Partisan roles don’t keep Van Hollen, Sessions from reaching across aisle

Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Pete Sessions (R-Texas) spend the bulk of their time strategizing over how to steal seats from each other’s party, but that hasn’t stopped either from working across the aisle to pass bipartisan legislation.

A striking reminder of this dichotomy was on display at a March 4 news conference announcing the introduction of a measure to create special economic zones to help bolster security in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

{mosads}Van Hollen, who has begun his second stint as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), stood alongside Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), a man Van Hollen previously tried to unseat.

Kirk was the target of more than $2 million in attack ads during the last cycle, commissioned by Van Hollen.

“We certainly disagree on which party we want to be in the majority,” Van Hollen laughed. “Despite those differences, we can and should team up wherever possible.”

Sessions, who heads the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), shares that view. He’s even sponsored legislation with Van Hollen, his nemesis. They may be their sides’ biggest partisan cheerleaders, but that hasn’t stopped both members from working on favorite legislation with members of the other party — including those who will sit atop target lists in 2010.

“Why should I change what I was doing?” Sessions asked, listing more than a dozen Democrats with whom he enjoys warm relations.

Beginning with the late Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass.), who hosted a fundraiser for Sessions’s opponent but remained friendly, Sessions said he had learned a valuable lesson: “That’s an old bull teaching a young guy when you’re brand-new. This thing is about getting your job done.”

So far during the 111th Congress, Van Hollen has sponsored the Afghanistan-Pakistan measure with Kirk and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), as well as a healthcare premium conversion measure with Reps. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). Wolf is a Republican Van Hollen targeted in 2008 and Connolly a Democrat he helped get elected to a previously GOP-held seat.

On Thursday, Van Hollen and Rep. Todd Platts (R-Pa.) will introduce a bill to increase protections for whistleblowers that is widely expected to pass the House.

Van Hollen said the measure, which was removed from the stimulus legislation at the insistence of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), is necessary as Congress spends nearly $790 billion “outside the normal course.”

“When you’re spending that magnitude of taxpayer dollars, you should put [in] increased whistleblower protection to safeguard the taxpayer,” Van Hollen said.

Two weeks ago, Sessions introduced a measure with Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) that would increase financial resources earmarked for emergency rooms around the country. That bill hit Congress about two weeks after Sessions’s NRCC launched a radio advertisement hitting Gordon for supporting the economic stimulus legislation.

On Wednesday, the NRCC put pressure on Gordon to declare his feelings about card-check legislation, organized labor’s top legislative priority, after he received $1.6 million in campaign contributions from labor groups during his career.

But also Wednesday, Gordon said he looked forward to working with Republicans in order to pass legislation, which he said is important to him as chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee.

“If you’re really interested in an issue, you need to make it bipartisan,” Gordon said. “Pete has a real passion and a real knowledge on this emergency-room issue and I was happy to work with him. I may be a target of the Republican campaign committee, but that’s next year.”

Sessions views his two roles as mutually exclusive.

“Is this going to upend my relationships because I’m chairman of the NRCC? Well, I hope it doesn’t,” Sessions said. “These friendships are going to continue.”

Since their work in the late 1990s on a measure to help children with Down syndrome, Sessions goes so far as to call himself Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) “favorite Republican.”

“Ted Kennedy and I aren’t exactly close political allies, but we’re friends,” he said.

Before Sessions took over the NRCC, he and Van Hollen introduced legislation in the 110th Congress aimed at helping families of disabled children win attorneys’ fees when suing to implement the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Sessions and Van Hollen, who will fight it out over the next two years to help win or retain the majority, both say they have yet to encounter a member of the opposite party who has refused to work with them because of their associations with the campaign committees.

Still, joked Van Hollen, “I haven’t asked everybody.”