'Moving Forward Together – A Transpartisan Agenda to Rebuild Trust and Tackle America's Biggest Challenges' Report Issued

WASHINGTON, Dec. 29 -- Three Organizations jointly issued the following report, dated December 2020, entitled "Moving Forward Together - A transpartisan agenda to rebuild trust and tackle America's biggest challenges."

The report was issued by U.S. PIRG, Environment America and Frontier Group.

Here are the executive summary and introduction of the 48-page report:

Executive summary

The 2020 election confirms it: Americans are more divided than at any time in recent history.

Our increasing polarization makes it difficult for our government to produce results on behalf of the public - or even for Americans of differing political views to have civil conversations.

Paradoxically, however, this moment of heightened polarization also contains the seeds of renewal. With political coalitions increasingly entrenched and splitting the country nearly down the middle, our nation's leaders face a stark choice: Continue down the path of gridlock and total political warfare, or begin to carve out a space where people of both parties can work together on behalf of the public interest.

The good news is that there are a surprising number of public policies on which Republicans, Democrats and independents share common ground. By daring to venture out across political "no man's land" and forge compromise on areas of public concern, lawmakers can get important work done for the American people even as they begin to create a pathway out of the nation's dangerous and counterproductive polarization.

This paper outlines 12 areas of policy where the potential exists for real reforms that bridge the partisan divide and restore Americans' faith and trust in one another and in their government.

1) Infrastructure - A national infrastructure bank has been proposed by both Democrats and Republicans as a tool to unlock investment in the nation's crumbling and outdated infrastructure.

2) National service - Republicans and Democrats have supported proposals for an expansion of national service - creating new opportunities for Americans of all backgrounds to work together to better our communities.

3) Broadband internet - Lack of access to broadband internet impedes the ability of children to learn during a time of pandemic and of rural communities to thrive in the 21st century economy. Public broadband can be a solution.

4) Climate change - Young Americans - including young conservatives - are increasingly alarmed about global warming as climate impacts become more severe and apparent, opening the door to forge bipartisan agreement on specific policies around the edges of the climate debate and build toward larger solutions.

5) Career and technical education - The nation has a growing need for training for so-called "mid-skill" jobs accessible to those without a college education. Revitalizing career and technical education can help prepare a broader range of young people for success in today's economy.

6) Gun safety - Gun rights are among the most polarizing issues in America, but the vast majority of Americans agree that specific measures to keep guns out of the hands of potentially dangerous people are necessary and appropriate.

7) Cutting wasteful spending - Progressives and conservatives often disagree about the size and role of government, but there are some government programs and tax breaks that simply don't make sense. Cutting wasteful programs can save money at a time of growing fiscal challenges.

8) Government transparency - Transparency and accountability are imperative to restoring trust in government. Bipartisan reforms can improve citizen access to information about government spending and impose accountability on public officials.

9) Citizen engagement with government spending - In a growing number of communities, citizens are entrusted with directly deciding how a portion of their tax dollars are spent. The adoption of participatory budgeting or the expansion of the current income tax check-off system could provide new ways for citizens to engage with government.

10) Empowering citizens in elections - Americans are sick and tired of expensive elections bankrolled by wealthy special interests. Policies such as tax credits or matching grants for small political contributions can help even the scales between big and small donors.

11) Right to repair - From smartphones to farm equipment, manufacturers often make it difficult or impossible for consumers to fix the things they own. "Right to repair" legislation can expand freedom for individuals and counter the power of the tech industry.

12) Clean energy - Tax credits for wind and solar power are broadly popular and have helped spark the dramatic growth of renewable energy. There is broad bipartisan support for extending the tax credits, providing a firm foundation for continued recovery of renewable energy after the COVID-19 pandemic.

These areas of potential transpartisan cooperation are just the tip of the iceberg. From rebuilding our public health system to handle pandemics to addressing the plague of opioid addiction; from replacing lead water pipes in our cities to protecting precious lands and clear streams in the wilderness; and from reforming our antitrust laws to reforming our criminal justice system, America has no shortage of critical challenges we need to face. By identifying areas of potential common ground and then getting to work to enact solutions in those areas, the nation can begin to face up to its challenges.

Introduction

Americans are more divided than we have been in living memory.

Not that we haven't disagreed on things before. Diversity of opinion has always been one of our nation's great strengths - it's the fertile ground from which new ideas grow.

What's happening today is different. In the past, when we've disagreed, most of us still recognized the other side as acting for what they believed was in the best interests of the country. "The average American used to feel positive about their own party and kind of neutral about the opposite party," said Stanford University researcher Matthew Gentzkow, part of a team that recently studied trends in political polarization across Western countries./1 "But now they are positive about their party and quite negative about the opposing party." "Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party's members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines," according to another 2019 study of polarization./2

The effects of this deepening polarization are all around us. Republicans and Democrats increasingly live in different places, consume different media, buy different products, watch different sports - in essence, they exist in different realities from one another. Every issue - even such seemingly universal ones as the response to a deadly pandemic - gets filed into one or another partisan box.

And so, a government that once served as the vehicle through which Americans came together to win world wars, build monumental works of infrastructure, clean our air and water of industrial pollution, lift communities from the depths of poverty and deprivation, and promote the cause of human freedom increasingly fails to perform even its most basic functions.

The system of checks and balances devised by the Founding Fathers and refined by tradition over the centuries requires that major decisions achieve a threshold of consensus from across the nation's diverse range of constituencies. That system often works slowly. Sometimes it is slower than is necessary. But when it does work, it yields change that is durable, broadly supported by the public, and profound enough to address the nation's biggest, most difficult problems. Today, however, partisan polarization makes achieving consensus - or even enacting compromise - next to impossible. The division of Americans into warring political camps, the nationalization of congressional elections, and the rising threat of primary challenges mean that members of Congress have more to gain politically by catering to the extremes of their own party than by reaching out across partisan lines.

The result is a system that treats sharing credit for legislative accomplishments as "giving the other side a win." A system in which compromise - the heart and soul of effective legislating - becomes a political liability. A system that transforms the U.S. Congress from a deliberative body working to advance the interests of the public into a theater of total political war.

The only time that anything really gets done, it seems, is when one party controls all of government. The achievement of a "trifecta" - control of the presidency, House and Senate - is seen as the ultimate vindication of a party's vision, and a chance to pursue all of its political hopes and dreams without restraint and without the need to engage the minority party.

But the legislation passed via these single-party votes is often only temporary. Without even token bipartisan support, signature legislative initiatives come under attack immediately when control of Congress changes - something that happens with increasing frequency. In the last 26 years, since the election of 1994, control of the House or the Senate has changed nine times./3 In contrast, over the previous 26 years (from 1968 to 1994), control of a house of Congress changed only twice./4

Indeed, over the last 11 elections, the composition of American government - control of the presidency, Senate or House - has changed after all but two: the reelections of George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012. Over and over, it seems, when Americans fill out our ballots, we don't vote for one party so much as we vote against the other. And with government functioning so poorly, that's understandable.

But when we look beneath the division and anger of our current politics, beneath the dysfunction of our governing institutions, a surprising truth emerges: Americans actually agree on quite a lot. From clean energy to campaign finance, from gun safety to infrastructure, public opinion polling consistently reveals ample common ground - places where Democrats, Republicans and independents generally agree on specific policies to address significant problems.

America's newly elected leaders have a choice: Pursue policies and politics that deepen our divisions. Or find ways to work together across partisan lines to show Americans that government can work again. Cooperation and compromise across party lines is among the very best traditions of American politics. Bipartisan agreement broke the logjam on civil rights legislation in the 1960s; laid the foundation for America's major environmental laws in the 1970s; forged tax reform in the 1980s; enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act in the 1990s; and led to the passage of campaign finance reform legislation in the 2000s./5 Democrats and Republicans have come together time and time again to address the nation's biggest challenges.

Working together on specific legislation also builds understanding and trust that, over time, can erode toxic polarization. Research shows that increasing one's contact with members of another group is a consistently effective way to reduce prejudice and misunderstanding./6 By partnering on a shared agenda, Americans of good faith may come to recognize that politics does not have to be a theater of total war, but can be a venue for actually getting things done that are in the public interest.

This memo describes 12 policy areas where Americans from across the political spectrum have an opportunity to work together to get results. The ideas discussed here are not necessarily "bipartisan" in the sense that they enjoy broad support from politicians of both parties. Indeed, some of them only have limited support among politicians of either party. All of them, however, are areas in which a significant portion of rank-and-file Democrats, Republicans and independents share common ground.

In many cases, the common ground that exists is relatively narrow. Just because, for example, Democrats and Republicans share views on policies to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals doesn't mean they agree on the meaning of the Second Amendment or the ideal role of guns in society.

But it is precisely by working together to implement change in narrow areas of agreement that our government can begin to get its transpartisan "muscles" working again and lay a pathway toward addressing the deep and significant challenges facing the nation.

The problems of the 21st century are too great to meet with dysfunctional government. They require too much long-term commitment to solve with policy that swings from one extreme to another every two to four years. Restoring the capability of Americans to work together - and of our government to work, period - is the biggest challenge America faces, and one that is essential to resolving all our other challenges.

Full text including footnotes: https://environmentamerica.org/sites/environment/files/reports/Moving%20Forward%20Together%20USP%20EA%20FG%20Dec%202020%20final_0.pdf

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