Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) was one of the winners of the 2024 Newsweek-Stubblefield Institute Civility Awards.
He recently spoke to Larry Platt of the Philadelphia Citizen
It’s funny in politics, right? [Laughs] You are used to getting called too young and then suddenly one day you’re called a dinosaur. But first, I actually want to thank you for having an interest in this and wanting to write about it. Because I know just as well as you do that my winning an award on civility will not get nearly as many clicks or likes or as much notice as if I went on Twitter and screamed my head off about something. That is a real challenge of the era in which we find ourselves.
But the truth is real bipartisanship still does exist and it’s necessary if you’re going to get important pieces of legislation passed. So the Women and Lung Cancer Bill is my bill, and I invited Brian [Fitzpatrick (R-PA)] to be my Republican co-lead on it. It’s been a multi-year fight. I won’t get really into the weeds on this, but basically non-smoker women are at an alarming rate contracting lung cancer and no one knows why, and they aren’t being screened for it, and so by the time they find out at 41 or 42, it’s really too late. I mean, it is a vicious form of cancer. So I have a bill addressing that.
And the way I was able to get the Republican-led Energy and Commerce Committee to act on it was not just my relationship with Brian, but also the lead Republican on the subcommittee is a conservative Republican from Kentucky named Brett Guthrie. He and I have become friends over the years because we both served in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly together. So, three or four times a year, we’ve traveled and spent a good amount of time together. We’re both sports fans, and we’ll go back and forth on text messages about that. And so here was an example where having that preexisting friendship really made a difference where I was able to go to him and say, “Listen, this is not partisan and I could really use your help on this.”
That’s just one example. I mean, I had another bill that got passed and signed into law to help reform the way the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) works and was able to get that passed out of budget committee unanimously despite the fact that Republicans are in the majority. That would not have happened if it weren’t for having relationships and doing the not glamorous hard work behind the scenes.