Finding Bipartisan Consensus

It is easy to hate Washington right now. On the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President, the government shut down. It was another completely unavoidable black eye for the Administration and Congress.

It is worth examining how we got to this point.

Several months ago, the new fiscal year was set to begin, but notwithstanding GOP control of both houses of Congress and the White House, the Majority failed to arrive at a budget to fund the government. As a result, we passed a succession of temporary funding bills, called continuing resolutions (CR), that merely set the budget for the next few months or weeks. These stopgap measures pose a real problem for all aspects of the federal government because they do not allow the setting of new priorities or any predictability in the future and, for reasons you can imagine, they are particularly problematic for the military. The last of these CRs expired a few days ago and brought us to the brink of the shutdown.

Around the same time last September when Congress failed to pass its budget, President Trump set another clock ticking when he ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protected DREAMers from being deported as long as they were in good standing and working. The President gave Congress six months to solve the problem and come up with legislation for him to sign. That same month, Congress also failed to extend funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and thereafter allowed it to lapse for 114 days. Some states began to wind down the program in anticipation of not receiving additional federal funding.

These three timelines converged last week, the continued expiration of Children’s Health Insurance, the end of the CR, and the crisis for DREAMers now only weeks away from potential deportation. Notwithstanding unified GOP control of Congress and broad bipartisan support for both DREAMers and CHIP, the Trump Administration lacked the competence to avoid a shutdown and address these key issues. In the end, government reopened with another three week CR and addressed the CHIP program, but left the fate of the DREAMers to the whims of the GOP leadership. That was a poor resolution from my point of view, leaving these young people hanging, and our military uncertain of its funding beyond the next three weeks. I voted no; surely we can do better than that.

As discouraging as the continuing dysfunction in the Administration and Congress can be, I believe there are places we can and must come together. Protecting the lives of these young people is one of them. Here are a few others:

First, we must finally begin to address our infrastructure nationwide and build out our information technology network. When the stimulus passed in 2009 in the wake of the Great Recession, we made a down payment in repairing our crumbling infrastructure – from roads to rail and bridges. Now we must follow through on that initial investment and also build out access to high speed Internet across the country, including into rural communities, and a renewable energy superhighway as well.

Second, we can finally begin to shore up the health exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act and keep premiums from rising. There has been bipartisan support – at least in the Senate – to address some of the shortcomings of the ACA and continue the government’s cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers. And even though the parties may never agree on the merits of the ACA, they should come together to make improvements to our healthcare system.

Finally, the parties can come together to solve an issue that has always had public bipartisan support, but little congressional action: a major effort to address the epidemic of opioid addiction ravaging so many communities across America.

This President and the Majority in Congress have a poor track record when it comes to bipartisan deals and accomplishments – and this week only underscored the flaws in their approach. That is why it is all the more important that we try to develop a consensus where we can, and begin to tackle the big issues we can agree on. The American people deserve as much, and so much more.

  ADAM SCHIFF