The United States Senate witnessed two acts of political courage last week. The first was John McCain's public announcement that he would not vote for the latest effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, the Graham-Cassidy health care bill, because it did not emerge from a bipartisan process. A conservative Republican from a red state whose Republican governor supports the bill, McCain bucked his party, his president, and no doubt many of his constituents to do what he believed was right.
The other act of political courage came from the co-author of the bill, Lindsay Graham. While he might have been expected to blast his colleague for what many in the Republican party consider a betrayal, Graham said that: "My friendship with John McCain is not based on how he votes but respect for how he’s lived his life and the person he is."
Such behavior is what the Constitution's framers hoped would occur in the Senate, a body constructed to provide a more sober, polite, and judicious setting than the House, which it was assumed would be more reflective of the passionate impulses of the people.
Sadly, the Senate and the House seem almost indistinguishable today, at least in regard to the willingness of their members to balance the broader, long-term interests of the nation against the preferences of angry constituents, demanding funders, and a bullying president. While in the majority, many in seats so electorally safe that they have little fear of losing the next election, Republicans have been largely unwilling to explore bipartisanship as a way of addressing serious issues. They refuse to stand up to a president who 66 percent of Americans in a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll have concluded is doing more to divide than unite the nation. They have been willing to allow him to take us to the brink of war in recent months without a public hearing on either the appropriate limits to the president's war powers or the strategy, and prospects for peace, on the Korean Peninsula. They have allowed him to threaten Americans' trust in the courts, the electoral system, the free press, executive branch ethics, and Congress itself with almost no effort to call out the damage done or strengthen these institutions on which so much of our faith in democracy depends.
Nor do the Democrats in Congress get a free pass. Content to rouse opposition demonstrations, vote "no" rather than craft and strongly publicize solutions for which they may be criticized, unwilling to condemn the extremists in their own party, and too often failing to openly demand that the committees on which they serve do the job of legislating and oversight, they too do a disservice to the nation. In regard to health care, they decry potential cuts to Medicaid but refuse to admit that its future cost curve is unsustainable.
In 1807, Massachusetts Federalist Senator John Quincy Adams, voted to support Republican President Thomas Jefferson's proposed embargo against England, despite the clear preferences of his own state and party. Commenting on his vote, he said that "highly as I reverenced the authority of my constituents . . . I would have defended their interests against their inclinations, and incurred every possible addition to their resentment, to save them from the vassalage of their own delusions."
Adams would lose his seat (senators were chosen by state legislatures in those days) but go on to become president. After his presidency, he served in the House of Representatives. In that capacity, he led an almost decade-long effort to end the chamber's "gag rule" against accepting petitions opposing slavery, believing that Congress had no right, under the Constitution, to deny citizens their right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The institutions of our free society are remarkably resilient. They have survived demagogues, extremism, apathy, adventurism, isolationism, and tragic miscalculations. But in each case, that survival depended on political leaders with the moral courage to face reality and the pressure to do the popular if politically difficult thing. Until we, the voters, demand and reward that behavior, we will continue to get political cowardice.