Showing Congress the way on working together

Bipartisan committees making progress on vets’ health care legislation

WASHINGTON — Magnanimous hearings. Bipartisan votes. Substantial legislation on its way to becoming law.

This is Congress? Something strange is happening in the staid hearing rooms of the House and Senate veteran affairs committees here this summer, though few have taken notice.

As the rest of Congress fights over the health care overhaul and looming budget deadlines, the committees responsible for writing legislation affecting veterans are quietly moving forward with an ambitious, long-sought and largely bipartisan agenda that has the potential to significantly reshape the way the nation cares for its 21 million veterans. It could also provide President Donald Trump with a set of policy victories he badly wants.

“It’s a case study in Washington working as designed,” said Phillip Carter, who studies veterans issues at the Center for a New American Security and advises Democrats. “And it’s shocking because we so rarely see it these days.”

The tally thus far is impressive, if not exactly the stuff of headline news: The secretary of Veterans Affairs was confirmed unanimously, the only Cabinet secretary with that level of congressional approval. Congress quickly passed a temporary funding extension for the Veterans Choice Program, which pays for private-sector health care for veterans facing long wait times at government facilities. Then it passed a bill that makes it easier for the department to hire and fire. The next bit of legislation on the brink of becoming law expedites disability benefits appeals.

This is happening as Congress finds itself stalled by a growing list of priorities that lawmakers had hoped to send to Trump before the August recess. In the case of the health care overhaul, the Senate leadership has even decided to sidestep the committee process that typically sets the pace of legislation moving through the Capitol.

Lawmakers with coveted spots on the veterans committees are quick to acknowledge that caring for those who served the country in uniform has long been largely a bipartisan pursuit. But ideological differences do exist between the parties on how to care for veterans’ health needs, particularly when it comes to the Choice program, which was hastily written after a 2014 scandal over the manipulation of patient wait times and has proved to be a flawed, if popular, fix.

Whether the latest bout of amity can persist will largely depend on whether lawmakers are able to agree on a way to permanently fix the program, and streamline a half dozen others that send veterans out for private care, before it loses its authorization in January.

But as lawmakers talk about how they will do it, it almost sounds like an idealized version of how Washington works.

“We don’t want to have a fight for fights’ sake. We want to find solutions,” said Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “So when we have opposition to an issue from a member, we try to bring them into the fold and sometimes maybe address the concern they have.”

Isakson, 72, a former real estate executive, is among an increasingly rare breed of deal makers in the upper chamber. Those watching the 15-person committee say he has gone a long way to set the tone for its work. He has found a willing partner in Jon Tester of Montana, the committee’s top Democrat, who along with being a political moderate is up for re-election next year in a rural state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.