro-Trump mobs invaded the Capitol and temporarily stopped the counting of electoral votes validating Biden’s victory.

Between those concerns and worries that large crowds would worsen the pandemic, many normal inaugural events were curtailed. The traditional balls and the hourslong parade were canceled, and the public was disinvited from the ceremony itself, the Mall filled with thousands of American flags instead of the cheering crowds normally present.

The platform on the Capitol’s West Portico, where Biden and Harris took their oaths of office, was less crowded than usual, and the invited guests – including three past presidents and outgoing Vice President Mike Pence – all wore masks. The only discordant note: Trump’s refusal to attend, the first such snub since Andrew Johnson passed up Ulysses Grant’s inaugural in 1869.

But if the day’s atmospherics were unusual, the day’s message — unity — was not.