The real lesson of the feud between Susan Collins and Chuck Schumer

The real lesson of the feud between Susan Collins and Chuck Schumer

Opinion by Greg Sargent

Columnist

March 12, 2021 at 6:40 a.m. GMT+9

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. (Michael Reynolds/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

Many senators are supposedly shocked, shocked by a feud that has erupted between their colleagues Charles E. Schumer and Susan Collins. According to a Politico report, the Democratic majority leader and the Republican from Maine are barely speaking amid his alleged failure to reach out to her during the stimulus debate.

Many GOP senators are treating this as a teachable moment: If Schumer (N.Y.) and Democrats want bipartisan support in the future, by golly, they’d best treat the most gettable Republican with a whole lot more respect!

This is a teachable moment, but in an entirely different way: It shows yet again how confused and obfuscatory our discourse is around “bipartisanship.”

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Specifically, I’d like to stipulate that there is no way to discuss the concept of “bipartisanship” in a neutral way, outside of a policy context. During the debate over the $1.9 trillion relief package, you constantly heard media figures asking whether President Biden and Democrats could “do more” to “win bipartisan cooperation” from Republicans, as though this could have been secured by acts of personal glad handling or other mystical rites that went unspecified, and that this would have been an inherently good thing.

But the only thing Democrats could have done to win such bipartisan cooperation was to dramatically scale down their package. And so, those who suggested that winning bipartisan cooperation would have been an inherent good were necessarily offering an opinion on policy: They were saying a much smaller package would have been a better outcome than what did happen, because it was bipartisan.

That’s a fine position to take, but the point is, taking it preferences one policy outcome over another. It’s not a policy-neutral position.

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The Collins-Schumer feud illustrates this well. The idea is supposed to be that Schumer backed a challenger to Collins in 2020, failed, and their relationship has since been “frosty.”

Then Schumer said on TV that Democrats learned their lesson from 2009 and would not chase after bipartisan support forever, adding that “Susan Collins was part of that mistake.”

Collins took great umbrage, and insisted there had been no outreach to her at all on the stimulus. She declared it the height of folly to “alienate the most bipartisan member,” suggesting that winning future cooperation would now be far harder. Numerous other GOP senators echoed that sentiment.

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But there’s no reason to believe any amount of outreach would have won over Collins.

Recall that Collins and Republicans backed an amendment that would have scaled down the package to one-third its size, even as the $1.9 trillion proposal had enormous public support. Which means nothing short of an enormous downscaling of the bill would have won 10 Republican senators to break a likely filibuster.

So Democrats passed the package by a simple majority through reconciliation. Could more outreach have persuaded just Collins to support what did pass?

Doubtful. At the least, since Collins touted that amendment — which, again, was one-third the size — as a reasonable compromise, winning her would have required a big downscaling in that direction. And recall that Collins and other moderate Republicans have admitted that Biden did solicit input from them; that act didn’t move them at all, and he and Democrats decided passing an ambitious bill was what the country needed.

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The point is that winning over Collins — and winning bipartisan support — would have resulted in a far less generous package. So arguing that Democrats should have done what was necessary to win that support is tantamount to arguing that a far less generous package would have been a preferable outcome. You can’t treat “winning bipartisanship” as a goal that exists in a vacuum.

It’s possible that on a few future issues, the right kind of dealmaking might win a few GOP senators. But that will be on issues they already want to act on (like, say, infrastructure). On most others, the choice for Democrats will be to act alone or dramatically compromise their agenda. (This is why it’s very hard to see filibuster reform not happening.) In most cases, whether Democrats perform the right kind of outreach will be irrelevant.

The real moral of the Collins-Schumer feud is that Republicans badly want to confuse you on this point. That’s why they attacked Schumer for alienating Collins personally, even though that’s not remotely relevant to what actually happened. They want to be able to argue that when no Republicans support future bills, this was a general failure of leadership on Democrats’ part, with little discussion of the truism that only the most enormous specific concessions (if those) could have ever won their support.

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It’s a neat trick. But we don’t have to play along.

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