With Hatch's passing, bipartisanship loses a role model
One was gracious, the other garrulous. One was severe, the other soft. One was rail-thin; the other carried a spare tire around his waist. One never touched alcohol; one was a prodigious drinker. One was a Mormon, the other a Catholic. One spent his adult life in the cold winds off the Wasatch Mountains, the other in the warm tides of the Gulf Stream. One was Coolidgereticent in his speech, the other Churchill-voluble in speech. One earned pocket money by delivering the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper on frosty mornings; the other came from a family where newspapermen were in their pocket — and, in some cases, in their pay.
The contemplative, introverted Orrin G. Hatch and the buoyant, extroverted Edward M. Kennedy
were the oddest couple in contemporary American politics. Kennedy died 13 years ago, and Hatch died last week. With them, the spirit of bipartisanship in the Senate died.
The two never went for a meal together, never sailed off Cape Cod together, never played touch football together, never threw women into a swimming pool together, never left a bar in shambles — broken picture-frame glass on the floor, chairs upended — together. They did something far more important, far more enduring. They worked together to win the Children's Health Insurance Program.
America's families were better for it, the country was better for it, the two men were better for it. They learned to respect political figures with different outlooks on life. Hatch was no friend, for example, of the Freedom of Information Act that journalists revere. Kennedy was free with information with the journalists who, sometimes to their discredit, revered him. And it is not too much to say that Kennedy injected a sense of fun into Hatch, and the Utahan added a touch of discipline to the Massachusetts lawmaker.
They liked each other, to the surprise of both of them and to the astonishment of their allies and spouses. They learned from each other, to the betterment of the Senate. Their views often were so different — they represented the extremes of their party, Kennedy on the left, Hatch on the right — that their union redeemed the notion of left-leaning Agostino Depretis (1813-1887), the Italian prime minister who spoke of the hope that “enemies will be transformed into friends.”
With Hatch's passing, we are left to contemplate the passing of an era when two men dared cross the aisle and befuddle their colleagues.
And yet there is hope in the hopelessness of our contemporary politics. President Biden invited Sen. Charles Grassley to the White House before he nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Washington gasped — and the Iowa Republican voted against her — but it was a start. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed members of Congress last month, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Democratic firebrand Maxine Waters, both of California, sat beside each other. Capitol Hill shook. Earlier this year, a bipartisan group helped shape an infrastructure bill. America benefited.
And on Tuesday night, two dozen female senators from both parties gathered for a chicken dinner.
The irony is that the modern bipartisanship impulse may have been strongest in the early days of the administration of the most polarizing president of the 20th century, that scourge of Democrats, Richard M. Nixon.
The newly inaugurated president instructed Dwight Chapin, his appointments secretary, to arrange frequent White House meetings with leaders of both parties. William Timmons, the White House liaison officer, opened a bipartisan office on Capitol Hill and arranged to have a picture taken with Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, the Republican leader from Michigan, and Speaker John McCormack, a Massachusetts Democrat, to hang on the wall.
A year later, Nixon specified that meetings of both parties' leaders be biweekly, and, cognizant of congressional procedures from his days in the House and Senate, he urged the meetings start at 8 a.m. rather than 8:30, so members could return to Capitol Hill in time for committee meetings. Buried in the Nixon Library archives is a 1970 memo showing his insistence that the meetings be held “even if circumstances require they be held on a
day other than Tuesday.”
After the midterm congressional elections of 1970, when the Republicans gained a seat in the Senate but lost a dozen in the House, Timmons recommended the president “have a series of half-hour meetings with those liberal senators who have frequently been opposed to his legislation,” adding, “The purpose of these meetings would be to build better rapport with the `bad guys' in hopes they'll meet us halfway next year.”
So it has come to this: Richard Nixon as an exemplar of bipartisanship.
But fair is fair — he deserves credit — and the atmosphere in which Nixon governed, at least before Watergate, was far different from what prevails today. (It's also fair to add that the Watergate scandal itself began with the ultimate in partisanship, a burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Party. It is also fair to say that the slide toward our contemporary mutual contempt might have begun 50 years ago this June, with the break-in that began the end of the Nixon presidency.)
And yet, even as the 1972 elections approached, according to Senate testimony by Gordon Strachan, who oversaw political operations for the Nixon team, the White House had a list of 100 Democratic members of the House and Senate who were running for reelection “who would not receive very strong opposition from Republicans … The goal was not to give a tremendous amount of support to Republicans that would oppose these congressmen.”
Today, political figures are motivated more by their opposition to their rivals than by their adherence to their own beliefs. “Once that becomes your departure point, you're already questioning your opponents' motives,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Now, bipartisanship is considered collaboration rather than cooperation.
“Team-sport politics replaced bipartisanship, and there's big money in uncompromising partisanship,” former GOP Gov. Jon Huntsman of Utah — ambassador to Russia under Republican President Donald Trump and ambassador to China under Democratic President Barack Obama — told me. “Orrin really set the mark for cross-party cooperation — and on big things, with key players like Sen. Kennedy. It's essential that the Hatch model return in order to preserve our republic. Without it, the divide simply widens.”