One Way Street

Bipartisan: marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties. 

Oh, how we love that word! How we love that concept. How often we invoke the desire to see our elected officials reach across the aisle and get things done, because surely bipartisanship is the way things happen.

If we dig a little, we learn that it has happened a few times. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil famously worked together to protect Social Security. John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi teamed up on passing the ACA. Of course, that was after Boehner and McConnell announced their intention to block and delay everything coming from that oft-touted other side of the aisle, in their effort to make Obama a one-term president. Oddly, no one in the media seemed to call them out on their stated goal of ignoring and subverting bipartisanship. It was no big deal that Republicans had no intention of reaching across the aisle. By this time, we didn’t expect it from them anymore. By this time, bipartisanship was a one-way street, populated only by Democrats.

That’s where it remains. 

Democrats are expected to fall all over themselves to compromise. In fact, they’re expected to completely cave in to GOP demands. That’s what we call bipartisanship, but it could be more properly referred to as capitulation. There are whole “bipartisan” groups dedicated to this philosophy. No Labels claims to be dedicated to bridging the divide. In 2017 they launched the No Labels “problem solver caucus,” comprised of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats who would work together on ambitious bipartisan proposals. They also gave out “Problem Solver Awards.” They gave one of those awards to Donald Trump, who has never solved a problem in his life. No Labels always seems to be advocating for the position of the right. I can’t think of a time when they’ve taken the other side. Nope, they want to do things like gut Social Security and Medicare, policies that aren’t popular with most people from either side of the aisle. 

We’ve seen similar antics in Concord. When the Tea Party Junta took over the State House and installed Bill O’Brien as Speaker, all possibility of reaching across the aisle flew out the window. That was when the Republican Party began the slow descent into the kind of madness that caused them to elect an incoherent game show host as President of the United States. 

Yes, this is New Hampshire, a state where the media default setting is GOP, and so since the new Democratic majority at the NH House elected Steve Shurtleff the media focus has been on bipartisanship. A Seacoast online headline read, “Speaker Shurtleff Offers Refreshing Bipartisan Message.” I guarantee you this headline would never have been written if the Republicans had kept the majority.

It took nearly a week for the speech made by Representative Dick Hinch, the new GOP minority leader to get any media attention. It was not a “refreshing message.” Hinch began with a little lip service about unity and working together for the benefit of the state, then quickly moved on to his real message. Hinch told his caucus that their primary duty is to make sure they take back the House in 2020 so that they can gerrymander districts to ensure they keep the majority for the next decade. He urged the caucus to be disruptive at every opportunity.

This speech didn’t even merit a mention in most of the NH media. Those that did carefully danced around Hinch’s speech, sanitizing it for GOP protection. The exception to the rule was long time NH political reporter Garry Rayno who reported on the content of Hinch’s speech, at Manchester Ink Link. Why didn’t other NH media cover it? GOP is the default setting of the NH media. They are always protected and never held to the same standards that Democrats are. Stories of GOP bad behavior seldom splash across the headlines unless the story is picked up by national media, as we have seen time and time again, most recently saw with (former) Representative Porn Star. 

Republicans aren’t expected to behave in a bipartisan way. They will not be held accountable for the kind of disruptive, delaying tactics they’ll be engaging in on the House floor this year. Those tactics won’t even be mentioned in the news coverage of House sessions. The further north one travels in the state, the less likely one is to get any coverage of the goings on in the state house. Democrats are supposed to knuckle under to the demands of the GOP, because doing their bidding is their definition of bipartisan. 

Most of us want to have a representative body that will work hard to do what is best for New Hampshire. If we’re going to cling to the myth of bipartisanship, let’s insist that it be a two way street – in the legislature and in the media. 

Published as an op-ed in the December 14 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.