"Bipartisanship" has become a dirty word on both sides of the aisle these days. Republicans see it as treason - treason to their party, not the country - while Democrats, particularly progressives, see it as a waste of time at best, and a sellout of principles at worst.
Nonetheless, Congress still operates in a bipartisan manner. It's just that all the players are members of the Democratic party.
Bipartisanship has value - it is an expression of the Enlightenment ideal on which this country was founded: the idea that out of reasoned debate the best laws and policies will arise. In order for that ideal to function, all sides have to acknowledge that though they will fight for their partisan principles, in the end, they will have to come to some compromise in order to accomplish a practical good. The majority will generally get its way - that's the consequence of having elections - but the minority gets to point out flaws, mistakes, things overlooked or not properly taken care of, and to influence the final result.
As with any other system of rules invented by man, the rules of bipartisanship can be abused. The unstated underlying principle behind these rules is that people who rise to the level of national office, particularly in the Senate, are adults who have the best interests of the country at heart, and that disagreements on what that interest is, are disagreements among gentlemen (and ladies) which can be resolved in a spirit of comity.
That changed when the Republican party became the creature of its extremists, who insisted that all GOP elected officials swear absolute fidelity to their platform, who labeled dissent as treason, who valued loyalty to the party over loyalty to the nation. And who, while insisting that government does not work, at the same time insist that they are the only ones capable of running it.
This accounts for the farce we have been subjected to over health care reform. Because President Obama made it his highest legislative priority, the GOP saw it as a chance to make his presidency a failure - it would become Obama's "waterloo", derail the rest of his agenda, and clear the way for a Republican return to power in 2010 and 2012.
The merits and demerits of health care reform were irrelevant to such a plan. In 1994, Republicans defeated Bill and Hilary Clinton's health care reform largely by pointing out legitimate problems with their proposals. (And they played on people's fears as well.) This time, they ignored the real flaws in favor of invented fantasies which existed only in their minds, "death panels" being the foremost example. "Teabaggers," TV and radio pundits and talk show hosts, town hall disruptions, all were enlisted in an attempt to stifle debate rather than engage in it. The (so far) low point was reached last night when Sen. Tom Coburn asked for people to pray that some Democrat (presumably Sen. Byrd) would be unable to attend the cloture vote.
The GOP, the "party of No," is no longer a legitimate political player. They have broken too many rules, violated too many principles on which our system of government is built. Although many attempts - too many, people here have said - were made to get Republicans to participate in the process, only Sen. Snowe made even a half-hearted attempt to do so. The other GOP senators indulged in a year-long tantrum which, in the end, made them irrelevant.
Nonetheless the two-party system, the spirit of bipartisanship, the Enlightenment ideal of reasoned debate, endures. It's just that both parties are now Democrats.
Pundits are starting to point out that while the Republicans engaged in name-calling and fantasy charges, Democrats were actually arguing over ideas. We may not beall that thrilled with the compromise that has emerged from Harry Reid's pushing and pulling, but the fact remains that it is the sort of legislation that is the normal product of bipartisan negotiations. In this case, the partisans are Conservative and Progressive Democrats, along with moderates - and, yes, the occasional mischief maker.
And Reid was working with a handicap not normally associated with bipartisan maneuvers: he had to achieve unanimous consent among his various partisans. Republicans hold exactly one fewer than the number of votes needed to bring the process to a grinding halt. This forced him to make more compromises, to weaken the legislation, more than reasoned debate would have called for. The Enlightenment ideal does not work well when unanimity is required.
So, those of you who call for boycotting the 2010 elections, or for working for some hopeless third party candidate, in order to punish the Democrats and President Obama for not delivering everything you wanted, consider that we got what we got because the Democrats had to play all the parts, fulfill all the duties, normally expected of both sides of an Enlightenment-structured system of government. In spite of everything the Republicans could do to gum up the works, the Democrats have been able to make the system work.
The solution to the bipartisan conundrum, then, is not to help the Republicans make things worse. It's to help the Democrats make things better. We need to expand our majority in the Senate, not reduce it. A vote for more Democrats is, in today's reality, a vote to continue the two-party system.
The alternative, should the GOP get its 41st senator, is a one-party system - the party of No.