There is a lot of talk these days about what “Democrats” on Capitol Hill should do to resist the Trump blitzkrieg or whether “Republicans” will be able to resolve their disagreements over spending cuts and Ukraine. Implicit in such questions is a widely shared assumption that the way things ought to work, the natural order, is for members of the same party to unify around a strategy or policy and, on the strength of such unity, prevail over the other party. By that logic, failure to reach consensus or achieve party unity is a sign of weakness that guarantees victory to the other side. But what if that model is wrong? What if in a country that is just about evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independents, under a constitutional system that divides power among a president and two chambers of Congress each elected in somewhat different fashion, there are significant differences among party members in terms of policy preferences, constituent interests and political necessity that can’t be easily resolved? And what if the point of serving in Congress isn’t to ensure that your party prevails over the other but to enact policies that will do the most good for all your constituents, not just the ones who voted for you? In that case, perhaps everyone’s first instinct wouldn’t be to ask what “Republicans” or “Democrats” were going to do. Instead, they’d ask what individual members were going to do — and what combinations of Republicans and Democrats could create working majorities on various issues. Indeed, for most of the 20th century, this was the prevailing model of how Congress operated. And it is no coincidence that this was also a time when most voters and most members believed that Congress was doing a decent job with the people’s business. But in the last 30 years, Congress has embraced a different model. Now, instead of 535 members exercising independent judgments, they reflexively hand over their power and independence to party leaders and caucuses on the mistaken assumption that what is good for the party is good for their districts, their country and their own political fortunes. And the result? Nobody — not the members, and certainly not the voters — thinks it’s working. So how about this radical idea? Instead of House and Senate Republicans spending the next two months meeting behind closed doors trying to agree on a massive tax and spending package that almost every last one of them can be bullied into voting for without input or support from a single Democrat, why not spend a few weeks trying the old-fashioned way? Break the sprawling reconciliation package up into a half-dozen different bills and send them to the relevant committees. Give those committees 60 days to hold honest hearings on serious proposals from members of both parties. Then spend a week behind closed doors hammering out a bill that can win the votes of the overwhelming majority of Republicans and, say, 20 percent of the chamber’s Democrats. Put each bill before the full House and Senate with opportunity for debate and amendments. Then resolve differences between the chambers with a small conference committee. Why, you might ask, would most Republicans accept three-quarters of a victory when they could muscle through “one big, beautiful” package with all Republican votes? Because accommodating the demands of the party’s most radical fringe will force many Republican members to hold their noses and vote for a fiscally dangerous package with program cuts that so many of their constituents won’t like that they will risk losing their seats in 2024, along with the Republican majority, at least in the House. That’s exactly what happened in 2010, 2018 and 2022 after partisan reconciliation resolutions were muscled through on party-line votes, and the early polling suggests it will happen this time as well. And why would any Democrats vote for an improved but still badly flawed package when by maintaining a united resistance they might energize their base, create division in the other party and possibly win back the majority in the next election? Because by giving Republicans a reason to compromise, they can save the country from really damaging policies, resolve a few pressing issues and begin to rebuild the voters’ trust in government and the Democrats’ brand as the natural governing party. What both parties should have learned from the last 30 years of relentless partisan trench warfare is that staying unified and hanging tough won’t give them the breakthrough final victory they fantasize about. Instead, what partisan unity and message discipline produce are long stretches of legislative gridlock punctuated by brief periods of frenzied, partisan policymaking that are largely reversed after the next election. Two bits of conventional wisdom are used to rationalize this stubborn refusal to even consider the possibility of bipartisan compromise: (1) that any members who vote for such a compromise will be challenged and defeated in the next party primary; and (2) bipartisan compromise will create disunity within the party and cloud its message, resulting in a loss of the next election. The first is a gross exaggeration based on a small number of incumbents ousted in primaries. The second ignores recent history and is logically false: In a two-party system, it’s not possible for both parties to lose the next election if some of their members engage in compromise. The reality is that neither party is going to achieve total victory by waging ideological jihad. What most Americans yearn for is competent, decisive and honest leaders who will move the country toward the “radical center” and a politics freed from the grip of ideology, partisanship and the status quo. For this new, silent majority, bipartisan compromise is something to be rewarded, not punished—it’s the “change” they’ve been yearning for all along. What’s been missing are politicians with the courage, wisdom, imagination to try it. Steven Pearlstein is director of the Fixing Congress Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a longtime writer and columnist for The Washington Post. He is also Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University. The views expressed here are his own.
