On Wednesday, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris held a bipartisan meeting with the “big four” of Congressional leadership — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — his first such meeting since taking office, in an attempt to reach a bipartisan consensus on his $4 trillion combined infrastructure proposals.

What You Need To Know

  • President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris held their first meeting with the four pillars of Congressional leadership since taking office

  • The meeting was an attempt to reach a bipartisan consensus on Biden's $4 trillion infrastructure proposals

  • The GOP leaders called the meeting productive but said that their "red line" is raising taxes by overhauling the changes made in the 2017 tax law

  • The White House has previously said that the president is willing to hear suggestions on how to pay for the plan, and is open to compromise on other aspects of the proposal, but his red line is raising taxes on American households making under $400,000 annually

“The bottom line here is we’re going to see whether we can reach some consensus on a compromise,” Biden said. “We’re going to talk a lot about infrastructure, to see if there's any way that we can reach a compromise that gets the people's work done and is within the bounds of everyone agreeing.”

At the top of the meeting, Biden joked that coming to a compromise will be “easy.” 

“I’ll just snap my fingers, it’ll happen,” Biden quipped.

After the sit-down, House Minority Leader McCarthy, who just hours before saw the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney from House GOP leadership, called the meeting “productive” and said he saw opportunities for members of his caucus to work with the White House on infrastructure.

Cheney was ousted over her unyielding criticism of former President Donald Trump, and her refusal to accept his falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 presidential election. McCarthy, who voted to overturn the results of the election, said after the White House meeting that "I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election."

"I think that is all over with," he continued . "We're sitting here with the president today."

While they both expressed optimism about compromise, both McCarthy and McConnell said that for Republicans, the “red line” is raising taxes by overhauling the changes made in the 2017 tax law, one of the signature legislative achievements of the GOP in the last decade.

"We're not interested in reopening the 2017 tax bill,” McConnell said outside the White House. “We both made that clear to the president. That's our red line.”

“You won't find any Republican that will go and raise taxes and that's the worst thing you can do in the economy — when you are watching inflation, gas prices are going up, and it has not been this high since President Biden was vice president,” McCarthy said.

McConnell credited the 2017 tax overhaul with responsibility for the United States’ strong economy in Feb. 2020, prior to the devastation wreaked by COVID-19 pandemic, and said that from his perspective, “this discussion about the way forward on infrastructure will not include revisiting the 2017 tax bill.”

The Kentucky Republican conceded, however, that it was a “productive meeting.”

“There is certainly a bipartisan desire to get an outcome” on infrastructure, McConnell said. 

McConnell’s remarks are a departure from his recent comments about working with Biden, namely saying that “100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration.”

According to the White House, President Biden “enjoyed hosting Speaker Pelosi, Leader Schumer, Leader McConnell, and Leader McCarthy, and spent the nearly two hours working with them to identify areas where they could collaborate, especially with regard to infrastructure, on which the leaders agreed there was a need for investment.”

President Joe Biden’s dual plans — the $2.3 American Jobs plan, which focuses on traditional infrastructure including upgrading roads, bridges and ports, as well as creating jobs and expanding broadband, and the $1.8 trillion American Families plan, which calls for free community college and a comprehensive paid leave plan — would be paid for by increasing the corporate tax rate and raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

The White House has previously said that the president is willing to hear suggestions on how to pay for the plan, and is open to compromise on other aspects of the proposal, but his red line is raising taxes on American households making under $400,000 annually.

Biden’s infrastructure proposal is a major area in which the Democratic president could make inroads with Republicans and moderate Democrats alike in an attempt to forge a bipartisan compromise, a major campaign promise.

“When I ran, I said wasn't going to be a Democratic president,” Biden said ahead of the meeting Wednesday. "I was going to be a president for all Americans.”

The meeting with Congressional leadership is just one in a series of meetings the president has had with key lawmakers on the infrastructure proposal. Earlier this week, Biden met with moderate Democrats Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and on Thursday, the president will sit down with a group of GOP senators, headlined by West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, who authored the Republican counter-proposal to Biden’s infrastructure bill.

Meanwhile, the Democratic leaders also expressed optimism a deal could be reached on infrastructure, but did not comment on specifics.

“Basically, we said that we would explore the places where we could agree on and come to bipartisan agreement on those,” Majority Leader Schumer said. “So, we're going to see which areas there are areas of agreement in some degree of detail based on Biden's plan."

“I am more optimistic now that we will do so in a bipartisan way,” Speaker Pelosi said. “But we’ll see.”