I challenged Ben Rhodes a few weeks ago, questioning whether it was necessarily true that a bipartisan solution to problems would be inherently better than a partisan one. Ben, graciously, engaged the discussion.

I mention that by way of introduction because I am not an advocate of bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship. I am also, however, not an advocate of the opposite: partisanship for the sake of partisanship. That is exactly what was on display early this week, as reported in Roll Call:

Senate Democratic leaders “are pushing their rank-and-file Members to refrain from reaching across the aisle to work on legislation and other policy efforts with vulnerable Republican incumbents until after Election Day, warning that the GOP has often used such displays of bipartisanship to protect incumbents in tough races only to abandon those measures after November, Democratic sources said Tuesday.”  Aides said party leaders “were concerned that shows of election-year bipartisanship could help a number of Republicans facing difficult challenges…”

From: “Democrats Urged To Avoid Working With Vulnerable Senate Republicans,” Roll Call, 5/24/06.

I would like to say that this mentality has not affected foreign policy, but that is not the case. To cite just one example, Congressional Quarterly reports that Democratic senators are blocking the nomination of Susan Schwab to be the next U.S. trade representative. The reasons may be valid, and this might seem a trivial case (I don’t think so), but when you consider this behavior in the light of the Roll Call story, it looks a bit suspicious.

There is some bipartisan agreement in Congress on one issue, strong criticism of the FBI’s raid on the offices of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La), but this is not particularly healthy, either, because it reveals a near civil war raging between Congress and White House. It is not hard to conclude that all is not well in the state of American politics.

Alas, this post is not much more than a whiny lament, because even if both parties put aside their differences, and the Congressional lamb lied down with the White House lion, I remain skeptical that that alone would get us out of our several foreign policy predicaments.

Bipartisanship has not yet succeeded in extracting U.S. forces from Iraq, in large measure because there appears to be broad bipartisan agreement that they should stay there until the Iraqis are capable of defending themselves, which might be never, and is likely to be a very long time from now. In this same vein, it is entirely possible that there will be bipartisan agreement on the next most urgent foreign policy challenge – Iran – and I’m not confident that the bipartisan answer will necessarily be the best answer. More on that next time.

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