Clip: Will Biden's show of bipartisanship with McConnell help him in the divided government?

Yamiche Alcindor: And one of the things that we've talked about, and I want to bring it up and talk about a little bit more, is that with all this chaos in the lower chamber, in the upper chamber, that would be the Senate, the spirit has been one of cooperation, surprisingly. This week, President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell traveled to McConnell's native, Kentucky, to tout the bipartisan infrastructure act passed last year and the benefits of working across the aisle.

Joe Biden: We disagree on a lot of things but here is what matters, he is a man of his word. He is willing to find common ground to get things done for the country.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): We all know these are really partisan times but I always feel no matter who gets elected, once it is all over, we ought to look for things we can agree on and try to do those.

Yamiche Alcindor: So, Yasmeen, this is the person that you are covering every day, President Biden. What was going into the president's thinking? Take us a little bit behind the scenes about why the White House thought this was a good idea and what they think this might, in some ways, lead to down the line.

Yasmeen Abutaleb: I think the timing could not have worked out better for them. I don't know that they expected the backdrop to be quite that much of a split screen. But there are a couple of elements to this. One is that President Biden and Mitch McConnell actually like each other. Even though they disagree on most of things, they actually have a long relationship and they like each other and they are both from this era where Republicans and Democrats try to get things done together.

And so I think for them, I know from Mitch McConnell's side, the bridge, nothing was more symbolic of crumbling infrastructure in the U.S. and he could tout this. And I think also for both of them, they are trying to show, look, we can still work together, we can still get things done. Look at this clown show. For people who are reasonable, actually, the two parties can still come together and we know that they had been looking for some time for some type of event, some type of bill where they could showcase bipartisanship and try to show people that Congress and the presidency could still function together.

Yamiche Alcindor: And, Ali, I want to come to you. What is your sense of why this term was important to both of these sides, especially as you are up on the Hill? I wonder if House members, if they can even think about the other chamber, what they have been saying.

Ali Vitali: Certainly, nobody was talking about Mitch McConnell if they were thinking about him. But I think that Yasmeen is right, that the goal for Biden and McConnell, both, is to show that this can still work. Biden is still, in many ways, the same man who served in the Senate for decades, a creature of Congress. It's something that he regularly talked about on the campaign trail. So, this makes a lot of sense.

I do think as we look at the next few months and certainly the next two years, we are going to see two very different theories of how to be a Republican in the post-Trump era coming out of Congress, based on which chamber you are looking at. Mitch McConnell had a very different lesson that he learned from these midterms than Kevin McCarthy did. McConnell's lesson was the chaos did not work and he was using chaos as a stand in both for Trump and also for the literal word, chaos.

What McCarthy and House Republicans are doing this week only underscores the idea that they are going to represent messiness and dysfunction even as they try to spin it as this just being the way that they are going to move forward on a path to governing. So, this is, I think, what it's going to be for the next two years, showcasing two entirely different versions of Republicanism in Washington.

Yamiche Alcindor: And it is such a good point.

And, Carl, I have to ask, what do you think Mitch McConnell gets out of this? In some ways, it makes sense what President Biden gets out of it. What's McConnell --

Carl Hulse: I will say first that nothing brings politicians together like hundreds of millions of dollars for public works projects.

Yamiche Alcindor: You mean pork?

Carl Hulse: Yes. Mitch McConnell is -- he would not like me saying this but he is nearing the end of his career. And I think Mitch McConnell is in legacy building-mode and he wants to be seen as somebody who was able to work across party lines. He also was famously in the past a big person directing a lot of money to Kentucky.

He helped Biden a lot these last two years. They got some legislation done. They supported Ukraine together. But I think that Mitch McConnell just really relished this moment, what was going on in the House and Trump not having much influence, and here is Mitch McConnell and the president and several other senators celebrating, they are celebrating their work together. It was really something.

I did a piece on the last time that the House had this big long drawn out vote 100 years ago and it was eerily similar. The Senate also then basically saw what the House was doing, immediately recessed and left town and let the House carry on. So, it's basically a great parallel.

Yamiche Alcindor: Wow. I was going to ask you about the history of this. Are there any parallels that you want to point out when you think about sort of time that we're living in the then-1923?

Carl Hulse: Well, the interesting thing was the fight was sort of about the same thing. It was about progressive Republicans at that time trying to get more power, they wanted to offer more amendments, wanted more committee slots. I said there's a lot that has happened in 100 years but Congress is kind of the same. It's just I want my share.

Susan Page: There's a battle underway for the soul of the Republican Party. It's been underway for some time. President Trump, when he won election, defined the Republican Party in a new way and it's really been the face of the party since then. But this next presidential election is going to be a battle that will play out the same forces that we see playing out in the House this week.

Yamiche Alcindor: It's such an important point. And I wanted to ask you, do you think that there is any chance we get big bills? We are looking already at the idea of government shutdowns and raising the debt ceiling. But I wonder, do you think there is any chance that we get the sort of big bills that Biden and McConnell were touting?

Susan Page: No. I mean, I think if we are lucky, we will fund the government and raise the debt ceiling. But the idea that some of the big legislation that has passed in the past two years can make it through this House, I think, is unlikely.

Carl Hulse: I agree with that. I mean, we will be lucky if we don't have a default on the federal government.

Yamiche Alcindor: Is that what you are hearing from White House sources too?

Yasmeen Abutaleb: Absolutely. I mean, they've been worried from before November that if House Republicans took control, the budgets would be a really big deal. And, of course, that's why you saw the White House and the Senate, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, wanting an omnibus at the end of December to fund the government for a full year as opposed to bring this up again in two months because of exactly what we are seeing play out this week.

Yamiche Alcindor: And, Ali, in the last 30 seconds we have here, tell us a little bit about what is coming up on your side of Pennsylvania Avenue here.

Ali Vitali: Hopefully, they do their work tonight. That is the goal of team McCarthy. They think that they are there, though they can't quite explain how they will get there. I think part of the reason that we don't have that answer yet is because many of these six holdouts love the drama. They want to be able to do it on the floor. And so that's what we are waiting to see. This story, as it has all week, unfolding in real-time for all of us together.