The second Trump administration, like the first one, has been full of wall-to-wall partisan controversies. Pardons for January 6th rioters. An attempt to end birthright citizenship. A funding freeze. Elon Musk burrowing into some federal agencies and trying to end others. A slew of divisive Cabinet picks.
Turn on C-SPAN pretty much any hour of the day, and you’ll probably be greeted by the sight of Democrats and Republicans in Congress at loggerheads, fighting over all these issues, plus many more.
Which is why it stopped me in my tracks when I received an unusual press release in my inbox Tuesday morning: “Sanders, Hawley Introduce Bill Capping Credit Card Interest Rates at 10%,” it announced.
Bernie Sanders, in case you missed his two presidential campaigns, is an Independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats. A self-described democratic socialist, he’s one of the most progressive members of the Senate.
Josh Hawley, on the other hand, is a Republican senator from Missouri. He’s one of President Trump’s closest allies in Congress, a MAGA warrior perhaps best known for raising his fist in solidarity with protesters on January 6th (this was before the protesters became rioters, though only by a few hours).
The two lawmakers are almost 40 years apart in age — but might be even more distant from each other in terms of ideology.
And yet, here they are, introducing a new piece of legislation together, at a time of peak partisan tensions, no less.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
After all, despite appearances, Congress often functions in a much more bipartisan manner than many think.
If you had to guess, how many laws in the past decade do you think passed Congress with majorities of both parties in support? 10%? 30%? 50?
According to research by Princeton’s Frances Lee, the correct answer is more than 80%.
I know what you’re thinking: Well, sure, most of those laws were probably just symbolic — renaming a new post office, or declaring it National Cheeseburger Day or something.
And, yeah, some of them were. But Lee *also* calculated the percentage of “important” laws — the select few deemed consequential by political scientists — that received majority support from both parties. The number goes down, but only to 64%. Even consequential lawmaking is usually done in a bipartisan fashion.
This is the case for several reasons. In the House, it’s largely because of how closely divided the country is right now — close elections mean congressional majorities keep getting smaller and smaller, and that means that House speakers need votes from the minority party if they can’t keep almost their entire party in line (which they often can’t). In the Senate, it’s largely because of the filibuster rule, which requires the support of 60 senators (more than either party usually has) to end debate on most pieces of legislation.
Sometimes, it’s also a result of our scrambled party politics: we’re living in a time when the coalitions that fuel the two parties are shifting, with key groups of voters floating in both directions. That fluidity opens up some space in the middle — which is how, for example, you end up with Sanders and Hawley working together, since they share some of the populist tendencies that were once more associated with the Democratic Party but are now drifting over to the GOP.
Their new bill — which would cap credit card interest rates at 10% — is a perfect example. In a statement announcing the measure, both senators sought to position themselves as defending workers and battling Wall Street. “When large financial institutions charge over 25 percent interest on credit cards, they are not engaged in the business of making credit available. They are engaged in extortion and loan sharking,” Sanders said. “We cannot continue to allow big banks to make huge profits ripping off the American people.”
“Working Americans are drowning in record credit card debt while the biggest credit card issuers get richer and richer by hiking their interest rates to the moon,” Hawley agreed. “It’s not just wrong, it’s exploitative. And it needs to end.”
The average credit card interest rate is 28.6%, according to Forbes. Banks typically oppose the attempts to add a cap, arguing that it would require them to limit the number of higher-risk customers to whom they issue credit cards to.
The Sanders-Hawley bill is just one example of bipartisan legislating that could emerge this year.
Hawley himself is involved in several other efforts, including plans to become the first Republican to sponsor major pro-union legislation in decades and discussions around a proposal to increase the Child Tax Credit, which would likely pick up Democratic support.
He has also been a player in the bipartisan push to ban members of Congress from trading stocks. Democratic and Republican lawmakers backing such a ban expressed openness in interviews with me last month to using a discharge petition — a tool to force a House vote on bills if the majority supports it, even when the House Speaker is opposed.
Just as Hawley represents movement on the part of some Republicans from conservative orthodoxies on economic policy, some Democrats are moving away from their traditional immigration stance — creating room for further products of bipartisanship.
Already, Trump has signed into law his first piece of legislation, the Laken Riley Act, which would require the federal government to detain noncitizens arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting. The measure picked up 46 Democratic backers in the House and 12 in the Senate, while also receiving support from all Republicans in Congress.
Other immigration bills, including a measure to codify Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy — which requires migrants seeking asylum to stay in Mexico until their hearing in immigration court — has secured support from the leaders of the House Blue Dogs Caucus, a prominent group of centrist Democrats.
For several years now, tech policy has been one of the richest sources of cross-party cooperation in Congress. Several bipartisan pairs of lawmakers proposed legislation to regulate AI last year; a bipartisan House task force on AI also released recommendations in December which will likely form the starting basis for new proposals.
Meanwhile, as both Democratic and Republican-led state governments work to crack down on phone usage at schools, bills like the Kids Online Safety Act — a measure requiring tech companies to take steps to protect children from harmful digital content — will likely make a resurgence. The measure, known as KOSA, passed the Senate in a sweeping 91-3 vote last year, but never received a vote in the House.
The list goes on. Another Trump proposal, to eliminate taxes on tips, has picked up Democratic co-sponsors. A special House committee on China established itself as an “oasis of bipartisanship” last Congress; it will continue pushing for bills to counter Beijing in the months ahead.
Some lawmakers have also begun looking inward at bipartisan changes to congressional rules, including an initiative led by Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) — who gave birth last week — to allow House members to vote remotely for 12 weeks after becoming a mother or father.
Under current rules, there is no option for lawmakers to vote remotely; Pettersen’s proposal has generated support from both sides of the aisle.
Later this week, the House is expected to vote on what could become the second bill Trump signs into law: the HALT Fentanyl Act, yet another bipartisan effort. The bill would permanently add fentanyl-related substances — the drug at the center of the opioid epidemic — to the list of Schedule I substances, which are the most strictly regulated. (Heroin, LSD, and marijuana are also on Schedule I.)
But the biggest test for congressional bipartisanship is yet to come.
Government funding is poised to run out on March 14, just over a month away.
Spending legislation will not be able to pass unless both parties sign on — which means government funding is always handled on a bipartisan basis…eventually. The question is how much partisan bickering it takes to arrive at the bipartisan solution.
Negotiations kicked off last month, but they’ve hit a snag amid the Trump administration’s efforts to freeze federal grants and loans, some of which were expressly mandated by Congress. If lawmakers can’t trust that the executive branch will spend the money allocated by Congress, Democrats have asked, how can spending negotiations proceed in good faith?
According to NBC News, Democrats are considering pushing for the “must-pass” funding legislation to include provisions constraining Trump from going around Congress. It is unclear if Republicans will accept such language.
If a bipartisan spending deal — or at least a temporary stopgap — isn’t reached by the deadline, the government will shut down, sending all non-essential employees home until lawmakers cobble together an agreement.
Bipartisanship isn’t dead, it’s evolving. As the party platforms drift, topics on which they can find common ground will too.