Biden team struggling to adapt to GOP power on Capitol Hill

President Biden’s reversal on a House GOP-led measure to kill the District of Columbia’s criminal justice overhaul last week exposed a White House still struggling to figure out how to operate in a Washington where Republicans have partial control over the agenda.

Mr. Biden told senators that he would sign the resolution, just weeks after the White House had told lawmakers the administration opposed it.

The White House, moving into a defensive crouch, insisted the president’s stance wasn’t a reversal and they had always intended to let the process play out on Capitol Hill before issuing a final ultimatum.

But that meant dozens of House Democrats cast their vote on the legislation last month believing Mr. Biden was leaning one way, only to find he was really headed the other way.

Mr. Biden’s allies in the District were also incensed by his stance. Some called it a betrayal. One D.C.-based group said he was embracing “the oppression, the disenfranchisement and the outright discrimination woven throughout our history.”

It was an unforced error for the team, said longtime Capitol Hill operatives.

“They wound up delivering a haymaker to Congress, then punching themselves in the nose,” said Eric Ueland, who spent decades in senior positions on Capitol Hill before running the legislative affairs shop in the Trump White House. “There will always be people now on the Democratic side of the aisle up there who will ask each other, once the White House team has left the building, ‘Do we know for sure that’s truly the president’s position?’”

The flare-up comes on legislation that emerged from the House to overturn the District’s new criminal code, which reduces maximum sentences for many major crimes.

Backers call it a long-overdue rewrite of a century-old code, bringing sentences more in line with what judges are doing right now. Opponents call it the wrong message to send at a time when crime is surging in the city.

The Constitution gives Congress ultimate power over the District, and under the Home Rule Act, Capitol Hill retains a veto over city legislation. The new House GOP majority exercised that power, forcing a vote on a resolution to halt the criminal code rewrite. That measure passed 250-173, with 31 Democrats joining Republicans.

Ahead of that vote, the White House Office of Management and Budget — the nerve center of the administration — issued what’s known as a statement of administration policy on the resolution, saying the White House “opposes” it. The statement said it conflicted with Mr. Biden’s belief that the city should manage its own affairs.

But late last week Mr. Biden told senators he would sign the measure.

Legislative experts said either OMB fired off its statement without first checking with the president — a real no-no — or else someone had a change of heart.

“It makes you wonder who is actually in charge in the West Wing,” said one former OMB staffer.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre rebutted that suggestion.

“There was never a change of heart,” she said.

She acknowledged that OMB had said the president opposed the resolution, but she said that statement didn’t include a veto threat, which meant Congress should have known he might sign it.

“We never laid out where the president was going to go once it came to his desk, because we wanted to allow Congress to move forward in a way that they normally do with the mechanism when a piece of legislation moves forward,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said. “Now that we know that this legislation is going to be at the president’s desk, we’re making [it] very clear and communicating where the president is on this legislation.”

Mr. Ueland, who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the White House operation seems off-kilter as it deals with a Washington where Democrats aren’t in total control.

“They slipped into the easy familiarity of [former House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi solving all their problems for them over the last two years, so legislative affairs consisted of trudging up to the Hill and hearing what the former speaker had to say and adapting their perspective to her guidance,” he said. “Now they need to act independently, and they are subsuming a lot of their policy calls into the political agenda.”

Indeed, Mrs. Pelosi herself dinged the White House for its bungle.

“If he was going to do it, I wish he would’ve told us first because this was a hard vote for the House members,” the California Democrat said Friday during an event at the University of Chicago.

Russ Vought, who served as director of OMB in the Trump administration, said the bungle exposed a rift inside the White House’s operation.

“Sad for the institution!” he tweeted. “Weakens it.”

OMB also had an earlier stumble when it issued in January its first policy statement on a House GOP bill to revoke tens of billions of dollars in new money for the IRS. The statement went beyond the usual policy analysis by mocking Republicans as sycophants for the wealthy by enabling people to “skip out on their taxes.”

That statement contained Mr. Biden’s first veto threat.

He has followed up with three more veto threats. Two came on legislation to end coronavirus emergency policies, and the other would have imposed conditions on Mr. Biden’s ability to tap the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve until the administration delivers a plan for boosting U.S. energy production.

The Biden OMB has also issued three other policy statements this year opposing House GOP bills, but not directly threatening a veto.

The resolution on the D.C. crime legislation was one of those. It was tied together with another piece of legislation that would overturn the District’s new ordinance allowing noncitizens to cast ballots in city elections.

The White House is betting that voters don’t care about the messy operations and frayed relationships with Capitol Hill, and will reward the president for a tough-on-crime approach.

When a reporter said most Americans are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of statements of administration policy, Ms. Jean-Pierre laughed and nodded, saying, “I’m pretty sure they’re not.”