Bipartisanship surfaced recently in the U.S. Senate as four Democratic senators and four Republican senators reached a consensus on a proposed immigration reform bill. While the bill will face tough challenges from House Republicans, voters should be encouraged for two reasons: First, any sign that Democrats and Republicans will work together to solve a problem is good news and, second, immigration reform is a critical issue.
Partisan politics prevent the President and the Congress from solving the nation’s most critical problems, and Senators and Representatives of both parties share the blame equally in an environment where job one is to keep the congressman’s base happy in view of the next election cycle and job two is to do whatever damage can be done to the opposition party.
No one should expect Democrats or Republicans to be apolitical, but voters should demand that they work together, build cross-party coalitions and hammer out compromises to address everything from tax policy to debt reduction. The shame is that the cooperation among Democratic senators Charles Shumer, Bob Menendez, Dick Durbin and Robert Bennet and Republican senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Jeff Flake is so unusual — it ought to be an everyday process for resolving political differences so Congress can function as it is designed to function.
Differences of opinion about how any issue should be addressed should increase the probability of finding the best course of action, but that is true only if senators and representatives from both parties are willing to listen to each other, to compromise and to negotiate in good faith.
Eight senators showed what can be done when the focus finally turns to solving a problem, and that happened because members of both parties realized that it’s in the interests of both parties to fix an immigration system that is broken, Democrats because they get the majority of Hispanic votes, and Republicans because they’re being clobbered in national elections by the lack of Hispanic votes. Should their immigration plan become law, both parties can claim success and, more importantly, millions of immigrants can come out of the shadows, begin a path toward citizenship and regain confidence that they too have a chance at the American dream.
It is also in the interest of both parties — and to the benefit of the American people — to find similar common ground on taxation, debt reduction, health care, national security, global warming, gun control, education and countless other issues. The question is, can the rest of the Democrats and Republicans in Washington, like the eight senators, reach the conclusion that working together gets better results for the American people than holding to rigidly pure political ideology? Or must every issue reach the point of a national crisis before Democrats and Republicans consent to join forces in resolution?
It is heartening to see Democrats and Republicans working together for the good of their country, but the fact that it seems extraordinary is an indication of how seldom it happens. Clearly, both houses of the U.S. Congress need more statesmen and fewer politicians focused on ideological purity.
