OPINION |
FOURTH ESTATE
Why the halo around an idea that barely worked when it
existed?
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has stretched
his 5-foot, 9-inch frame as far as it can extend to block the bill that would
expand voting rights. |
By JACK
SHAFER
05/28/2021
05:50 PM EDT
Jack Shafer
is Politico’s senior media writer.
Washington
this week has been obsessed with the hunt for the elusive thing known as
“bipartisanship.” Is there a bipartisan deal to be had on China? On
Infrastructure? When Senate Republicans filibustered the investigation into the
Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol—physical security surely being a bipartisan
concern if there ever was one—our own Playbook moaned that “Dreams of a
bipartisan, independent investigation into the Capitol insurrection are
probably dashed for good.”
What dreams
were those? Joe Biden ran for president as the “apostle of bipartisanship,” as
the New York Times put it, and ever since has been romancing Republicans at the
White House hoping to convert them. But the two parties seem unable or
unwilling to agree on anything substantive. The $1.9 trillion pandemic measure
that Congress passed, and Biden signed, collected not a single Republican vote
in either chamber. Today, Republicans and Democrats remain at partisan
loggerheads over the “infrastructure” bill. Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell has stretched his 5-foot, 9-inch frame as far as it can extend to
block H.R. 1, the bill that would expand voting rights.
Speaking
for the bipartisans who don’t seem to exist, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)
lamented the current lack of congressional bipartisanship in a December
farewell speech to the Senate and gloried in the times he had crossed the aisle
to help Democrats rescue a bill. “I think the people elected me to go to work
with the president who was elected at the time,” Alexander said.
Why all the
anguish over a lost ideal of cooperation? While it’s not necessarily a bad
thing when the two parties harmonize, it’s not automatically a good thing, either.
Often, terrible, awful things can also happen when Republicans and Democrats
agree to agree. Other times, virulently partisan legislative solutions are the
best policy. And if you look closely enough at the rosy, hazy past, you’ll find
plenty of times when what looks like the pure ideal of bipartisanship turns out
to be pure political horse-trading, as one party concedes a vote that’s not
important to them to persuade the opposing party to forfeit a position they
don’t particularly care about.
Paging
through American history textbooks, it’s easy to find examples of
bipartisanship we regret. The internment of citizens of Japanese descent?
Bipartisan. The Patriot Act and the Iraq War? Bipartisan. The Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution? The Defense of Marriage Act? The ultracomplicated tax code?
President Bill Clinton’s crime bill? All bipartisan to the max. If only there
had been a little less cooperation between the parties back then, and a little
more critical examination of what they were actually voting on. Proponents of
Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, the civil rights legislation of the
1960s, and other radical measures will tell you that these measures never would
have passed had legislators worshiped the grail of bipartisanship.
You should
reach for your wallet every time a politician makes a plea for bipartisanism in
the name of seeking “common ground” or “rising above politics” or to “reject
cynicism.” There’s nothing more political than asserting that your position is
above politics and that your foes’ positions are drenched in it. As you do,
keep a watch on self-proclaimed “centrists” who claim, as keepers of
compromise, to be the guiding spirit of bipartisanship. Centrism is a position
no less distinct than liberalism or conservatism. Also beware of the so-called
bipartisan presidential commissions that various White Houses have convened. As
the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman observed in 2014, they’re usually a
strategy designed not to bring the warring sides together, but to give a shroud
of credibility to kicking the can down the road a little further. “The
documents are a glorious feast for editorial writers but a bowl of day-old dog
food to the people who make policy,” Chapman concluded.
To anyone
who has watched Washington change over the years, it’s clear the bipartisan
credo represents a nostalgia for a time—which started fading in the late
1960s—when what passed for bipartisanship was extreme partisanship by another
name. Back then, the two parties still embraced more ideological diversity
within their ranks: There were liberal Republicans like John Lindsay, whom
political taxonomists would now peg for a Democrat (he eventually became one)
and conservative Democrats like Strom Thurmond, who acted like a Republican (he
eventually became one, too). The jockeying for votes in those days created an
illusion of Republicans and Democrats working together, when what was often
happening was the natural liberals from both parties ganging up on the natural
conservatives on the Hill.
But by the
1970s, politicians were aggressively sorting themselves into the party closest
to their position, ending easy accommodation with the “other side.” It’s not
just from a failure of character that 1960s-style bipartisanship doesn’t exist
today: It can’t exist. All the liberals have deposited themselves into the
Democratic Party, and all conservatives are Republicans. The species that made
those “bipartisan” deals is as extinct as the ivory-billed woodpecker. Call it
a cryptozoological search.
None of
this analysis is to suggest that the two parties should never work with one
another to pass laws. But as news consumers and voters, we need to remember
that the halo that reporters and pundits, and politicians themselves, hoist
over “bipartisanship” is a shuck. And when it isn’t a shuck, it’s a rhetorical
cudgel that politicians use to brand themselves as noble and reasonable while
slamming their opponents as petty and vindictive.
Despite
their moans of protests about the end of bipartisanship, members of Congress
understand what’s going on: Old-school accommodation is mostly dead, and
Congress has evolved into a defacto parliamentary system in which the majority
takes all. The best way to pass legislation is to win more seats. If you
believe in majority rule, forget about making converts: Assemble a majority and
start ruling with it.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário