To get support for education bill, senators conjure lost art: Compromise
Sen. Lamar Alexander walked into Sen. Patty Murray’s office and closed the door.
Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, had just taken control of the education committee in the new GOP-led Senate and was determined to rewrite No Child Left Behind, the main K-12 federal education law. It was early February, and he had released a draft of his ideal bill, inviting lawmakers to amend it with their own ideas in committee before bringing it to the full Senate.
Murray, the committee’s ranking Democrat from Washington state, was equally serious about crafting a new law. But she bluntly told Alexander that his way wouldn’t work.
Using a Republican draft as a starting point would only lead to yet another partisan logjam that has come to define Congress, and it would doom their chances of passing an education law that was eight years overdue, she said.
As their staffs anxiously waited in an ante room, Murray and Alexander made an old-school deal —they would find common ground and together write a bipartisan bill. They would compromise.
Alexander and Murray arrive on Capitol Hill for a committee hearing to look at ways to reform the No Child Left Behind law. (Susan Walsh/AP)“I know the general atmosphere of Congress today is ‘Whatever they do is bad’ and ‘Whatever they do is bad’,” Murray said in an interview. The only way to slice through that dysfunction, she said, is to start with a “document at the outset that both of us said we could support and live with and work from.”
It wouldn’t be easy, she told Alexander. “It takes really listening to each other, working it, member by member, line by line, idea by idea,” she said.
Alexander, 75, and Murray, 64, had never worked closely but they were suited to the task. Murray had a growing reputation as a dealmaker after negotiating a budget with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in 2013; Alexander had stepped down from Republican leadership in 2011, saying he wanted to focus on bridging divides rather than scoring political points.
Alexander accepted Murray’s suggestion.
“And it turned out to be good advice,” he said later in an interview. “I gave up something, but I gained more — not only a working relationship with her but a lot of support from the Democratic members of the committee.”
The result was remarkable. On a Senate committee that spans the political spectrum from progressive Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on the left to tea party favorite Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on the right — and includes two declared To get support for education bill, senators conjure lost art: Compromise - The Washington Post: