EDITORIAL: Biden runs away from his own ‘compromise’

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” The fictional Lewis Carroll creation must have recently inhabited the body of President Joe Biden.

On Thursday night, the White House announced it had reached a deal, in principle, with a bipartisan group of senators on a nearly $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The measure is less than the $2.3 trillion Mr. Biden originally proposed, but higher than the roughly $500 billion counteroffer from the Senate GOP. It’s also stripped of much of the progressive lard that fouled the president’s larger proposal.

“When we can find common ground, working across party lines, that is what I will seek to do,” the president said in a photo-op to tout the legislation. The agreement is “a true bipartisan effort, breaking the ice that too often has kept us frozen in place.” As he’s prone to do, Mr. Biden went on, pointing out that “neither side got everything they wanted in this deal. That’s what it means to compromise.”

But just moments after his “Kumbaya” presentation for the cameras, it became clear that Mr. Biden’s definition of “compromise” doesn’t track with Noah Webster’s. The president, The Associated Press reported, revealed he wouldn’t sign the bipartisan infrastructure proposal unless Congress also sent him a second bill that included every Democratic proposal that was left out of the compromise.

“What we agreed on today is what we could agree on. The physical infrastructure,” Mr. Biden said. “There’s no agreement on the rest. If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it.”

Huh? Cue the proverb about having your cake and eating it too.

Simply put, there is no compromise if Mr. Biden demands, as a condition of supporting the compromise, additional legislation that includes what he gave up as part of the compromise.

Mr. Biden’s acute case of lexicographical confusion reveals how badly the president is being compromised — there’s that word again — by the leftists now dominating his party.

House progressives and their Senate counterparts insist that any “infrastructure” bill include a laundry list of items — child care, paid leave, public housing subsidies — that have nothing to do with repairing the nation’s roads, bridges, ports and the like. And they have no intention of dealing on anything. Mr. Biden, on the other hand, was elected as a unifying force eager to reach across the aisle. But now entrenched in the Oval Office, he has jettisoned those promises to signal his subservience to the radical left. Thus, rather than defend the deal to which he just agreed, he runs away from it moments after praising it.

“Less than two hours after publicly commending our colleagues and actually endorsing the bipartisan agreement,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, The Wall Street Journal reported, “the president took the extraordinary step of threatening to veto it.”

Senate Democrats now seek to use a parliamentary gimmick known as reconciliation to avoid a GOP filibuster on items that didn’t make the cut in the compromise bill. If that fails, and the president kills the bipartisan infrastructure deal that he spent much of Thursday extolling, look for the White House and its media stenographers to blame Republican obstructionism, when, in fact, the opposite will be true.

In the long run, however, Mr. Biden’s gimmickry will only further erode trust and make it more difficult to find common ground with Republicans on other issues.

What is the GOP’’s incentive to talk when the president can’t properly define “compromise”?