The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.
Washington, we’ve got a helluva problem:
As you know, for the first time since the United States was founded 247 years ago, governance within the House suddenly shuddered to a halt this past week – because a mere eight members of the majority Republican Party’s far-right fringe stunningly revolted and ousted their own speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
But there’s good news, Washington – we’ve also got a solution:
We found it just by looking in our rear-view mirrors – all the way back to America’s earliest days. We checked our Founders’ party registrations. In 1792, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded a new party to oppose the Federalists. They named it the Democratic-Republican Party. And 231 years later, our Founders’ party label may give us a most positive, patriotic and plausible solution to the political crisis that has just shuttered our ability to govern ourselves.
We can indeed benefit by taking a hard look at the best that a Democratic-Republican Party might have given us. We are not suggesting here that today’s two parties can work forever as one. Indeed, they couldn’t way back then. After the 1824 election, the Democratic-Republican Party split into two groups: Andrew Jackson’s faction became the Jacksonian Democrats – and eventually begot the Democratic Party. John Quincy Adams’ faction became the National Republicans, then Whigs. (And Donald Trump might have ended up a Whig – except for a former Whig Party congressman from Illinois who wanted to run for president. But Abe Lincoln flipped his Whig, ran and became America’s first Republican president.)
Now back to our punditry. Tom Jefferson and Abe Lincoln would be shocked to come back today and discover that the parties they bequeathed to us created today’s hate-filled political mess. America is better than this. Our Congress must be better than this – starting now.
So today we are considering whether we can replant and repurpose our Founders’ Democratic-Republican Party roots that we just dug up. Perhaps we can use their symbolic seedlings to regenerate a patriotic, positive new political landscape – one that is definitely hate-resistant.
Perhaps it can work. Today’s Democrats and Republicans recognize that the House of Representatives is badly broken. Can the best of each party convince the rest of their colleagues that the damage is so severe that both parties need to at least try, for a while, to use their party’s principles to serve all Americans? Not forever – but perhaps just during the coming 2024 national election year?
PROPOSAL: Picture an experiment in which today’s House becomes a parliamentary and political greenhouse. Inside, for this coming year only, each House committee will be headed not by one chairman but two co-chairs: a Democrat and a Republican.
Picture each committee’s Democratic and Republican co-chairs committing to work with (not against!) each other to achieve bipartisan compromises, when possible. Each week’s goal would be to enact – not block. What a concept.
Picture committee co-chairs issuing joint statements and reports – and candidly stating each party’s differences. Picture those co-chairs melding their majority and minority committee staffs into one effective unit, with experts willing to present two alternative program options, when necessary.
This idea is not without precedent. The Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence operates with a chairman and a vice chairman who issue joint statements. Their staff has just one goal: our national security. It works.
This year the House can become its own parliamentary and political greenhouse. Just this once, let our contempt-ridded House fumigate and re-landscape itself – and our politics. It can’t end up any worse than the congressional compost that’s been gushing out of our news screens.
EPILOGUE: Sometimes a journalist just can’t type fast enough. I had finished and filed my column proposing all this when my Google machine informed me that someone else had just written something similar. And this wasn’t the usual columnist competition – House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had just come out with a Washington Post op-ed column headlined: “A bipartisan coalition is the way forward for the House.” His idea was more general than what you’ve just read – but the concept was out there. Also, he wrote that Republicans had been rejecting his suggestion.
Can a new Democratic-Republican civility take root in this gleaming white-domed greenhouse? We’ll never know if we don’t take advantage of our best-ever chance in this run-amok House moment. Let’s see what grows.
