You’ll Miss Moderates When They’re Gone

Two of the members of the group of nine senators and Congressmen who’ve scrambled to put together a compromise between the House’s and the Senate’s relief bills, Sen. Mark Warner and Sen. Susan Collins, have taken to the pages of the Washington Post to encourage the adoption of their bill:

Despite a broad consensus that more relief is desperately needed, for months congressional leaders and the White House have been trapped on a merry-go-round of negotiations that have led only to one stalemate after another. Millions of struggling families watched as Washington dysfunction hijacked a debate with their lives and livelihoods at stake.

We’re proud to work across the aisle to solve the most pressing issues facing our nation, even though it has subjected us both at times to criticism from people in our own parties who would rather smear the other side than get things done. At a moment like this, with millions of Americans getting sick or losing their jobs, we felt the stakes were simply too high to allow partisan warfare to prevent us from delivering relief to the people of Maine, Virginia and all of America.

So we began quietly reaching out to like-minded colleagues to explore ways to break the partisan logjam among party leaders. Out of the public eye and off TV, we worked for two weeks over Zoom and socially distanced pizza dinners to negotiate a compromise on emergency funding that senators from both parties could find a way to support. The result is a bipartisan $908 billion relief framework that, if passed, would help Americans at least get through the next four months as vaccine manufacturing and distribution ramp up. The process, too, can serve as a template for progress on other difficult but vital issues in our closely divided Senate.

These are the most moderate members of the Senate and House, vilified by members of their own parties as DINOs and RINOs. Unfortunately, when the next election time rolls around they’ll be opposed by more partisan and more extreme members of their own party in the primaries, big ticket donors will prefer those more partisan and extreme candidates, gerrymandering will foster them, and in the next general election voters will have forgotten who cared more about getting something done than about partisan advantage and line up to vote for the regular Republican or Democratic candidates whoever that might be. It’s not the electorate that’s more polarized but the party leaderships. Contrary to the opinions of some we’re not getting the government we deserve but the government the party leaderships will allow us to have as they pursue their own parochial interests.