“Bipartisan work is as basic as the American covenant, E pluribus unum, out of many, one,” Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, said recently on NBC’s Meet the Press. In 2022, he ran a memorable campaign ad about his unlikely work with conservative Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on an interstate highway extension connecting military communities in their states. His tagline: “I’ll work with anyone if it means helping Georgia.”
It’s easier than you might think to find wildly disparate bipartisan partners in Congress. Massachusetts progressive Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, the MAGA champion from Missouri, are another example. Just this month they challenged automakers’ opposition to people’s right to repair their own cars, and teamed up on a bill to rein in pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs, the middlemen who drive up drug prices).
Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, another bipartisan pair, began work in 2023 on how to screen and restrict sensitive U.S. technology investments in China and other countries of concern. The final version had broad support but, like the RFK stadium deal, was part of the negotiated bipartisan spending package that died.
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RONALD REAGAN ENTERED POLITICS after a career as an actor and union negotiator. When he became governor of California in 1967, Reagan wrote in his 1990 autobiography, he already understood the need for compromise—but “compromise was a dirty word” to the purists (the “radical conservatives,” in his phrase) who had supported him during his campaign. He told them it’s best to take what you can get and fight for the rest later, but they “never got used to it.”
