Apparently, relations between the Senate's party leaders have hit a new low, at least according to Politico.
Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell sat down for a rare face-to-face meeting on the last day of November. The agenda was straightforward—plotting out the legislative agenda for the end of the year—but what transpired has pushed the relationship between the veteran Senate leaders, never warm and fuzzy, to a new low of bitterness and distrust.
Reid left the meeting seething with rage, associates of the Democratic leader said, after McConnell told Reid that legislative language to help 9/11 responders and challenge a boycott against Israeli goods would be left out of a must-pass transportation bill. Within a day, Reid's allies were going public to portray McConnell as using 9/11 heroes as negotiating chips, and later that week Reid said it was solely McConnell who blocked the Israel language.
Then it was McConnell's turn to vent: Not only did he deny Reid's charges publicly, but nearly a week later, McConnell (R-Ky.) was still privately grousing that Reid used the closed-door meeting to attack McConnell politically, sources said.
Perhaps McConnell should take a lesson from that about using 9/11 first responders as political hostages, which is just about as low as a politician can get, even McConnell. At the heart of the issue, still, is Reid's filibuster reform from a few years ago when he was forced by McConnell's unceasing obstruction of President Obama's nominees to change the Senate rules with a simple majority of Democratic votes. McConnell didn't appreciate being thwarted then, and seems to still hold it against Reid.
The two men were forced to refute the report on the floor of the Senate Thursday morning, with Reid saying "[n]o one knows our personal relationship expect him and me," and that the Politico story "really troubled me." McConnell added that there's "nothing wrong with our personal relationship, whether it's watching baseball or a lot of other things we discuss." Then they both changed the subject.
They do have a mutual goal this week—getting the hell out of town for Christmas. This could be another instance of McConnell's less-than-adroit leadership, as there are rumblings from his side about not allowing the pending omnibus spending bill to pass.