News Journal: When politics turn strange, things are looking up

I guess I never really grasped how true that hoary old aphorism was until I went to work in the Senate in 1972. I was initially somewhat surprised to see how often people who usually disagreed still found a way to work together on some issues. It was not unusual for liberal and conservative senators to co-sponsor important legislation and many votes were decided with bipartisan support.

I watched as the liberal Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and the conservative Orin Hatch, R-Utah, worked together on health care and national service. And as Bill Roth, R-Del., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., did the same on the Retirement Savings Opportunity Act. Co-sponsoring bills with a member of the other party was a common practice. That’s how things got done.

Then, as liberals left the Republican Party and conservatives the Democratic Party, that once-common practice, with rare exceptions, came to an end. For the past five years, party line votes have become the norm, with Democrats always supporting the president and Republicans always opposing him. We developed a word for it: gridlock. Things no longer got done.

But no one in Congress could be unaware of the frustration felt by voters about gridlock. And the economic recovery has made people feel better about their financial prospects and therefore perhaps more amenable to political compromise. Whatever the reasons, in the past few weeks politics has been making strange bedfellows again.

Nowhere has that been more obvious than in the debates and votes on the president’s Trade Promotion Authority for the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty with 11 other Pacific Rim countries. TPA is what is called “fast track” legislation, meaning its passage would allow the treaty to be considered without amendment. No one questions that this is essential, because it would be virtually impossible to pass any trade treaty if individual members of Congress were allowed to add amendments to protect products or interests important to their constituents.

On May 12, the president started off on the wrong foot and lost a perfunctory vote to move to consider TPA when 14 pro-trade Democrats would not vote to take up the bill. The no votes included the entire Democratic leadership of the Senate. You know the bedfellows are getting strange when the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell votes with the president and says, “What we’ve just witnessed here is the Democratic Senate shutting down the opportunity to debate the top economic priority of the Democratic President of the United States.” Senate Finance Committee Chair Orin Hatch asked, “Does the President of the United States have enough clout with members of his own political party to produce enough votes to get this bill debated and ultimately passed?”

Of course it wasn’t just Democrats voting not to take up the bill. Rand Paul, R-Ky., joined Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., among the nays. Stranger and stranger.

Two days later, the president was able to get 13 Democrats to vote with the Republicans and allow debate to begin on TPA.

Finally, after a lot of intra-party skirmishing, we saw the first headline of its kind since Obama became president: “REPUBLICAN-LED SENATE HANDS PRESIDENT A MAJOR VICTORY.” The final yes votes included 48 Republicans and only 14 Democrats.

There is going to be another bipartisan donnybrook with the vote on the re-authorization of the Export-Import Bank, co-sponsored by Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill.,. The Bank, whose purpose is to encourage foreign businesses to purchase U.S. products, has never before been controversial and has been routinely reauthorized with strong support from Republicans and big business. A coalition led the Chamber of Commerce is strongly in favor of reauthorizing it once again. The Boeing Corporation is threatening to move manufacturing abroad if that doesn’t happen. But some powerful Republicans are not on board.

House Financial Services Chair Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, and House Ways and Means Chair Paul Ryan, R-Wis., have both come out against the bill. So who is championing Boeing’s cause? I’m sure there are some surprised CEOs in the Business Roundtable to find Maxine Waters, D-Calif., often described as a liberal firebrand, on their side. The Democratic Ranking Member on Hensarling’s committee, she said, “If Maxine Waters can work with the Chamber and the manufacturers that sometimes she’s not always gotten along with – then everybody should be able to do it.”

Wow. It is beginning to seem like old times, and I couldn’t be happier. Having polarized party line votes on every issue is a sure way to make sure nothing gets done. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a return to a Congress with a lot of strange bedfellows.

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