Washington can change

By Rep. STENY HOYER

Everyone’s for bipartisanship. Everyone’s for freedom, security and happiness, too — until we get down to the work of defining what they mean. In the debate over the economic recovery and its slog through Congress, it’s been easy to exploit that confusion, to create myths of bipartisanship and turn those myths into accusations.

And so a lot of Washington is reading off of the same old script, telling us that after a promising start at the dawn of a new administration, bipartisanship is dead. Again. Now that President Obama’s recovery plan has passed the House without a single Republican vote, and passed the Senate with only three, that will be all the proof some people need; they’ll spend the rest of the year mourning bipartisanship and arguing over who killed it.

But with a clearer definition, we can still take some concrete steps to deliver on our new president’s promise of a new tone.

To begin with, bipartisanship does not mean members of Congress going to the same parties or going out for drinks. It doesn’t even mean that we have to like each other, although most of us do. None of that really matters to the people who sent us to Washington.

Misconception

Nor does bipartisanship mean that, because there are two parties, each gets to write exactly half of every bill. The misconception underlies a lot of Republican anger over the economic recovery plan. But that kind of bipartisanship would make elections irrelevant.

For me, the central question is whether the seriousness with which we work matches the seriousness of the times. What matters is whether we see a vote as a chance to shape better public policy, or to define ourselves ideologically. Under President Bush, we Democrats understood that our differences were still outweighed by the need to do the right thing for our country, on intelligence reform, on last winter’s economic stimulus, on the painful decision to approve rescue funds for our banks, and on a host of other issues.

You can contrast that with 1993, when every single Republican in Congress voted against President Clinton’s economic plan, or to the first vote on President Obama’s plan, when every Republican in the House voted “nay” — and then broke out in cheers. The GOP is still wedded to a strategy developed by Newt Gingrich decades ago: the less Congress accomplishes, the better the minority looks. In the Senate, according to Republican Susan Collins, that approach is alive and well: “Some of my colleagues seem determined to oppose the stimulus bill almost no matter what is done.”

We can’t change that attitude overnight. But we can still work to create a culture in which opponents listen to one another attentively, respond with arguments, not talking points, and never question the sincerity of the other side’s beliefs — an atmosphere of respect and fair input.

Spirit of unity

And those virtues can over time, find their way to the rest of the culture. They can mean fewer political arguments devolving into shouting matches, and more Americans hearing out their neighbors’ beliefs. That was the spirit of unity that resonated so strongly in President Obama’s campaign.

More important, that kind of bipartisanship can mean better results. As President Obama said, the founders “set it up to make big change hard. ... No one party, no one individual can simply dictate the terms of the debate.”

In practical terms, that means hashing bills out in committee, opening them up for amendments and substitutes, and voting those up or down. To be honest, we didn’t always live up to those principles in the last Congress; and in this one, I hope we’ll do better.

That is why the House must return to “regular order”: the back-to-basics approach, full of debate in committees, that we learned about in civics class. That would give more members, from across the ideological spectrum, input into the work we do. It would mean better legislation, stronger consensus, and a House that is as open and representative as we pledged it would be.

X Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., is majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.