Time for Washington to stop shooting the moon

The political fight now occupying center stage on Capitol Hill may appear like more of the same. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised to thwart a bipartisan bill designed to help American businesses compete with China unless Democrats abandon a big spending bill that Republicans oppose. And this does ring familiar: Steamrolling the other party has become business as usual in Washington. At the same time, however, this moment also speaks to a more universal truth. Bipartisanship could replace steamrolling as a default strategy if leaders simply decided to take a different tack. To glean a better sense of why, consider an analogy from the card game, Hearts.

A player’s goal in Hearts is to accrue the fewest points possible — to play their hand in successive turns so that their opponents pick up the points instead. But if, in any given hand, a player is dealt particularly bad cards, she can try instead to accrue all the points by losing every single turn, at which all the points are distributed among her opponents and she emerges without a blemish. “Shooting the moon,” as this strategy is known, is notoriously risky because the player pursuing it has to be perfect in every single hand. Any false move, any point claimed by an opponent, renders the entire effort a failure. As a result, it’s a strategy savvy players reserve for only the most extreme circumstances.

But that wisdom has been lost in Washington. It’s almost as if our nation’s legislative leaders have chosen to shoot the moon no matter the cards they’re dealt. Rather than build two-party coalitions, they default to strategies that require the support of every last member of their coalition. And that’s turning out to be as risky for Democrats today as it was for Republicans trying to make good on President Trump’s vow to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Not only is the strategy prone to fail—it also poisons the well with members of the other party on other topics.           

Simply put, there’s no good reason to enter every legislative negotiation with this same high-risk approach.

Democrats could have embraced in earnest President Biden’s inaugural promise to unify the country. They could have invited Republicans to join them in crafting major social and economic measures. They could have honored what some on Capitol Hill call “regular order,” namely the protocols by which ideas are typically referred to committees who, if deemed worthwhile, pass the proposals up to the full House and Senate for broader consideration.

Instead, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) explicitly chose to bypass both the GOP and regular order from the get-go by sequestering legislative negotiations behind closed doors. But now even a slimmed down version of the reconciliation bill faces long odds, and further pursuit could imperil an easy bipartisan win against China.

This, of course, isn’t just a Democratic problem. The GOP employed this same risky technique to pass President Trump’s tax cuts in 2017— that time to success — and, today, McConnell’s piqued refusal to consider the China competition bill doesn’t really serve the nation’s economic interests. But that’s the point — both parties can now cite any number of instances where they feel that the other side has steamrolled them and perpetuate the cycle.

Here is a simple proposal: Start again. When the first incarnations of the present Democrats-only reconciliation bill were being bandied about, the pandemic threat seemed to be diminishing, the Russians had not yet invaded Ukraine, and inflation wasn’t nearly so much of a worry. Now that the nation’s economic circumstances have changed, shouldn’t the nation’s legislative agenda shift as well? Couldn’t Democrats and Republicans find a series of reforms that would pass both chambers with bipartisan support? Isn’t that much more likely than the notion that Democrats will manage to wrangle every single member of both their Senate and House coalitions to a single transformative bill? A great place to start would be the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act that the Senate passed by a large bipartisan majority over 400 days ago. The bill has been bogged down as the Senate tries to reconcile it with a more partisan House version, but a No Labels side-by side comparison of the bills reveal it should not be too difficult to align on the provisions that clearly have bipartisan agreement.

The lesson here is clear enough. Shooting the moon may be a smart strategy in some limited circumstances, but it can’t be your go-to approach. It’s easy today to say bipartisanship doesn’t work because the parties are too recalcitrant—but we’re now to the point where neither party is willing to try. Not only can bipartisanship work, in the wake of this Congress’s most remarkable achievement—passage of the bipartisan infrastructure framework—it appears to be the surest strategy for legislative success. In a country where faith in democracy is slipping, that’s wisdom worth heeding. We need to reset Congress to the point that two-party solution always gets the first pass.

Margaret White is the co-executive director of No Labels.