January 24, 2018--Losers & Winners

For days after Congress couldn't agree to a short term budget fix, which resulted in the government going dark, and then after three days it's reopening, if you spent any time watching cable news virtually all the talk was about who won and who lost.

Was the "Schumer-Shutdown," as the Republicans derisively referred to it, evidence that Democrats in the Senate "blinked" when they realized they had overstepped when they refused to make a budget deal?

Or was President Trump the political loser (no equivalent alliterative epithet for this) when he agreed to include six years of child healthcare, CHIP funding in exchange for a three-week continuing resolution?

Losers and winners is the way so much of our public life has come to be construed. Not what gets done but who's up and, especially, who's down.

But with their reporters scurrying around the halls of Congress to take the minute-to-minute pulse--especially of the dozen or so Democratic senators who are already running for president in 2020--these news sources missed the big picture--who actually won and what it may mean going forward. May mean.

The deal finally hammered out more than anything else was the result of a bipartisan group of about two dozen senators working together 10, 12 hours a day on something they and their colleagues could live with.

They met in semi-secrecy in Maine Republican senator Susan Collin's "safe office," her "sanctuary office," talking to each other about substantive issues for the first time in their senatorial lives, some reported, largely because they felt they couldn't depend upon their leaders--Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell--to come up with a deal as they were so immeshed in posturing and spinning the truth before the waiting microphones and CSPAN cameras.

Many of the participants in the "gang or 25" said that they were so fed up by being excluded from the sausage-making process of crafting legislation and so disgusted by the equivocation and mixed messages emanating from the president and his White House, where many felt Trump was being "led around by the nose," as Joe Scarborough put it, by "a 32-year-old kid," presidential advisor Stephen Miller, who looks like a picture of evil right out of central casting, that they took matters into their own hands and for a change earned their $174,00-a-year salaries (which, incidentally continued during the shutdown).

Some, after the agreement was struck, said that the experience of working together across party lines to "get things done" was the reason they originally sought public office--and here's the potential big headline--that not only did they feel good about what they accomplished (though the full story about that will not be known for some weeks as the centripetal political forces struggle to reassert themselves as the 2020 campaign heats ups), they said this is how they plan to work going forward. 

They claimed they will stick together and deal themselves in when it comes to what to do about the so-called "DACA kids," hurricane disaster relief, Obamacare fixes, infrastructure, and border security. Some "big stuff."

Are we at last witnessing an outbreak of comity and moderation?

As my grandmother used to say when any of us brought a new girlfriend home to meet her and perhaps (unlikely) pass her special muster, "We'll see."

Every once in awhile she revealed that she could actually smile. That's what I am planning to hope for now--that we are at a pivotal moment and it will take hold.

We'll see.