Why we shouldn’t all just get along
Posted on Friday, December 15, 2006
There's all kinds of complaining in Washington these days as Republicans face the loss of power.
But the call for bipartisanship and cooperation, while sounding good, is neither practical nor genuine.
When I worked in Congress as a press secretary and legislative aide for nine years, we frequently got asked why we couldn't all just get along and do what was right for the country. It's a well-meant question, but naïve. Here was inevitably my response: Do you get along all the time in your marriage, in your family, on your school boards, on your city councils ?
Now ramp up the complexity and impact of the scenarios exponentially and you can understand why everyone is not just palsy-walsy in Washington and eager to give away the store. At the congressional level, the issues affect 300 million people and the world at large. Let's take Iraq. When it comes to spending $ 2 billion a week (a total of $ 400 billion thus far ) on a failed war that has claimed an estimated 600, 000 civilian lives and 3, 154 coalition casualties, including 2, 907 Americans, what makes anyone think arguments are not going to be heated in Congress and consensus difficult to reach ?
Congress is a hard-scrabble battlefield where members fight for what they think is right and for their constituents' interests. I want them to fight hard. The gravity of the issues warrants it.
The parties and members representing different constituent interests are not supposed to get along. The ruling party is supposed to push and the opposing party is supposed to oppose, to provide a counterweight, to bring balance. Opposition is just the beginning of a political process for sorting out ideologies. It often builds into an explosive culmination that leads to compromise, which is rarely easy because what one side has to give up is often very important.
There's also a lack of genuineness behind Republican calls for cooperation. Too often what Republicans and President Bush mean when they tout bipartisanship is that Democrats lie down and play dead. They want Democrats to give in to Bush on all counts and neither oppose nor investigate him. And Republicans want all the cooperation they didn't give in their more than 10 years of near total control and repression of Democrats. It got so bad that Republicans no longer consulted Democrats on major legislation, and Democrats often didn't even get the chance to read bills before they had to vote on them.
I was in Congress when the Republicans took power in 1994, and it wasn't pretty. That time is encapsulated for me in a scene at a congressional ATM, where a good friend of mine, a Republican press secretary, actually mocked me about our loss of power as I walked by. The message ? All bipartisan friendships were off. Republicans weren't going to handle power well. It was going to go to their heads. And indeed it did, which is why the country gave them a spanking at the last election.
After the 1994 Republican win, there followed a cascade of events in which Democrats were relegated to much less office space than they gave Republicans, where committee chairmen didn't even consult their Democratic counterparts, where valuable caucuses were defunded, where an important research arm of Congress was dismantled, where Republicans instituted a new computer system that potentially gave them access to the internal goings-on in Democratic offices, and so much more. Republicans ruled with a heavy hand, exclusively and without bipartisanship. They were arrogant, belittling and powerdrunk. They used their powers of investigation viciously, especially on a Democratic president, as if releasing pent-up resentment over the impeachment of Richard Nixon. These are the same people who now decry any attempts to investigate the false premises of this war, the wasteful and corrupt spending of so much treasure, the horrendous Pentagon decisions that have cost so many lives and created so much chaos. They are also the people whining about the loss of Republican staff jobs, which is natural fallout in any party switch. So brace yourself for the great conservative whine - you're not playing fair, you're divisive, you're being mean to the president - and try to keep it in perspective. Am I saying that turnabout is fair play, that Democrats should exact the same dirty tricks on Republicans that Republicans played upon them - a dance that has been going on since the beginning of the republic ? No. I don't believe that's what people voted for. They voted for change. But how that change takes place will test the political savvy of Democrats. Democrats need to be wise, wary and firm, not abusing their power but not giving it away. They need to let criticism roll off them and do what resonates with their gut. They need to institute ethical reforms. And they need to remember that they are far better at governing than being in the opposition. We have divided government again, and I think people are happier with that. But with divided government comes division. So let them fight it out, and don't demand a tea party while the world burns.
• • • Barbara Warner is a former congressional press secretary and White House appointee at the U. S. Commerce Department. She lives in Siloam Springs and writes a monthly column for The Benton County Daily Record.
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