Bipartisan Quotes

James Ed went to his office and sat down at his small, metal desk. He smiled as he considered Penny Jones’ plan to shame him out of her life. Would he let her do that? He shook his head as he thought, No way in hell!

The whole point about corruption in politics is that it can't be done, or done properly, without a bipartisan consensus.

Market moralities and mentalities-- fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost-- yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. And our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation.

When picking a leader, choose a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship.

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

The problem is politics is made a sport, almost as much a sport as football or baseball. When it comes to politics, adults and politicians do more finger-pointing and play more games than children ever do. Too often are we rooting for the pride of a team rather than the good of the nation.

Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.

Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime.

Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change. And seemingly overnight, banning and tightly regulating harmful industrial practices went from being bipartisan political practice to a symptom of “command and control environmentalism.

While many have depicted the War on Drugs as a Republican initiative, the drug war was a bipartisan effort. This rhetoric of law and order deployed by politicians won elections nationwide, from races for local council seats to the presidency.

But we’re at a place in our political history when passing legislation through the House with bipartisan support is considered by some folks a greater evil than the problem it’s intended to solve.

The illusion of feeling well-informed....a public that feels informed in proportion as it is to befuddled. In one of his characteristic pronouncements, at a press conference in May 1962, John F. Kennedy proclaimed the end of ideology in words that appealed to both these public needs-the need to believe that political decisions are in the hands of dispassionate, bipartisan experts and the need to believe that the problems experts deal with are unintelligible to laymen.

Smiles are universal. Happiness knows no culture or geography. Joy is bipartisan. Be kind to everyone - for everyone is having a hard time.

They worried that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud. And they had good reason to worry. A 2005 bipartisan commission co-chaired by none other than Jimmy Carter found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in American elections. Why should 2020 be any different? They worried that universal mail-in balloting would make ballots harder to track, as some states bombarded addresses with ballots for previous residents who had moved out but hadn’t been struck from the voter rolls. What would happen to all the excess ballots?

To Arendt’s point about post-revolution stability deriving from pre-revolutionary experience in self government, it’s worth remembering that two of Henry’s less chatty fellow burgesses became the first and third presidents of the United States. Andrew O’Shaughnessy, referring to the masterminds of the 2013 government shutdown and no doubt alluding to the freshman senator who was its ringleader, told me, “Experience is terribly important. You’ll notice that the congressmen who want to hold up the government are all junior people and new to the game. And of course they will say, ‘Oh, it’s Washington cynicism, where they all compromise and work out backroom deals.’ But that’s actually how democracy works.” Which is exactly how government operations resumed on October 17, 2013: a bipartisan group of old-school senators with the combined age of Stonehenge started hashing out a bargain drafted by third-term moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine, who, prior to her election sixteen years earlier, had spent twelve years working behind the scenes as a legislative aide to her predecessor.

The implicit bias of white supremacy is alive and well in the United States of America and is a bipartisan value that is perpetuated by nearly every US citizen (or at least every US citizen who owns, or hopes to own, land).

While many have depicted the War on Drugs as a Republican initiative, the drug war was a bipartisan effort. This rhetoric of law and order deployed by politicians won elections nationwide, from races for local council seats to the presidency.

The United States had a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating with even its worst enemies, from John Kennedy--'Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate"--to Richard Nixon's opening with China, to Ronald Reagan's famous 'walk in the woods' with MIkhail Gorbachev. Obama's position was firmly in line with longstanding diplomatic practice. George W. Bush's post-9/11 policy--'You are either for us or against us'--was the exception, and a bad one. It removed subtlety from international affairs.

However, by early 2014 one conclusion had gained considerable traction across partisan lines: The attacks could have been prevented. That is, if only the State Department had taken appropriate steps to improve security at the Compound in response to numerous warnings and incidents during the months prior. That conclusion featured prominently in a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject - that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States - kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian school children heeded FDR's call to scrounge up rubber for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot - not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbor, getting on each other's nerves is our right.

Debates about economics these days generally enjoy a climate of bipartisan asininity. Democrats want to “rein in” corporations, while Republicans claim to be “pro-business.” The problem is that being “pro-business” is hardly the same thing as being pro–free market, while “reining in” corporations breeds precisely the climate liberals decry as fascistic.

It’s not just tougher out there. It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together. The people in the game now just think to the first Tuesday in November, and not a day beyond it.

To be accepted by the public, transformative legislation—Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare—needed at least some level of bipartisan congressional support.

Mitch McConnell’s innovation was in using it constantly to slow down things that did have bipartisan support, just to make sure as little as possible happened that Obama could get credit for. You

Washington” has become for many a dirty word that connotes self-serving politicians and devious lobbyists. To be sure, they are there, but I remember when I first went to work in the city in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, being struck by how populated the government was with young people from every corner of the nation, there to do the right thing and serve their country. I still feel that way whenever I return. Yes, you see ambition, but also idealism and the desire to work hard. You see purpose and patriotism. It is bipartisan. This is a part of Washington that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

Just as some historians seemed more shocked that the author of the Declaration of Independence had sex with Sally Hemmings than by the fact that he owned her, Clinton received far more censure for his sexual misdeeds than for other moral lapses, such as his politically motivated decision to ignore the finding of a bipartisan panel that issuing needles to drug addicts would save lives and curtail the spread of AIDS without increasing drug addiction.

Mani’s preaching developed into Manichaeism, a religion that spread throughout the Middle East and influenced Western thinking. If you think about politics in a Manichaean way, then compromise is a sin. God and the devil don’t issue many bipartisan proclamations, and neither should you.

It was the natural result of the political realignment that took place after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The conservative southern states, which had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War (because Lincoln was a Republican) then began to leave the Democratic Party, and by the 1990s the South was solidly Republican. Before this realignment there had been liberals and conservatives in both parties, which made it easy to form bipartisan teams who could work together on legislative projects. But after the realignment, there was no longer any overlap,

Ultimately, Reagan presided over the largest tax cut in American history, and accomplished it working in tandem with (rather than against) a huge Democratic Party majority in the House. It was a bipartisan triumph. The Washington Post called Reagan’s accomplishment “one of the most remarkable demonstrations of presidential leadership in modern history.” After a slow start through 1982–1983, the stimulus effect of the Reagan tax cuts was extraordinary, sparking the longest peacetime expansion/recovery in the nation’s history: ninety-two consecutive months, far surpassing the previous record of fifty-eight months.

The extraordinary outpouring of bipartisan concern blotted out the scandals of Grant’s presidency and restored him to his rightful niche in the American pantheon. Hundreds of sympathetic messages piled up at the Grant residence, including telegrams from Jefferson Davis and the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston.

Here’s what presidential candidate Mitt Romney said about Barack Obama: Barack Obama is not a very good President. He said Barack Obama doesn’t do a very good job on the economy; he said that Obama’s foreign policy has a lot of holes in it; he said Obama has done a pretty poor job across the board of working in bipartisan fashion. But, Romney added, Obama’s a good guy. He’s a good family man, a good husband, a man who believes in the basic principles espoused by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He is not someone you should be afraid of in any way. Essentially, Romney’s campaign slogan was this: “Obama: Good Guy, Bad President.

was the result of government policies, carefully crafted in a thoughtful and bipartisan atmosphere, that assured America’s lead in building an information-age economy. The most influential person in this process, which may come as a surprise to those who know of his role only as a punch line to jokes, was Senator Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee.

Environmental protection has become an arena for bitter partisan battles, leading to inaction on critical agenda items including reframing the nation’s energy strategy and confronting the existential threat of climate change. What is going on? Why has a policy area that once enjoyed broad bipartisan support become a source of deep division?

In one especially shameless instance, GOP lawmakers demanded that the Democratic White House endorse legislation to create a bipartisan commission on deficit reduction. When Obama did exactly what they requested, Republicans quickly killed the bill. In fact, six GOP senators who cosponsored the legislation ended up voting against their own proposal.

His decisions were all based on long-held policy positions of various sectors within the pro-Israel community. Many were bipartisan, such as the move of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which, as we explain in detail, was based on a law passed during the Clinton administration with an overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republicans.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited me to breakfast on the eighteenth. Five days before, she had issued a news release saying, “The president’s strategy in Iraq has failed,” and “The choice is between a Democratic plan for responsible redeployment and the president’s plan for an endless war in Iraq.” With those comments as backdrop, at the breakfast I urged her to pass the defense appropriations bill before October and to pass the War Supplemental in total, not to mete it out a few weeks or months at a time. I reminded her that the president had approved Petraeus’s recommendation for a change of mission in December and told her that Petraeus and Crocker had recommended a sustainable path forward that deserved broad bipartisan support. She politely made clear she wasn’t interested. I wasn’t surprised. After all, one wouldn’t want facts and reality—not to mention the national interest—to intrude upon partisan politics, would one?

as Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, merrily observed, “In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical ‘average American citizen’ put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his own country. . . . It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average.” So why bore the people? Secret “bipartisan” government is best for what, after all, is—or should be—a society of docile workers, enthusiastic consumers, obedient soldiers who will believe just about anything for at least ten minutes.

It did not matter, to Trump or his followers, that not one independent authority, not one judge, not one prosecutor, not one election agency, not one official who was not a Trump partisan ever found widespread fraud. None. Even an audit in Arizona sponsored by Trump allies only confirmed the result. A federal judge described the effort to overturn the election as a “coup in search of a legal theory” and opined that Trump most likely committed conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct the work of Congress. A bipartisan House investigating committee concluded that Trump had committed a crime.

It quickly became apparent that a new president could not be named because three of the contested states with warring governments—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—filed one set of election certificates for Hayes and another for Tilden. Their returning boards, which verified the election returns, were in Republican hands, further tainting the results in Democratic eyes. Faced with this agonizing dilemma, Congress in mid-December called for a special bipartisan committee to settle the electoral crisis and favored the creation of “a tribunal whose authority none can question and whose decision all will accept as final.

Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana gave public voice to what angers so many Americans today about Congress—it operates like a dysfunctional family. “The people’s business is not being done,” Bayh declared in February 2010. Congress suffers from multiple pathologies, he said, and he ticked them off: “strident partisanship, unyielding ideology, a corrosive system of campaign financing, gerrymandering of House districts, endless filibusters, holds on executive appointees in the Senate, dwindling social interaction between senators of opposing parties and a caucus system that promotes party unity at the expense of bipartisan consensus.

There’s a reason for the mainstream bipartisan consensus around community policing: it maintains and expands the status quo. As advocates call for fewer police and less policing and criminalization, community policing becomes a way to reshape the narrative to position police as friendly beat cops who know everyone’s name. But community policing doesn’t make policing more effective, less hostile, or more accountable to the communities they serve in. Instead it allows police to further entrench their presence in neighborhoods, justify increases in their numbers, and even mobilize community members to participate in policing by surveilling our neighbors.

The point was made many times that scientific management benefitted workers not at all, perhaps most clearly by a short statement by John P. Frey, editor of the International Molders Journal and participant in a bipartisan survey of the claims of scientific management, 'If generally applied the craftsmen would pass out of existence, and the workers would become dependent for their existence upon the scanty and insignificant industrial knowledge and experience afforded them by their limited opportunities, regulated by those who in addition to their ownership of machinery, had also acquired possession of craft knowledge and the skilled workers’ methods.

The Grassley-Cruz bill addressed each of these failings, directing law enforcement resources to stop violent criminals from using guns to harm others. It created a gun crime task force, to prosecute violent gun criminals and also felons and fugitives trying to illegally buy guns. It directed resources to helping states report mental health records to the federal background check system. And it enhanced school safety funding, to protect vulnerable children. As a result, it garnered more bipartisan support than any other comprehensive piece of gun legislation—and far more support than the 40 votes Dianne Feinstein’s so-called assault weapons ban received. With votes from 52 senators—9 Democrats and 43 Republicans—Grassley-Cruz could have become the law of the land—if Harry Reid and his Democratic allies had not filibustered it.

Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.

By the 1950s, most Republicans had accommodated themselves to New Deal–era health and safety regulations, and the Northeast and the Midwest produced scores of Republicans who were on the liberal end of the spectrum when it came to issues like conservation and civil rights. Southerners, meanwhile, constituted one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful blocs, combining a deep-rooted cultural conservatism with an adamant refusal to recognize the rights of African Americans, who made up a big share of their constituency. With America’s global economic dominance unchallenged, its foreign policy defined by the unifying threat of communism, and its social policy marked by a bipartisan confidence that women and people of color knew their place, both Democrats and Republicans felt free to cross party lines when required to get a bill passed. They observed customary courtesies when it came time to offer amendments or bring nominations to a vote and kept partisan attacks and hardball tactics within tolerable bounds. The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before. The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

By 1980 the bipartisan consensus on women—that the laws should not discriminate on grounds of sex and that qualified women should be allowed to compete for jobs at every level—had seriously unraveled. There was no more room for good-government Republicans to agree to disagree on matters such as the Equal Rights Amendment while well-heeled women such as Anne Armstrong and Pat Lindh “nagged” long-suffering men in the White House for a token appointment here and there. At its 1980 convention, the Republican Party, firmly in the hands of the conservative wing, and about to nominate Ronald Reagan, repudiated its support for the Equal Rights Amendment and allied itself publicly with the opponents of women’s abortion rights. Polling revealed that women were starting to peel off from the Grand Old Party. Four years later, the gender gap, wherein women disproportionately support the Democratic candidate and men the Republican, would emerge as a constant in American politics.

Since the inception of the Islamic Republic, the United States has pursued a policy of containment in various forms, essentially relying on political coercion and economic pressure to press Iran in the right direction. The failure of this policy is routinely documented by the U.S. State Department, which insists on issuing reports denouncing Iran as the most active state sponsor of terrorism and warning that its nuclear program is rapidly advancing toward weapons capability. The American diplomats fail to appreciate how, after twenty-seven years of sanctions and containment, Iran's misbehavior has not changed in any measurable manner. Even more curious, the failed policy of containment enjoys a widespread bipartisan consensus, as governments as different as the Clinton and Bush administrations have largely adhered to its parameters. Although at times the Bush White House has indulged in calls for regime change, its essential policy still reflects the containment consensus. In Washington policy circles evidently nothing succeeds like failure.

In his first two years in office, with a slender majority in the House of Representatives and a Senate split fifty-fifty, the Democrats managed to pass historic legislation that echoed that of FDR and LBJ, shoring up the economy, rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, and investing in the future, trying to bring the disaffected Americans who had given up on democracy back into the fold. In March 2021, Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic and stimulate the economy that it had hobbled. In November 2021, some Republicans were persuaded to get on board to pass the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to rebuild the country’s roads and bridges and to install broadband in rural areas across the nation. A few Republicans also backed the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which invested $52 billion in the domestic manufacture of semiconductors and boosted scientific research in the U.S. And in August 2022, the Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic investments in addressing climate change, expanded health coverage, reduced the deficit, and raised taxes on corporations and the very wealthy.

Hannity & Colmes was another management challenge. Despite its bipartisan billing, the show was a vehicle for Sean Hannity’s right-wing politics. An Irish Catholic from Long Island, Hannity came of age as two revolutions, Reagan conservatism and right-wing talk radio, sent the country on a new course. He harbored dreams of becoming the next Bob Grant, the caustic New York City radio commentator who provided an outlet for incendiary views on blacks, Hispanics, and gays. Radio personalities like Grant, Hannity said, “taught me early on that a passionate argument could make a difference.” In his twenties, Hannity drifted. He tried college three times but dropped out. By the late 1980s, he was living in southern California working as a house painter. In his spare time, he called in to KCSB, the UC Santa Barbara college station, to inveigh against liberals and to defend the actions of his hero Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. His combative commentaries impressed the station management. Though he was not a student, Hannity was soon given an hour-long morning call-in show, which he titled The Pursuit of Happiness, a reference to Reagan’s 1986 Independence Day speech.

The Sputnik moment for the Open Classroom movement came in 1983, when a blue-ribbon commission appointed by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, T. H. Bell, delivered a scathing report, entitled, A Nation at Risk, whose famously ominous conclusion warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” The response this time was a fervent and growing bipartisan campaign for more accountability from schools, mostly in the form of more of those standardized tests. And by 2001, “accountability” had become a buzzword. Under President George W. Bush that year, the “No Child Left Behind” Act tied federal funding to students’ performance on tests. Eight years later, President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program sought similar results, although this time using carrots instead of sticks. However the federal policy was constructed, the message was becoming clear: for schools to survive, their students would have to score high on mandated tests. Teachers consequently understood that to preserve their own jobs, they’d have to spend more time and energy on memorization and drills. The classrooms of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution began to look ever more like the dreary common schools of the turn of the twentieth century, and the spirit of Emile retreated once again.

That was a triumph, but “those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning…. Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.” Johnson celebrated that the bill had bipartisan support of more than two thirds of the lawmakers in Congress and that it enjoyed the support of “the great majority of the American people.” He emphasized that the law “does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others.” He took on the old trope that Black Americans wanted “special treatment” and said that the law simply made sure those people the Founders had declared were created equal would now “also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.” “Its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions—divisions which have lasted all too long. Its purpose is national, not regional. Its purpose is to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom, a more constant pursuit of justice, and a deeper respect for human dignity.

The world recoiled in horror in 2012 when 20 Connecticut schoolchildren and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. . . . The weapon was a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle adapted from its original role as a battlefield weapon. The AR-15, which is designed to inflict maximum casualties with rapid bursts, should never have been available for purchase by civilians (emphasis added).1 —New York Times editorial, March 4, 2016 Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle. . . .(emphasis added)2 —New York Times editorial, December 11, 2015 [James Holmes the Aurora, Colorado Batman Movie Theater Shooter] also bought bulletproof vests and other tactical gear” (emphasis added).3 —New York Times, July 22, 2012 It is hard to debate guns if you don’t know much about the subject. But it is probably not too surprising that gun control advocates who live in New York City know very little about guns. Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. The New York Times might be fearful of .50-caliber sniper rifles, but these bolt-action .50-caliber rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are made of nylon. These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made.4 If it really believes that it has a strong case, it wouldn’t feel the need to constantly hype its claims. What distinguishes the New York Times is that it doesn’t bother running corrections for these errors.

Meanwhile, the US House of Representatives voted in favor of a military budget even bigger than Trump had asked for. And, as Erik Sherman at Forbes magazine eloquently pointed out, 60 percent of the Democrats voted for this outsized military budget which totals $695.5 billion. As Sherman explains, "{i}n other words, of the party that supposedly opposes rampant military spending and the Trump administration, 60% voted for this bill," at a time "{w}hen income inequality combines with systemic and systematic redistribution of virtually all income growth to the wealthiest while their taxes are reduced." Sherman of course hints at a truth which must be accepted- that Democrats are not, and never really have been, a party which "opposes rampant military spending." There is a bi-partisan consensus on such spending, and there is very little debate on lowering it. And this is for a number of reasons, one of which being that military spending is very lucrative for the arms manufacturers who bilk the quite willing Pentagon, and by extension the taxpayers; indeed, these are the biggest welfare cheats who few will acknowledge.

In the first day of the fighting, America’s new president, Joe Biden, called me. We had known each other for close to forty years, from the time we both came to Washington, he as a young senator from Delaware and I as deputy chief of Israel’s embassy to the United States. Four days after the 2020 elections Biden was declared president-elect. In the twenty-four hours after that declaration I followed twenty other world leaders in offering my congratulations. This elicited the ire of President Trump, who to this day believes that I was the first to do so. Now in our phone call President Biden said that America stood by Israel’s right to defend itself. But in the coming days, as the fighting escalated and the press reported on mounting Palestinian casualties, he began to push for a cease-fire. “Bibi, I gotta tell you, I’m coming under a lot of pressure back here,” he said. “This is not Scoop Jackson’s Democratic Party,” referring to the strikingly pro-Israel senator whose long tenure ended in the 1980s. “I’m getting squeezed here to put an end to this as soon as possible.” I responded that I was getting squeezed by millions of Israelis in underground shelters who rightfully expected me to knock the daylight out of the terrorists. For this the IDF needed a few more days to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist infrastructure. Our intelligence could pick off more prime targets, especially since Hamas’s underground bunkers were no longer secure. Biden agreed but resumed the pressure to end the fighting the next day. As I did earlier with Obama during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, I asked and got from Biden during Operation Guardian of the Walls a commitment to fund the replenishing of Iron Dome interceptors, a defensive weapon system that enjoyed broad bipartisan support in the US Congress. Each phone conversation with the president brought the end of the fighting closer. I could buy a little more time, but it was clear that we would not have the seemingly unlimited time we had in 2014. Nor did we need it. Within a little over a week, the IDF’s main battle goals were achieved, but I had one more objective in mind. With some luck and a bit more intelligence work, we might be able to pick off Mohammed Deif, the Hamas terrorist chief who was responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis and who had managed to evade all our previous efforts to target him.

My body’s fucked up like a bipartisan bill in Congress, sir. I

Americans tell pollsters they want bipartisan cooperation. But those who actually vote don’t value that as much—or they define “bipartisanship” as acquiescence by the other party to what their party believes.

Military aid to Ukraine represented a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Trump’s Washington—supported by liberals who disdained Putin’s reactionary authoritarianism and by conservatives who wanted to check, as in Soviet days, Russian expansionism. Trump saw the military aid in a different way—as the most compelling form of leverage to use on Zelensky.

involving thousands of operatives to reverse the recommendations of the 2005 bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission

No president in American history has ever been removed from office by way of a Senate impeachment trial. A two-thirds vote requirement for conviction requires a bipartisan buy-in, which will be very difficult to achieve unless there is significant popular support in the nation. Those conditions likely existed during the latter months of the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon, but he resigned in August 1974, thereby ending the impeachment process.

This was clear less than thirty minutes into the speech, when—as I debunked the phony claim that the bill would insure undocumented immigrants—a relatively obscure five-term Republican congressman from South Carolina named Joe Wilson leaned forward in his seat, pointed in my direction, and shouted, his face flushed with fury, “You lie!” For the briefest second, a stunned silence fell over the chamber. I turned to look for the heckler (as did Speaker Pelosi and Joe Biden, Nancy aghast and Joe shaking his head). I was tempted to exit my perch, make my way down the aisle, and smack the guy in the head. Instead, I simply responded by saying “It’s not true” and then carried on with my speech as Democrats hurled boos in Wilson’s direction. As far as anyone could remember, nothing like that had ever happened before a joint session address—at least not in modern times. Congressional criticism was swift and bipartisan, and by the next morning Wilson had apologized publicly for the breach of decorum, calling Rahm and asking that his regrets get passed on to me as well. I downplayed the matter, telling a reporter that I appreciated the apology and was a big believer that we all make mistakes. And yet I couldn’t help noticing the news reports saying that online contributions to Wilson’s reelection campaign spiked sharply in the week following his outburst. Apparently, for a lot of Republican voters out there, he was a hero, speaking truth to power. It was an indication that the Tea Party and its media allies had accomplished more than just their goal of demonizing the healthcare bill. They had demonized me and, in doing so, had delivered a message to all Republican officeholders: When it came to opposing my administration, the old rules no longer applied. —

Wall Street investment houses and consumer banks had become bipartisan during the Clinton administration, and the proof, it seemed, was in the profits.

in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d

If you keep making right hand turns, you will end up spending your life driving in circles. Likewise, if you keep making left hand turns it will be the same. And so maybe we should realize that it’s not about a commitment to ‘right’ or ‘left.’ Rather, it’s about understanding that a thoughtful balance of both are needed if our destination is to be anything other than constantly arriving at the place that we’re constantly leaving.

Even as their priorities added billions, the group insisted that the overall bill had to come in under $800 billion, because any figure higher than that just seemed “too much.” As far as we could tell, there was no economic logic to any of this, just political positioning and a classic squeeze play by politicians who knew they had leverage. But this truth went largely unnoticed; as far as the Washington press corps was concerned, the mere fact that the four senators were working in “bipartisan” fashion signified Solomonic wisdom and reason.

Most Southeast Asia countries look to the United States to provide some sort of counterbalance to China, but they have increasing doubts about Washington’s dependability, know-how, resources, and staying power. These uncertainties affect their strategic thinking and planning in their relations with Beijing. “The U.S. needs to have a long-term consistent, comprehensive, bipartisan approach to the Asia Pacific,” says an ASEAN diplomat. “Countries in the region believe the U.S. will change its policy depending on who the next president is.

The myth of American exceptionalism is a bipartisan and unifying theme for most every American. One of the major challenges for a nation that believes in its own exceptionalism but also has a simplistic two-party political system is that when any flaw is uncovered that might blemish the exceptional nature of the whole, that flaw is blamed on the opposing political party (or any other available scapegoat). That way the mythology of American exceptionalism can remain intact.

Politics doesn’t mean affairs of the people, it is but a telenovela of sectarian histrionics.

There was also a large crew of people who tried to nickname the previously mentioned Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework "BIF". If you would like your audience to start making fun of a big, serious, and important piece of legislation, start calling it BIF.

The nature of the reconciliation process is that it doesn’t leave the minority party with many obstructionist options. But Mitch McConnell was determined to test them all. He announced that if the Democrats moved forward with reconciliation, he would sink the bipartisan CHIPS bill, which needed at least ten Republican votes to pass. The bill would invest nearly $300 billion in developing the American semiconductor industry, reducing the economy’s dependence on the foreign import of the single most important component of modern life. After a year of wallowing in limbo, CHIPS was weeks away from finally passing. McConnell felt that his threat might deter Schumer, who considered CHIPS a pet project. More

Israel is helped by the fact that it’s a bipartisan American political belief that backing the Jewish state is akin to necessary religious doctrine.

I have watched the world long enough to realize that men cannot run it, other than running it into the ground so deeply that they are entirely unable to run it out of it.

That evening the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president of the United States for a second time. Ten members of his own party, including the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, joined with Democrats in supporting the article, making it the most bipartisan impeachment in American history. One hundred and ninety-seven Republicans voted against removing the president for inciting the insurrection. Many seemed more concerned about the metal detectors that had been placed outside the House chamber, believing the devices interfered with their right to carry firearms in the halls of Congress.

He longed, he said, for the glorious spirit of bipartisan consensus he had witnessed during the nation’s Bicentennial celebrations, and at Hubert Humphrey’s funeral. So he concluded with a challenge to his colleagues: “If you want to see the reputations of decent people sullied, stand aside and be silent. “If you want to see people of dignity, integrity, and self-respect refuse to seek public office for fear of what might be conjured or dredged up to attack them or their families, stand aside and be silent.… “If you want to see dissent crushed and expression stifled, stand aside and be silent. “If you want to see the fevered exploitation of a handful of highly emotional issues distract the nation from problems of great consequence, stand aside and be silent. “If you want to see your government deadlocked by rigid intransigence, stand aside and be silent. “If you want this nation held up to worldwide scorn and ridicule because of the outrageous statements and bizarre beliefs of its leaders, stand aside and be silent and let the Howard Phillipses, the Meldrim Thomsons, and the William Loebs speak for all of us.

In the contentious political atmosphere of the times, this was one of the few pieces of legislation that received bipartisan support, and the Senate passed the bill with a 75–20 vote on February 11, 2016. President Barack Obama signed it into law thirteen days later. For the first time in eighty-six years, consumer demand could no longer be used as an excuse to allow products made by forced laborers to be sold in the United States.

The close relationship between Arizona and Israel long proceeded Donald Trump’s presidency. One journalist called the area the “Palestine-Mexico border” due to both nations sharing the same surveillance companies and co-operation.64 Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, who left office in 2019 after spending years welcoming Israel’s high-tech companies to build a home in Arizona, once said, “If you go to Israel and you come to Southern Arizona and close your eyes and spin yourself a few times you might not be able to tell the difference.”65 The reasons behind the collaboration are tied to two geographic spaces defined by some as vast and unoccupied and therefore deserving of colonization and control. It’s the settler-colonial mentality. Israel is helped by the fact that it’s a bipartisan American political belief that backing the Jewish state is akin to necessary religious doctrine. Arizona, like Palestine, is thus a testing ground. “Arizona is meant to be a showcase for technology before it expands across the country,” Tucson-based journalist and author Todd Miller told me. “Before 9/11, there was Border Patrol presence on Native American territory, but now it’s hugely expanded with surveillance technology. Native Americans are being racially profiled at border patrol checkpoints.” For the border profiteers, Palestinians and Native Americans are both equally deserving of monitoring. It was therefore not surprising that autonomous surveillance robots started appearing on both the Israel/Gaza border and US–Mexico border in 2021 and 2022.

to reduce competitiveness. After analyzing two decades of data, Seabrook concludes that plans drawn by a party with a trifecta actually result in greater competitiveness than those designed by bipartisan agreement.

An extensive analysis of redistricting of state legislatures between 1968 and 1988 shows that in the first elections held under both partisan and bipartisan redistricting plans the swing ratios exceed those for elections not preceded by a new set of districts.15 Disrupting relationships between

To demand of your opponent what you are not willing to demand of yourself evidences the cowardice of both your character and your cause.

In the 1970s, for example, Washington Post reporters uncovered President Richard Nixon’s direct involvement in the criminal Watergate scheme. After the Post’s extensive coverage of the scandal, the bipartisan consensus arose in Congress that Nixon had committed an impeachable offense. Shortly thereafter, he became the first US president to resign from office.

Obama assured us, only the United States. He claimed to have worked across party lines in the Illinois state senate on bipartisan issues like ethics and health-care reform, when in fact he had a fiercely partisan voting record. As a legislator Obama voted against the death penalty for cop killers, against legislation requiring medical intervention to save the life of a child born alive during an abortion, and for raising taxes. His Senate voting record displayed the same pattern, and he was rated the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate by National Journal.1 No matter, for with Obama, style always trumps substance, and rhetoric always replaces the record. Facts and failure may shame other politicians into a reassessment of their policies, but not Obama. In his case, misleading the public is not a function of ego or a personality flaw. It is a deliberate strategy designed to tickle the ears with pleasing words while doing things radical and transformational.

Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government. The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It's about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It's about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work--the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It's about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

...Bad behavior is bipartisan, but the Left seems to have an instinct for violence. This makes perfect sense for a worldview with revolutionary underpinnings....But yet, they claim oppression due to their inability to control the words and minds of others. That is why the Left is a threat to both freedom and democracy: Because at the end of the day, they don't really believe in either.

Weeks before Garvey’s final UNIA convention, delegates gathered for the Democratic National Convention of 1924 at that very same Madison Square Garden. The Democrats came within a single vote of endorsing the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the powerful Ku Klux Klan. The platform would have been anti-immigrant, too, if Congress had not passed the Immigration Act on a bipartisan vote earlier in the year. It was authored by Washington State Republican Albert Johnson, who was well-schooled in anti-Asian racist ideas and well-connected to Madison Grant. Politicians seized on the powerful eugenicist demands for immigration restrictions on people from all countries outside of Nordic northwestern Europe. President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.

By choosing a tested, moderate, bipartisan approach, the Obama administration and many environmentalists assumed a deal would be winnable. “What we didn’t take into account,” Mann later noted, “was the ferociousness of the moneyed interests and the politicians doing their bidding. We are talking about a direct challenge to the most powerful industry that has ever existed on the face of the earth. There’s no depth to which they’re unwilling to sink to challenge anything threatening their interests even if it’s science and the scientists involved in it.

As he broadcast his birther charge against Obama, Nielsen ratings for The Celebrity Apprentice took a sharp turn for the worse. “Given the downward trend of Trump’s ratings among his current, liberal audience,” joked one Republican media buyer, “maybe he’s running as a Republican to add a little bipartisan diversity to his viewership.

Obama nonetheless continued to seek bipartisan support. His experience with what Hillary Clinton labeled the “vast right-wing conspiracy” was limited. He had vaulted in only five years from the Illinois State Senate to the White House. He turned out to be unrealistically confident that he could transcend partisan rancor as he had while editing the Harvard Law Review. So when he received an invitation from Boehner and the others in the House Republican caucus to come up to Capitol Hill to consult with them about the stimulus package, Obama accepted, with much fanfare.

For decades, the environmental movement had enjoyed bipartisan support. As public opinion mounted in favor of climate action, however, the fossil fuel industry organized and financed a stealthy state-of-the-art counteroffensive.

Back in 1998, Governor Bush had told a Texas reporter that the same forces who were demonizing undocumented laborers were also seeking to turn homosexuality into a wedge issue. “I understand their concern about gay marriages or special rights,” he said that summer day. “But I don’t agree with the idea of pitting one group against another. That’s exactly what’s happened during the Hispanic debate, it seems like. And it may not have been the intention, but it became Us versus Them. It’s impossible to lead the nation or state toward a better tomorrow by dividing into camps.

The Republican House members also moved ahead with impeachment without bipartisan support, which meant that President Clinton would almost certainly not be convicted by the Senate (he was acquitted there in February 1999).

Heal the divide.

roads, rails, airports, ports, mass transit systems, and broadband networks. There was a good chance the Democrats would retake the Senate, but I expected to face a hostile Republican majority in the House. In theory, infrastructure should have bipartisan appeal, but we’d learned that partisanship could overwhelm everything. So outreach would have to start right away.

Those cuts had lowered the top income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. With bipartisan support, Bush had also slashed taxes on unearned income, most of which went to the rich. Taxes on dividends, for instance, were reduced dramatically from 39.6 percent to 15 percent. Taxes on capital gains, the overwhelming bulk of which were reaped by the wealthy, fell from 20 percent to 15 percent. As a result, many of the richest Americans were taxed at lower rates than middle- and working-class wage earners. A

The Second Amendment is threatened by the administration’s signing of a United Nations treaty on arms regulations in 2013, despite warnings by substantial bipartisan congressional majorities that there is no prospect of approval by two-thirds of the Senate, as constitutionally required for the pact to be ratified. The treaty would impose weapons-transfer regulations concocted by international bureaucrats—many of whom are anti-American and rabidly opposed to American firearms rights.

There are also concerns that Congress, despite bipartisan

It may be that only when xenophobia stops working as an election winner will the way be cleared for a return to bipartisanship

Since 1945 Turkey has, of course, acquired far more importance for the US as a strategic ally, first in the Cold War and now the War on Terror. In the last twenty years, increasing pressure from the Armenian community, today much more salient than in the 1920s, and the emergence of an Armenian scholarship that has pioneered modern study of the exterminations of 1915-16 in the West, have made repression of the question more difficult. After previously unsuccessful attempts to get resolutions on it through Congress, in 2000 the House International Relations Committee voted for a bipartisan resolution condemning the Armenian genocide, while carefully exempting the Turkish Republic from any responsibility for it. Ankara’s response was to threaten withdrawal of American military facilities in Turkey, trade reprisals, and to talk of a risk of violence against Americans in Turkey – the State Department even had to issue a travel advisory – if the resolution were passed by Congress. Characteristically, Clinton intervened in person to prevent the resolution getting to the floor. In Ankara, Ecevit exulted that it was a demonstration of Turkish power.

DC is using a rigged process to keep ObamaCare funded, to keep this job-killing bill funded. What they want to do fundamentally is ignore the men and women of America and keep up with business as usual. People wonder why Congress has such low approval ratings. I remember when all 100 of us were in the historic Senate Chamber for a bipartisan meeting. Multiple Senators stood and expressed frustration with the low approval ratings that Congress has. It varies--sometimes, 10, 12, 14 percent--but it is always abysmal.   Some

In 2013, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violating federal disclosure laws. An FEC audit of the 2008 records of Obama for America found the group failed to disclose millions of dollars in contributions and delayed refunding millions more in excess contributions.8 Excess contributions—sound familiar? But the FEC, you see, is a bipartisan group with an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners. As a consequence of both parties having a say, FEC decisions tend to be more balanced. My case, you may remember, was deliberately not referred to the FEC, as such cases typically are. Rather, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York decided to go ahead and prosecute it. Unlike Obama, I did not benefit from a scheme involving millions of dollars in excess contributions; rather, I paid $20,000 in excess of the campaign finance limit. Yet I ended up in a confinement center, and Obama, for vastly more serious offenses, paid a token fine.