Editorial: Legislation strangled by partisanship

The political landscape is as partisan as a war zone, but “bipartisan” seems to be every politician’s favorite word.

If a legislator does something with even one member of the opposing party, you will hear crows of “bipartisan support.”

Without that one member, there is a great wailing and mourning that no one could work together.

Well, no one can work together. Not anymore.

There was a time, not so long ago, that a law could pass with Democrats voting for and against it and Republicans doing the same. There would be detailed lists of who voted for what because you just didn’t know.

Today, a single vote that isn’t along party lines makes a bold-faced headline.

But if there is anything worse than a vote that you can predict in advance, it’s a vote you can predict in advance but doesn’t happen.

In a recent television interview, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said there were 395 bills passed in the Democratic- controlled House of Representatives that will never see a vote in his chamber.

This might seem like a gross dereliction of duty. It might seem like strategic gamesmanship. Maybe it’s even both.

It is definitely a measure of where we are today, in a place where partisanship grinds the gears of government to a clattering, overheated halt.

In a recent interview with the Tribune-Review, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Scranton, pointed out that most of the bills — about 200 of them — are bipartisan, having those precious Republican yeas on a Democratic-sponsored bill or vice versa.

But what is really tragic is that a bill should be measured by party instead of by merit.

We don’t need bipartisanship, because it just plays into the red and blue tug-of-war. We can’t have non-partisanship, because those gang colors have stained our politicians to the bone.

What we need is post-partisanship. We need our leaders to acknowledge the playing field and move past it, to accept that they may have picked a party but natural disasters, health care crises and infrastructure haven’t.