Don’t let this unifying moment go to waste

Washington today is awash in talk about tactics and gamesmanship. Pundits are rediscovering the history of the filibuster, and pontificating about the rules governing reconciliation. As a result, we’re losing perspective on a deeper crisis: Our nation’s leaders have a rare opportunity to change the culture of our national politics after failing to do so at the beginning of the last two administrations. In negotiations, many will be tempted to draw lines in the sand. But unless both Democrats and Republicans take actions to back up the unifying talk that framed the inauguration, they risk poisoning the well for the next four years.

Americans love a good fight. When the Buccaneers play the Chiefs this Sunday, we’ll expect both teams to give the game all they’ve got. But that never-say-die approach, so revered in some facets of our national life, simply doesn’t work in politics. That’s why the nation has grown so frustrated with Washington and it’s why our divisions have grown so dangerous and even violent. Opportunities to break the vicious cycle are few and far between — and what too few seem to realize is that this fast-moving negotiation over COVID-19 relief deal may be among the last.

Before dismissing bipartisanship as a fantasy, please remember we just saw a textbook example of it a month ago. In the waning days of the Trump administration, Congress came together to pass a $900 billion relief package. Even into last fall, few thought that the Democratic House and Republican Senate would be able to bridge big differences. But with leadership derived less from the four corners of congressional power and more from voices on the center-right and center-left—Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and members of the House Problem Solvers Caucus — the nation’s legislators came up with a package both sides could accept.

It seemed for a moment that perhaps this could be the model for a new way to govern. But old habits die hard in Washington. So now, just two weeks into a new administration and Congress, some appear poised to forget all the “unity” talk and go back to incessant battle.

Truthfully, both sides have legitimate reasons to look warily at those across the aisle. The last two times a new administration took over in Washington, the party in power eventually decided their best option was to steamroll the other. The Obama administration, frustrated in the end by what they saw as GOP intransigence in negotiations over the Affordable Care Act, decided to jam their bill through without any Republican votes. Republicans never even entertained Democratic ideas when drawing up the 2017 tax cuts, which passed without any Democratic votes via reconciliation. Both efforts deepened the divisions in Congress and made it harder to forge bipartisan cooperation thereafter.

That’s why leaders of both parties should step back from the brink before it’s too late. Yes, each of them can go to the proverbial mattresses on this COVID-19 deal. And if they do, their respective bases will cheer them on. But the cost of going down that road again may be a price our dangerously divided country can’t afford. Public cynicism will grow if all the talk of unity on both sides turns out to be entirely empty. A return to endless political warfare will signal to members of Congress that it isn’t worth the effort to try anything bipartisan and it will reinforce the not-so-subtle message they get every day from increasingly partisan journalists and party leaders — namely to do what the party says, country be damned.

The raw political calculation in 2021 is straightforward. Democrats have claimed majorities in the House and Senate, meaning that if they can hold their numbers together, they can pass a COVID-19 relief bill without any Republican support, and potentially even upend the rules of the Senate. Senate Republicans meanwhile have sufficient leverage to hold up the clear majority of the Biden administration’s agenda on issues ranging from immigration to infrastructure. In other words, both sides can serve to upend what the other hopes to accomplish. The question is: Should they?

Set aside for a moment the heated rhetoric both the left and right use to describe what might happen if the other gets its way. The crisis of American democracy today is that a system established to help competing interests find mutual accommodation isn’t working any longer. Leadership today requires those with real authority to abandon what they can do for what they should do. Our national government established by the Constitution is not working. We need those with the ability to set their own interests aside in the name of unity to do what’s right for the nation as a whole.

Nancy Jacobson is CEO and founder No Labels, a group that seeks to move Washington beyond partisan gridlock and toward solutions to challenges faced by the country.