Spin Control: Does one minority vote make something bipartisan?

“Bipartisan” has become a word so pliable that one is never sure what a politician means when it is applied to something he or she describes.

The agreement Congress reached earlier this month to raise the debt ceiling, with its attendant concessions on next year’s federal budget, was properly described as passing with bipartisan support. After all, some two-thirds of Republicans and three-fourths of House Democrats voted for it.

It also had bipartisan opposition, with 71 Republicans and 46 Democrats voting no. But just as winners get to write history, they are allowed at least a certain latitude in describing it.

That shouldn’t be unlimited, however. After the late, great 2023 session of the Legislature, Senate Democrats sent out what might best be described as a self-congratulatory statement saying 95.89% of the bills that passed did so with bipartisan support. That was marginally better than the previous four years, which were all in the mid-90s of percentages.

“When I’m out in our community talking to people, I think the thing that surprises them most is how much we work together,” Sen. Andy Billig said.

What might also surprise them, however, is how the Democrats are defining bipartisan as “a yes vote of at least one Republican senator or representative.”

One out of 147 is 0.7% of the Legislature. Or for argument’s sake, one of the 60 elected Republicans – 1.7% of the legislative GOP. Neither seem to qualify as “bipartisan.” That would be particularly true if Democrats lost a member or two in one chamber, or the other in the final votes.

Bipartisanship doesn’t have to mean nearly equal members of each party. But there should be some standard set, perhaps a percentage of the minority party voting yes that at least is in double digits, and no smaller than the number of the majority party voting no.

Happy Juneteenth Eve

Monday is Juneteenth, which is a relatively new federal holiday marking the day in mid-1865 when the last enslaved persons in the United States learned they had been freed. Note that the Civil War ended in April that year, but news traveled slowly in those days without cable news or the internet.

Also like today, people who didn’t like the news, including those who were using enslaved people in Texas, weren’t rushing to spread it.

One amazing thing about Juneteenth is how quickly it went from being celebrated by a segment of the population – that is, the descendants of those enslaved persons – to becoming a state and national holiday.

Juneteenth was first made a Washington state holiday in 2007, but without full legal status – that is, nothing was closed, no one got the day off – which made it on par with Children’s Day (second Sunday in October), Marcus Whitman Day (Sept. 4) or Blood Donor Day (Dec. 18).

A bill to make it a legal holiday was first introduced in the state House in 2020 with 38 co-sponsors, but it didn’t make it out of committee. A year later, it made it through the House on an 87-9 vote and the Senate on a 47-1 vote.

It may be one of the best recent examples of an idea whose time had come.

Got that wrong

Last Sunday’s column incorrectly linked the Moral Majority to televangelist Pat Robertson, as a couple of careful readers pointed out.

Robertson founded the Christian Coalition, but Moral Majority was founded by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, another prominent leader of the Christian right. MM was active in the 1976, 1980 and 1984 elections before Robertson got into the 1988 campaign.

Some Christian conservatives in Washington who identified with the Moral Majority supported Robertson through the caucuses and up to the Republican National Convention. But he never got the endorsement. That officially went to George H.W. Bush.