As Republicans bulled toward a vote confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last week, Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona rose up, his face twisted in a familiar anguished frown. Reconciling his conservative agenda with President Donald Trump’s means of achieving it, we’ve been told — by Flake, over and over again — has caused him great inner turmoil.
As he made his way from the dais, Flake tapped Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat and a friend, who left the chamber in his wake. After some anteroom talks, the pair and others who’d joined them re-emerged with word of a tentative deal: Pending Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s approval, there would be no floor vote on Kavanaugh, as Flake put it, “for up to but not more than one week, in order to let the FBI do an investigation, limited in time and scope to the current allegations.”
When GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the most closely watched swing votes, offered their support, McConnell and the White House had no choice but to go along.
And with that, the myth of bipartisanship was given yet another vanishing boost.
A little less than a week later, the evidently circumscribed supplemental background investigation is over and senators are again preparing to render a final decision on Kavanaugh, this time with some cover from the secret FBI report they are reviewing on Capitol Hill. The venom is flowing freely, like before, as Democrats complain about the scope of the probe and Republicans, led by McConnell, push for a vote — and with it a triumphant end to one of the most hotly fought partisan battles of the Trump era.
If the outcome was predictable — indeed, many observers anticipated precisely this — the narrative that welcomed initial news of the delay is worth a second look. In particular, the celebrated Flake-Coons pact.
What’s clear now, and probably should’ve been plain from the start, is that this was never a true compromise between Democrats and Republicans. What was sold last Friday as a kind of tradeoff can happen only when both sides of a political fight possess some power or leverage. In this case, the Democrats had neither. To the extent there were material negotiations, they took place (if indirectly) only among the Republicans, who didn’t at that point have the votes to confirm Kavanaugh.
To tell it any differently, or to ascribe some loftier purpose to what transpired, only undermines the sincere desire — to the extent it exists — for real compromise that shapes both process and results. In this case, that kind of resolution would have required Republicans to cede the power they claimed by winning a Senate majority and the White House to Democrats, and back a consensus nominee.
It’s a nice thought, but utterly divorced from the fundamental reality of politics: that a true bipartisan deal happens only when lawmakers on both sides see a clear benefit in striking it — like with the spending bill, which needed Democratic support to pass and so, in the end, funded Republican and Democratic priorities.
When the parties’ aims are irreconcilable, as they are when it comes to immigration, and both lack the numbers to impose their will, because the filibuster remains in place (for now) on legislation, you end up with the current impasse over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and “the wall.” Just ask Trump himself, who wanted a bipartisan deal until he was faced with … a bipartisan deal.
Kavanaugh’s confirmation, of course, does not require Democratic votes. Coons, speaking onstage alongside Flake at the Global Citizen Festival in New York last Saturday, said of Flake and the renewed probe, “It was our personal relationship that made the politics of compromise that prevailed yesterday possible.”
In fact, their personal relationship was more of a convenient vehicle than a driving force. The warm fuzzies that followed the Friday announcement had dissolved by Monday morning — a few hours after the pair appeared side by side, again, for an interview on “60 Minutes,” where Flake mourned an illusory past.
“There’s no value to reaching across the aisle,” he said. “There’s no currency for that anymore. There’s no incentive.”
In fairness to Coons, who by all accounts sincerely and similarly craves a more collegial kind of policymaking, this was no time to dump on his friend’s notion. There was no political benefit to be won in reminding the world that his desire to block Kavanaugh’s ascent, which he was open about, was entirely dependent on Republicans breaking ranks.
Their interviewer, Scott Pelley, didn’t try to break the spell either, at least not explicitly. But the cold reality of the moment emerged when he pressed Flake and Coons for a preview of what came next.
“What are the chances,” he asked, “that we are going to be in exactly the same place a week from now?”
“There’s a chance and we knew that, and some of our colleagues said that, ‘We’ll be back here one week from now. It’ll be worse,’ ” Flake answered. “There will be other outrageous allegations that come forward. The FBI will talk to people who don’t want to talk anymore. We won’t be any better off. There is a chance that that will happen. I do think that we can make progress.”
Not quite a week later, the probe is over, the decisive vote nearing and talk of bipartisanship has again been shelved by party leaders. While the state of play might not be any worse than at this point last week, it’s hardly any better, or gentler. In the bottom-line calculation, only one thing changed in the meantime: those Republican swing votes? Their path to “yes” has been plowed right through.
