×
×
homepage logo
LOGIN
SUBSCRIBE

Shaheen, Ayotte led the way out

By Staff | Oct 18, 2013

We were reminded of the old saying that “politics is the art of compromise” by watching New Hampshire’s two U.S. senators during the fight to end government shutdown and raise the ceiling on how much the government can borrow.

The actions of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, and Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, also brought to mind rescue workers leading lost hikers out of the woods of the White Mountain National Forest.

It’s a safe bet there has never been a hiker who – after a day or two in the woods, much less two weeks – has asked his or her rescuers to which political party they belonged.

Shaheen and Ayotte did the state proud by demonstrating a willingness to compromise and think about the long-term consequences that were at stake in the latest government crisis.

Ayotte distinguished herself on two fronts:

First, for being willing to stand up to those within her own party and say, in effect, that the emperor had no clothes. Ayotte took on one of her Republican colleagues, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and the small band of House Republicans whose asinine attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act led to the government shutdown. She was one of the first in her party to call the Cruz-led effort a failed strategy.

Doing so might increase the risk that tea party zealots will put up a primary candidate when Ayotte comes up for election in 2016, but she has an air-tight defense if that happens: She told the truth, and, in doing so, committed the almost unheard of act – for Washington, anyway – of putting country above party.

Ayotte also showed herself willing to compromise. She pushed hard for the repeal of a tax on medical devices, calling it a drag on the productivity and bottom line of several New Hampshire manufacturers. She fought hard to get rid of the tax but, at the end of the day she abandoned – at least for now – her effort to make the repeal part of the final agreement to raise the debt ceiling and reopen the government. With the country facing the uncertainty that would have come from bumping up against the debt ceiling and the prospect of defaulting on its debts, Ayotte wisely decided that the medical-
device tax was a fight that could wait another day.

Ayotte and Shaheen were both part of a group of 14 senators – seven Republicans and seven Democrats – who came together around an agreement that served as the basis for the final deal to fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.

Shaheen noted in an interview that the key to a functioning government is to parlay the kind of bipartisanship that led to this latest accord into agreement on other issues going forward, and she’s right.“This kind of bipartisanship that we tried to exhibit for New Hampshire would be important for all of us to think about as we tried to solve our problems long-term,” she said.

But after Ayotte spoke on the Senate floor Wednesday, several conservatives condemned her on Twitter for selling out on the fight to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. That was ironic, given that one of the questions she asked during her speech was “what have we learned from this?”

The answer, for some, apparently is, “not much.”

Newsletter

Join thousands already receiving our daily newsletter.

Interests
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *