In October, a couple weeks into the government shutdown, we wrote a piece encouraging the GOP to specifically seek out Democratic Senators with high Bridge Grades1 to build a coalition to re-open the government.
And, 25 days later, that is exactly what they did.
Of the eight Democratic Senators who voted for the resolution, all eight are bridgers (A or B grades) on our non-partisan Bridge Grades scoring system. This was not just a lucky guess. It is simple logic that the most collaborative Senators (based on actual legislative record and 3rd party rhetoric analysis) would be the ones to come to the table in search of a win-win.
Do those with high Bridge Grades have the weakest convictions, and are first to compromise? Are bridgers rewarded for caving?
No. Bridge Scores are based on collaboration, not compromise. We measure the act of collaboration (authoring and sponsoring bipartisan bills) while our system offers no such reward for voting with the other side2.
So, did these eight Senators cave?
The use of the word “cave” is a tell in itself. It identifies partisan Democrats engaged in zero-sum game politics, whose disbelief about the rationale to re-open the government at the very moment of their party’s newly acquired position of strength is understandably clouded by serious and valid concerns about Executive Branch overreach absent meaningful checks or balances from either the Judicial or Legislative Branches. The stakes are high.
Still, let’s agree that a meaningful and truly systemic change to address our nation’s health care affordability crisis—the relevant cause and the core rationale to have held out longer—will objectively require a deeply bipartisan solution. Securing an additional year of subsidies, kicking the can down the road, and financially rescuing tens of millions of Americans for another year, would have been considered a big political win, despite its superficial response to a much larger structural and cultural problem.
Instead, these eight Democratic bridgers formed a coalition and spotted a pragmatic win-win solution: an agreeement to re-open our Federal government, protect Federal employees’ jobs and pay, secure the critical Government Accountability Office’s independence, and lock in guarantees that the Senate will conduct an up-or-down vote on extending ACA subsidies before the end of the calendar year.
While one can certainly debate whether the Democratic collaborators left value on the table, this win-win collaboration unfortunately smelled too much like a compromise to miffed partisan Democrats who prefer to keep fighting.
Were the rogue eight Senators acting on their own?
Partisan Democratic voters were already exasperated with poor coordination and weak alignment within the Democratic Party leadership even before the group of eight broke off and did their own thing without the approval of their Senate party leader. It’d be easy to conclude that such splintering is a sign of weak party leadership, and, given the uncoordinated overall state of the current Democratic caucus, maybe it is.
But, breakaway coalitions are good. As citizens who want a better functioning Legislative Branch, we actually love to see this sort of coalition-building. The more the better. If we had a lot more of such break out groups, Congress would find many more win-win solutions for mutual common interests. Congressional representatives are meant to represent our full population, and last time I looked, the most diverse population on Earth can hardly be truly represented by two non-overlapping ideological monoliths. Coalitions matter.
As non-partisans and anti-partisans, we must reward and encourage such coalitions that break out from their respective partisan caucuses. And, make unlikely cross-partisan coalitions the norm. Such coalitions increase representation across a wider range of subsets of our deliciously eclectic population, restore health within the Legislative Branch, and restore its role as an effective check and balance in our Federal government.
Caving is compromising in a zero-sum game. Bridging is collaborating for a win-win solution.
Bridge Grades is a non-ideological report card for politicians. Using 3rd party data, we grade politicians on their ability to collaborate and build consensus solutions for the common interests of multiple parties versus how polarizing they behave. In aggregating data from multiple non-partisan 3rd party sources, Bridge Grade is like Rotten Tomatoes for politicians. Bridge Grades measure not “what” a politician thinks, but rather “how” the politician behaves. Independent of red or blue ideology, Bridge Grades objectively sorts bridgers from dividers.
Bridge Grades is a citizen-led public utility that measures how collaboratively or divisively each member of Congress governs. We use impartial 3rd party data and compile it into a 0-100 score for every member of Congress. Here’s how it works.
Roll call votes have no effect on Bridge Scores. That’s because bill and resolution voting record are not considered in our grading rubric. We looked at voting records, and our initial conclusion was using roll-call votes for bills that reach the floor offered too much of a partisan bias toward the party who controls the legislative agenda. So, instead, our method reward bipartisan authoring and sponsoring of bills, and will explore ways to integrate voting records into the scoring system down the line.
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