Indiana Republican Richard Lugar has served in the Senate for almost thirty-six years; he started before the first Star Wars movie released. But after a long string of unopposed victories his time is finally coming to an end, as he lost his party’s primary on Tuesday to the more conservative Richard Mourdock.
Mourdock is pro-government enough to disappoint libertarians, but he wants to abolish several federal departments and was backed by the Tea Party. He tried to paint Lugar as an out-of-touch liberal, noting, for example, that Lugar voted to raise the debt ceiling fifteen times.
In a way, this was unfair to Lugar, because raising the debt ceiling was one of those things that pretty much everybody in Congress has done for decades; there’s nothing especially “liberal” about it. But in a way, that’s also the point – Lugar was deeply embedded in the “status quo” that got us where we are today. (Don’t get me started on his lobbying connections.) Apparently this Washington insider thought he could represent the state for the rest of his life when he didn’t even own a home in Indiana anymore.
Now the media wasted no time lamenting Lugar’s loss and bemoaning how terribly extreme the Republican party is becoming. NPR said he was a “legend undone by his greatest strength” and that he lost because “his friendship with Obama… in the cauldron of hyperpartisanship, was most vividly turned against him by his own party.” CNN said Republican voters were “punishing him for the qualities he considered assets: seniority, expertise in foreign policy and a penchant for bipartisan cooperation.” And those weren’t even the opinion pieces. Ezra Klein said Lugar’s loss shows how much Republicans are to blame for polarization in Congress.
It is true that Lugar is the latest in a growing list of long-serving Republican Senators to be ousted for not being “conservative” enough, from Mike Castle in Delaware to Bob Bennett in Utah to Olympia Snowe in Maine. It is true that, as Lugar said in his concession speech, Republicans are increasingly unable to show “any nuance in policy on climate change” and “are now expected to take pledges against any tax increases.” It is true that we seem to be losing Republicans who are willing to compromise and engage in bipartisanship. (Their latest attempt to avoid defense cuts is rather, er, indefensible.)
But all of this lamenting about the increasing polarization of politics seems to me to be missing an important point: Bipartisanship is not always a good thing!
Sure, it’s good when opposing sides make concessions in their ideologies to solve a common problem. “I and my supporters want to cut spending to reduce the deficit, you and your supporters want to raise taxes on the rich to reduce it, let’s try to find a solution that best represents the needs and wants of all Americans instead of pretending that my supporters represent them all.” And it does sadden me that, for instance, many Republicans seem completely unwilling to give any ground on issues like this.
But too often “bipartisanship” has just been an excuse for big-government politicians from both parties to increase the power and scope of government while assigning unaffordable benefits to their supporters and lobbyists and kicking the can of hard choices down the road. As Tim Carney tweeted, “Bipartisanship: PATRIOT Act, Iraq War, TARP, Sugar program, ethanol subsidies, spending a lot of money.” Democrats and Republicans have worked together to give us the TSA and the NDAA. They almost gave us SOPA and they still might give us CISPA. There’s nothing moderate about all that – that’s just the corrupt establishment doing what it does best.
Sure, maybe Dick Lugar played an important role in nuclear treaties a few decades ago, but like most long-serving Senators, he’s been pretty indistinguishable from both the Bush and Obama administration on foreign policy in the last decade with their drone strikes and warrantless wiretapping and other assaults on civil liberties.
Sometimes “getting things done” in Congress means compromising to reach a common ground. All too often, though, “getting things done” just means Republicans and Democrats agreeing together to expand the scope and power of government. There’s a fuzzy line between being “moderate” and just being part of the establishment. Polarization may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but let’s not lose sight of how much bad bathwater we’ve had lately.
And that’s why I’m still a little optimistic about the future of this Congress. (Orrin Hatch is another pre-Star-Wars senator from Utah facing his first primary challenge in decades; we’ll learn next month if he follows Lugar.) Yes, we’re losing moderates – but we’re losing the establishment, too. The loss of Lugar and potentially others may make it harder for Congress to work out a deal to stop tax rates and payroll taxes and other things from reverting to their previous levels in 2013, but maybe that’s actually a silver lining. “Bipartisanship” is the reason we need to work out a deal in the first place; no bipartisanship means no more “agreements” that just kick the can down the road.
Take the current battle over student loan rates that are set to go up in July. The Republican House wants to pay for it by taking money from health care. The Democratic Senate wants to pay for it with some kind of business tax loophole. If we had more bipartisan moderates, maybe they could meet somewhere in the middle. Maybe they still will. But if they don’t, then, well, the government over-subsidization of higher education gets a little weakened.
(I know I’m biased, but I don’t think an extra $1,000/year on these borrowers is that much of a crisis. There’s a place for government helping create educated citizens but we’ve been inadvertently fueling a bubble for far too long now. Maybe education costs would actually start to come down if government stopped loaning whatever money colleges charged at interest rates no private loaner would touch.)
It was bipartisanship that brought us all these budget tricks and bloated departments and other unsightly things in the first place! Maybe a lack of bipartisanship will help bring them to an end…