News Journal: Budget deal shows compromise isn’t a dirty word

Sometimes in politics there is a major turning point that isn’t recognized as such when it is happening. Only in retrospect does its importance become clear.

I think the government shutdown in October may have been one of those turning points. And its importance became clear only a couple of weeks ago, when a large majority of Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives voted 332 to 94 to pass a budget that included revenue increases and expense cuts. It was then passed by the Senate, with all of the Democrats and 12 Republicans voting for it.

Obviously, poll results that blamed Republicans for the shutdown were a significant wakeup call. Most congressional Republicans weren’t enthusiastic about shutting the government down, but they more or less went along with the minority in their party that was dictating the “no negotiating” legislative strategy that turned out so badly.

Those formerly silent Republican House members said enough is enough when they voted for the budget deal hammered out by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray. The deal itself was pretty small potatoes.

It didn’t do much to reduce long-term deficits or even correct all the damage done by sequestration. What it did do was to signal that compromise is no longer a dirty word in Washington. It is just possible we will begin to see the return of the kind of bipartisan legislative give-and-take that until recent years was how Congress operated.

Rep. Ryan took a lot of heat from the hardliners in his party. But he didn’t back down, and for the first time House Speaker John Boehner took them on when he defended Ryan and the House Republicans who voted on the deal.

“When groups come out and criticize an agreement they’ve never seen,” he said, “you begin to wonder just how credible those actions are. So yesterday, when the criticism was coming, frankly I thought it was my job and my obligation to stand up for conservatives here in the Congress who want more deficit reduction. Stand up for the work that Chairman Ryan did. He did good work on behalf of the American people. It’s not everything we wanted, but our job is to find enough common ground to move the ball down the field on behalf the American people.”

He then went on to suggest that individual House members would band together to do the tough work of legislating even on the most difficult budget issues.

Other influential House Republicans chimed in.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, responded to the outside conservative groups by saying, “It’s not helpful for them to say that that’s completely unacceptable. What would they like? Another government shutdown? If that’s what they want, they should run for Congress.” His view, he added, reflected an “absolute majority of the majority.”

Even prominent conservative Republicans outside Congress expressed support for a new way to do legislative business. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee defended Boehner by saying, “When the movement becomes, sort of, focused in a handful of groups that are raising funds to attack Republicans and the criteria for being attacked is the difference you might have in the tactics of the party, not the philosophy of the party, I think that is what Boehner and the others are really reacting to. Governing is tough. Politics is not theology. It’s easy to be pure when you are talking about theology.”

It takes time for real change to take place. Perhaps trying to appease the groups the budget deal had offended, Rep. Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell both threatened to hold the upcoming debt limit vote hostage unless some unspecified demands are met. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

And it would be too much to hope for immediate breakthroughs on a Grand Bargain budget deal, immigration reform, or much-needed tax reform.

What we do know is that Speaker Boehner now seems to have enough House Republicans at his back to make real negotiations with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama a possibility.

That’s progress. So stay tuned.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.