Is Bipartisanship a Good Thing?
Bipartisanship is great, isn’t it? Everyone in Washington agrees that bipartisanship is the platonic ideal. The holy grail. The New York slice of politics. And if Washington believe something, well who are us peasants to argue? But let’s be fair. Unlike what politicians usually believe, this superficially makes some sense.
If you can get a bill passed in a bipartisan manner then you implicate both sides in it. That means it becomes harder and less politically advantageous for one of the parties to try to repeal it again. After all, it’s quite hard to criticize a bill that you helped pass and argued in favour of. Furthermore if both sides agreed that they wanted it, they have no reason to even try and repeal it. If the bill itself is a good one then being more sure that it will still be there after the next election is quite a good thing.
There’s also the fact that the government is, hold on to your hat for this one boys, meant to represent the people, ALL of the people, in its actions. So compromise makes perfect sense then, doesn’t it? Both sides get input and so both sides are represented in the final action. Neither side is fully happy but both are as happy as they can be. Which is great for co-existence. Bravo, hooray and bully for you.
Except… like your average New Year’s Resolution, this is nothing but a comforting but unrealistic lie people tell themselves. And if you actually look at the facts, the practical implications of bipartisanship are rarely so positive.
The Essential Problem of Bipartisanship
This is because there is an essential problem here. If you want to know what bipartisanship inspires first and foremost, you have to ask yourself: What unites both parties? What things do they agree on? If you want to pass something in a bipartisan manner, after all, then what both parties agree on is rather important. Because the things both sides agree on are the easiest to pass in a bipartisan manner.
Unfortunately for ordinary Americans, what they agree on is not a higher minimum wage and better healthcare.
The bills that receive the most bipartisan support are instead bills like giving tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy or funneling more money into the military industrial complex. It’s telling that the only Trump veto congress ever overturned in his 4 years in office… was a defence spending bill. And that they agree in these areas specifically is not surprising. As while their bases might be different, one thing both sides have in common is that they both take campaign contributions from the wealthy and corporations, including defence contractors.
Yet this is not stuff that most ordinary Americans would agree on. In fact, the bipartisan support among the American people flows in the opposite direction. We have, for example, this poll by the Center for Public Integrity which shows that 90% of democrats at 67% of republicans (quite bipartisan) support CUTTING the militay budget. And in 2018 62% of Americans, according to Gallup polls from 1992–2018, believed that upper-income people paid TOO LITTLE in federal taxes.
All this considered the basic premise of why bipartisanship is good which we established earlier fails miserably. The idea, you might recall, was that bipartisanship is good because it allows the government to not just represent one party’s interests but the interests of the American people as a whole. Yet, the things which are accomplished through bipartisanship are often the OPPOSITE of what the American people want. You can’t “represent bother sides” as the government if you’re actually going against what both sides want.
Alright, but what about the stuff that both sides disagree on? Surely there is value in reaching some sort of compromise on these issues? After all, we all have live together in one country regardless of our political beliefs and affiliation. In order to co-exist peacefully compromise is necessary. And I would agree with that. But that’s not actually what happens in Washington.
Compromising is the Devil’s Bargain
You see, in order to reach a good compromise both sides must be negotiating in good faith. This is because the positions both sides initially hold determine what the “middle” compromise position is. Sadly, this means that if you’re arguing in bad faith it’s relatively easy to get 100% of what you want, or the bulk of it, while making it look like the compromise. Because at the start you can just pick the most extreme position you can possibly hold. And the republicans do this all the time.
The Affordable Care Act is a great case study here.
For those who weren’t aware, the healthcare reform popularly called “Obamacare” is something called an individual mandate system. This is a system where private healthcare providers and private insurers stay in place, but there is a government mandate that everyone must purchase insurance. This is an attempt to get everyone coverage and reduce costs for sick individuals (by adding healthy paying individuals to the mix) all while still keeping healthcare entirely in the private sector. Perhaps less well-known is the fact that, not long before Obamacare was implemented, similar healthcare systems incorporating exchanges were proposed by the Heritage foundation (a right-wing think tank) and implemented by Mitt Romney (a republican) in Massachusetts.
That’s right. Evil, socialist, far-left Obamacare… is pretty much a republican plan.
And while there are some differences between the Heritage Foundation’s proposal and Obamacare, the foundational system remains the same.
But if you know anything about how the republican party responded to it, you know that’s definitely not how they played it off. And that’s not surprising. It is significantly more politically beneficial for them to just demonize the other side as much as possible. That way they don’t have to actually do anything AND they get their people to continue voting for them. Even if that is just because they’re voting “against the evil socialists.” From their perspective it’s a pretty sweet deal. It’s just too bad it comes at the cost of the American people.
More importantly for the purposes of this article, this bad faith negotiating essentially makes reaching genuine bipartisan compromise impossible. Because whenever the democrats move further towards the republican position, the republicans will simply move even farther right and call the democrats far-left for their proposal. This means that by the end the “compromise” you’re left with heavily favours the republicans and barely gets any democratic priorities accomplished.
A genuine compromise between two sides requires reaching a middle ground that’s acceptible to both sides. And that’s just not what happens with the way things currently work in Washington.
The Solution(s)
Now on to the part you’ve all been waiting for: What is the solution? That somewhat depends on what you’re looking for.
The obvious solution is for the democrats to abandon this idea of bipartisanship. Sure, they can try to get bipartisan agreements passed. But if the republicans refuse to cooperate, then just find alternate routes. Getting rid of the fillibuster, budget reconciliation, moving the overton window by staking out more left-wing positions themselves, etc. These are the tactics the republicans use and they work pretty well.
Polls show that democratic voters generally favour bipartisanship though, so this may be more difficult for the democrats than it is for the republicans. Then again, maybe democratic voters just love bipartisanship so much because democratic politicians fetishize it so much. If that’s the case, perhaps if they stopped holding bipartisanship up as the gold standard their voters would change their minds as well.
The harder solution is to attempt to introduce genuine bipartisanship into congress. This, as many things do, would have to start with getting rid of money in politics.
Changing the Shared Interests
As laid out earlier, one of the major reasons that the things both parties agree on are so far removed from what their voters agree on is that both parties take corporate money in the form of campaign contributions. Get rid of that and the first problem is likely solved. There will likely be less bipartisan consensus on cutting taxes for the rich if the rich are no longer buying both parties.
There are many ways of getting money out of politics but my favoured system is some version of “democracy dollars.” Where every person in the country would get a certain amount of money a year from the government specifically to allocate to any political party or candidate that they wanted. Outside of that political contributions (at least those exceeding a certain amount) would become completely illegal. Including in the form of PACs or Super-Pacs.
Compromise Starts with the Voters
Another form of compromise which might be a little less obvious is… ranked-choice voting. Switching to a system of ranked-choice voting (at least for the senate and the presidency) wouldn’t necessarily change how people compromise in Washington. But it would change the people who end up in Washington to people that VOTERS can compromise on. As compromise is at the heart of ranked-choice voting.
With ranked-choice voting people may not get the nr. 1 person they voted on on their list, because maybe everyone else didn’t like that person very much. But everyone might get the person who’s the nr. 2 on their list. And this person would be someone acceptable to all of those people, not just a plurality. This means the policy positions they hold are, inherently, a compromise which appeals to the majority.
Finally, a greater use of referendums and recall elections might work here as well.
Smashing the Gridlock
Right now if bipartisan support is necessary to pass a bill then one side can just stake out a position farther left/right than the one they actually believe and block the other party unless and until the party compromises down to their actual position. This not only makes for poor compromises but also for lots of gridlock. So how do we solve this gridlock? Referenda.
Under this system, if there was gridlock in the senate, it would take a minority of senators (or the president) to call for a binding public referendum. This referendum would then supplant the normal approval process of the bill. So if the majority of people wanted something it would just get done regardless of the political games being played.
Even if that wasn’t feasible within the U.S. political system (which to be fair, I’m not sure on this) you could still use non-binding referenda. These would not replace the approval process, but (as clear in the case of Brexit) provide a great deal of public pressure that might be sufficient to break the gridlock anyway.
Now it’s important to note that this would not mean there is an actual direct democracy here. This process would only occur if a bill was being blocked AND a minority of senators or the president called for it. But it would mean that no party could actually obstruct democracy very easily. Most importantly, however, this would give the parties a significant incentive to compromise. Since neither party would want the other party to take their chance to have input on this bill away. On the other side, the party trying to pass the bill would probably prefer not to call for a referendum since in many cases it would be quite risky. In other words, both sides would be motivated to compromise. Kind of like a ticking clock.
Return to Sender
Recall elections could also help here. If someone is obstructing a bill in a way that absolutely none of the American people actually agree with… there’s the option of a recall election. Where suddenly they would have to face another election early and defeat another opponent. If they managed to defeat them, then clearly what they’re doing has the support of their voters. And if they don’t… well, the gridlock has just been solved in favour of their voters.
Most importantly, however, politicians are terrified of elections. There is nothing the average politician fears more than their own voters. This means that if they even get a whif of a recall election being a possibility… they’ll probably be fairly amenable to compromising to avoid that.
And while an election is going on politicians tend to be much more motivated to actually say and do what their voters want. Whereas if an election is still 2 to 6 years away… not so much.
Conclusion
All of these proposed solutions are just ideas. And nobody can truly know right now how they would work out if they were actually implemented. Maybe some of them work, maybe others don’t. Maybe some solutions that I didn’t mention work even better. But the underlying point is this: Right now bipartisanship neither accomplishes its goal of representing agreement among a majority of voters nor its goal of bringing about genuine compromises on difficult issues.
That means that, right now, bipartisanship is (usually) not a good thing. No matter what Joe Biden or any other politician says. Either something needs to be done to fix it, or it needs to die an ignominious death. But nobody should be pushing it happily.
