Just as we need not heal until we purge the Trumpian right-wing extremist insurrection movement, we need not pine for bipartisanship until we can learn to be nonpartisan.
Our immediate need is not for the two parties to try to work together. Every current indication is that they can't and won't because of mutual self-service and cynical distrust.
The country is in too much trouble to stay on the current political course.
Instead of stymieing Congress with partisan ploys aimed at the next election, at which time the balance of power is likely to sway as a seesaw, why not enter a period in which neither party can do anything without having to deal with its more pragmatic, center-inclined and solution-oriented members?
By this notion, all members would remain in their natural parties formally to reflect their general leanings and to organize the place. After all, there must be a speaker of the House and there must be a majority and minority leader in the Senate.
But after the housework is done, a few members would depart from their party caucuses to form their own decision-making and solution-focused centrist caucus.
That would leave both parties with hapless minorities, powerless until and unless they went through these centrists.
I'm not talking about the center holding. I'm talking about the center ruling.
I'm not talking about facilitating an activist philosophical agenda. I'm talking about gridlocking one. I'm talking about demanding a narrowly focused competency and decency agenda.
Socialism can wait for its time, should it ever come. Trumpism and right-wing extremism must fade. Into the vacuum must arise ... how about starting with solutions on the virus and vaccines and attention to dangerous bridges?
For these purposes, let's apply the idea to the Senate alone, only because it's a smaller body with better-known personalities. But the same kind of thing should happen in the House, where, actually, there already exists a Problem Solvers Caucus, which ought to be expanded and emboldened.
Specifically, I'm wanting three independent-inclined Republican senators--Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins--and two center-right Democratic senators and a left-leaning independent senator who caucuses with the Democrats--Joe Manchin, Mark Warner and Angus King--to continue their formal organizational associations but break off after that into their own policy caucus.
The caucus could grow, but only by two members at a time, one Democrat and one Republican. Ideally, all senators from swing states would wind up in it. Anybody winning by less than a percentage point damned well ought to want to be in it.
That would leave the Democrats and Republicans with 47 senators each for ongoing policy currently. Thus, they would be mutually unable to do anything that didn't first come out of the solution-based centrist caucus or get vetted, edited and filtered by it.
It's happened in a way already. Those six aforementioned senators got together with House members in late November and early December to come up with a covid-19 relief plan. What they proposed forced the partisan leaders of both chambers, previously content typically to blame each other for failure, to act.
The recent election plainly showed that the people want that.
Republicans must consider that over four years they lost the presidency and both congressional chambers because of the behavioral and character failing of Donald Trump and the polarization of their extremist base to which they seemed to find it necessary to pander.
Democrats must consider that millions of Americans voted for a man they knew to be a personal disgrace only because they feared the leftward leanings of the Democratic Party even more.
The voters said yes to something more decent than Trump, more sane than his base, less inclined to free college and Medicare for all than Bernie and AOC, and aghast at any notion to defund the police.
Would I like to gut the two parties? Yes, as much as possible, until this solutions-oriented center manages to change the culture and force changes in party behavior.
Then we could talk bipartisanship.
Parties aren't sacred. They simply lend a symmetrical convenience to the way we do things--or don't.
Other democracies have multiple parties that must form governing coalitions. Surely, we could make use of one more legislative caucus in the interest of coalition-building here.
Sometimes the solutions caucus would have its own disagreements. That'd be fine. I'm not seeking caucus loyalty in the way of the two parties. I'm seeking only to provide leverage to those inclined toward honest attention to practical solutions.
Honest disagreement among respectful, solution-focused people ... what a gloriously refreshing thing that would be.
The parties will say that centrists operating legislatively outside the partisan structure would limit their ability to raise money, which comes largely from the passionate extremes.
They'll say that as if it's a bad thing.
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.