Shuster running on rare bipartisan record
Bill Shuster is going for the sweep. In his bid for re-election, the Hollidaysburg congressman is courting the votes of Republicans, Democrats and independents.
A late-in-the-campaign mailer hails Shuster’s bipartisan street creds, quoting a Politico story about Shuster’s successful launch of a multi-billion dollar infrastructure bill approved by the House on a lopsided both-sides-of-the-aisle vote.
“… Bill Shuster just may have brought bipartisanship back,” the mailer reads. The flip side of the glossy asserts that rather than “ram through a partisan agenda,” Shuster, the Republican chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, “worked across the aisle. …”
Missing from the mailer is the fact that Shuster, whose top-heavy Republican district includes all of Fayette County and parts of Washington and Greene counties, collaborated with Barbara Boxer, the Democratic senator from California, on the $10 billion measure, a conservative-liberal partnership rare for Washington in these days of white-hot party discord.
Maybe the Shuster campaign figured there’s only so much information it wished to share. The mailer contains the imprint of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, suggesting party endorsement of bipartisanship in the interest of electing one of its own.
(The same phenomenon is evident in the Pat Stefano campaign for state Senate as well. In that case, Stefano pledges to oppose either Tom — Corbett or Wolf — in the event the present and perhaps future governor or the governor-in-waiting acts at cross-purposes with his would-be constituent.)
Back to Shuster. Give the guy credit. As a Republican in the age of the tea party, he lives politically on a razor’s edge; his core constituents, or at least many of them, feel themselves put upon by liberal elites, their American “values” under constant seige.
A congressman since January 2001, when he succeeded his long-time congressman father, Shuster has been forced into several harsh primary battles with candidates who were professed conservative real deals, not phonies in the spirit of the patriarchal Bud Shuster.
Any false step the congressman makes is liable to cause enough anger to trigger a political challenge not from Democrats, who are not in a position to creditably confront Shuster, but from his right flank.
All of which makes Shuster’s open courting of Democratic voters, and, more importantly, his campaign’s trumpeting of bipartisanship as a positive good, surprising.
Quite frankly, he doesn’t need one Democratic vote to be returned election after election to Congress; and, least of all, he doesn’t need to talk up bipartisanship. In the small-bore scheme of things, neither is necessary for Shuster’s continued political health. Indeed, they would seem to imperil that health.
So why, in the waning days, of this campaign, unleash the dogs of bipartisanship?
Perhaps it’s a hedge against defecting Republicans, or a reassurance for conservative Democrats inclined to cast a ballot on his behalf.
Maybe it’s directed toward local Democratic officeholders and activists with whom he has done business. In this regard, Shuster’s efforts several years ago on behalf of Hopwood’s million dollar sidewalks come to mind.
Another possible clue to Shuster’s fessing up to bipartisan inclinations is contained in a little jewel of presidential politics: 50 years ago this fall, President Johnson grabbed a bullhorn and told an admiring crowd in Providence, R.I., “We’re for a lot of things and against mighty few.”
One might suppose that LBJ was professing the liberal activist impulse, and there’s probably some truth there. Just as plausibly his remarks reflected a style of politics that has all but disappeared in early 21st-century America. It was a style of politics central to LBJ, whose legislative achievements ran from civil rights to Medicare.
Johnson believed in a politics in which everyone got something. Ideally, domestic politics should be a win-win proposition. “I get mine, you also get yours.”
This “nobody loses” formula is not always possible. Maybe most of the time it’s simply impossible. Still, it may point the way out of our current political dilemma in which nobody seems to get anything.
The test for Shuster is to demonstrate bipartisanship on a range of issues. He could be tested as early as this winter, when it’s likely the House Republican majority will be asked to cast yet another vote to repeal Obamacare.
Shuster should decline to participate in the charade of dismantlement. He might, however, with profit say, “Here are several amendments offered not to ditch Obamacare, but to fix it.” In the spirit of LBJ, he might then say, “Now, let us reason together.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books of local history: Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail .com.