POLITICS
Bipartisanship: The Key to Success
by Jim Battin
Bi•par•ti•san-ship – adjective -“representing,characterized by,or including members from
two parties or factions: Government leaders hope to achieve a bipartisan policy.”
B
ipartisanship is a very popular word – actually, it’s all the
rage when politicians are out campaigning for votes.
Voters want it. Candidates promise it. Then, after the election
is over, bipartisanship somehow always seems to be forgotten.”
Congress has never been more divided than it is now. It seems
if one political party is for something, then, almost by default,
everyone in the other party is against it. There is nothing wrong
with an elected official holding to a political philosophy and
voting on those beliefs. That’s good government. It’s when that
same elected official forgets those beliefs and starts voting
party line. That’s hyper-partisanship, and currently it’s what is
wrong with our system of government.
Whether it is in Washington, D.C. or in any statehouse
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June 2009
around the country, hyper-partisanship is dangerous to Indian
Country. When the issue of tribal gaming gets “partisanized,”
tribes risk winding up on the losing end. The good news here
is that it doesn’t have to go that way. When tribal leaders engage
their legislators on both sides of the isle, they can achieve
amazing things - and have.
California is a perfect case study. There simply isn’t a
legislative body anywhere in our country that is as partisan as
the California State Legislature. Party line votes are the norm.
In the State Assembly and State Senate votes on the floor go
two ways: either it’s a unanimous vote with everyone voting
“aye,” or a straight party line vote with the majority Democrats voting “aye” and the minority Republicans voting “nay.”
The reverse never happens, because any controversial Republican bills meet their demise in the committee process. It’s been
this way forever – until the Indians came along.
In the early days of tribal gaming in California, a coalition
of Republicans and Democrats came together to fight for
tribal self-determination and their right to game. It’s a good
thing too, because at the time there wasn’t enough support in
either party to pass the bills on their own. As it was, the far right
conservatives and the far left liberals opposed Indian gaming
for their own reasons.
In 1999, the bill AB 1385 (Battin) started out as a bill that
gave the governor the authority to negotiate and execute a tribalstate compact. Ultimately it became the bill that ratified 57
tribal-state compacts that the governor negotiated. In its first
visit to the Assembly floor, the bill, which needed 41 votes to
move on, passed with a vote of 51 “aye” and 17 “nay,” with 12
“abstaining” (which is effectively a “nay” vote).
The amazing thing about that vote was the partisan breakdown. The 51 “aye” votes were made up of 28 Republicans and
23 Democrats. What was even more amazing is that at the very
end of the bill’s presentation, the Democratic leadership called
an off-the-floor caucus meeting to try and kill the bill. Their
reason? They did not want a Republican author to get “credit”
for a bill of this significance (that old hyper-partisanship
rearing its ugly head). The coalition held strong and the bill
passed.
A vote made up of half of each party’s members had never
happened before (or at least not for a long, long time) – and it
has not happened since in California. It happened in 1999 on
that very critical bill because tribal leaders came to the capitol
and spoke with everyone that would listen. They went to
Democratic offices, they went to Republican offices, and they
even went to see the lone Green Party member. They made
allies by showing the legislators the benefits of gaming to
their tribal members and the surrounding community. They
took the time to make friends and find champions, regardless
of party registration. They worked hard and it paid off.
The significance of this vote is easy to see. When you have
developed a coalition of legislators from both parties that will
consistently support you, regardless of what their party
leadership tells them to do, then you have power - power to
get your legislation passed. It’s the power of true bipartisanship. The reverse can happen, too, however – and did in
California. Because of term limits the members in the legislature turn over quickly. Every two years, one third of the
Assembly is brand new, and new members are subject to
catching hyper-partisanship.
Five of the larger Southern California tribes amended their
compacts with the governor and the legislature had to ratify
the changes. This time, because of the Assembly member
turnover, the relationships were not as strong in the lower house.
That, plus organized labor and a horse racing interest
deciding to use the ratification bills as leverage, caused
problems in the Assembly.
Even though the bills passed the Senate with strong
bipartisan support, they got stuck in the hyper-partisan Assembly on a straight party-line vote for over a year. This is how
bad it got: an Assembly member who was a co-author of the
bill voted against his own bill because his leadership told him
to! With Indian Country looking to Congress to fix the
unfortunate Carcieri decision, the best strategy is to look for
champions from both parties and both houses. This strategy
worked wonders in California in the early days, and can work
in D.C. even as hyper-partisan as it is right now.
While that advice seems self-evident, in a town as partisan
as our nation’s capitol, a lot of the time lobbying efforts tend
to focus on the party in power – somewhat ignoring the other.
In California, it took Republicans and Democrats to pass the
bill. Neither party had enough support to do it on its own. The
dynamics of the Carcieri “fix” look very similar. p
Jim Battin is President of The Battin Group, which offers
strategic advice to tribes. He spent 14 years as a California
Legislator and recently termed out of the State Senate. During
his time in office he was the leading authority on Indian
gaming. He can be reached by email at jim@jimbattin.com.
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June 2009
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