Eleven U.S. senators--six Democrats and five Republicans--have gone gloriously rogue with pragmatism.
They've worked closely to forge a philosophically imperfect proposal for immediate and incremental financial relief from the virus.
They took the destructive forces--party leaders and party extremists--out of it.
President-elect Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi beheld this development and decided to bless the effort generally. Biden has called it a good start and Pelosi has declared it a good framework for negotiations.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is talking with Pelosi while trying to figure out how much the arch-conservative base that all Republicans fear will permit him to concede to deliver aid to businesses that are hurting.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders doesn't like any of this. The plan is not big enough for him. He says it betrays working people unless a new round of direct checks to all taxpayers--of $1,200 apiece as before, at least--is put into the bill.
In light of all that, I ask: Have you ever beheld anything quite so encouraging?
It is possible that Washington might deliver to us by the end of the year something helpful, realistic, philosophically impure and delightfully imperfect?
We have a nation in unavoidable economic constriction because of the raging virus. States need help. Many businesses need help. Hospitals need help. People need help, especially on expiring extra unemployment benefits.
We've had a typical congressional chasm over what to do and when to do it. But now we have a new president-elect of an empathic nature who brings decades of experience in the legislative branch.
He is blessed with opportunity--yes, blessed--in being joined by a divided Congress, one led by his party in the House but deadlocked between the parties in the Senate, a circumstance likely to persist no matter which way the Senate runoffs go in Georgia.
He is blessed because, in modern times, new presidents have inherited--for two years--full partisan control of Congress. That has put pressure on them to oblige their bases. It has caused them to alienate the center, lose the midterms and spend the rest of their presidencies trying to find a way to appear effective.
Bill Clinton turned to Dick Morris-instructed small things like midnight basketball. Barack Obama turned to dubious executive orders. Donald Trump tweeted and scheduled primitive and self-exalting rallies.
Bernie is going to be Bernie. Perhaps he'll run for president again. Perhaps his divisions in the Democratic Party will bring Trump back into office. Bernie can take responsibility for that.
In the meantime, we appear to stand an outside chance of getting a sample of what nearly 155 million people voted for last month.
That's a better person as president and a few modest governing efficiencies from the Congress, produced from the center-left to the center-right.
Voters seemed to be seeking an America where there's no question that the police will be funded and no question that white supremacists are bad.
They seemed to be seeking a Congress that can offer a few vital targeted solutions while gridlocked acceptably on broader "omnibus" bills and disputes supposedly born of philosophy but mostly born of fear of the extremist bases.
For weeks now, we've had a country re-retrenching economically over the virus while Pelosi and Democrats talked about trillions in stimulus and McConnell and Republicans talked about a few hundred billion. But they didn't talk to each other. They talked to their bases. They talked as directed by the campaign consultants.
It turns out, though, that, since the election, actual good-faith discussions have taken place among six Democratic senators--Dick Durbin, Joe Manchin, Mark Warner, Michael Bennett, Chris Coons and Jeanne Shaheen--and five Republicans--Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman and Bill Cassidy.
While Pelosi and McConnell postured and waited while seeking to re-calibrate amid a new dynamic in a new year, these gone-rogue pragmatists managed to come up with plan to spend $908 billion on the most clearly essential immediate needs.
Pelosi and McConnell--and Biden--followed these leaders. They sent signals that something like the plan, maybe a little smaller or maybe a little bigger, could get done, maybe even by Christmas.
They're going to have to work out liability forgiveness on covid for employers and the level of aid to state governments.
That would defer until next year the big questions: How big will Biden go in seeking further economic relief? Will his problem be Bernie or Republicans or both?
And there's the other question: Can this bipartisan gang stay together and forge a few more center-out increments delivering gloriously efficient imperfections while blissfully marginalizing the destructive fringes?
The midterm electorate of 2022 stands ready to reward the bipartisan imperfections and efficiencies that the 2020 electorate prescribed.
A midterm election doesn't always have to be about backlash.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.