Your Turn: Congress needs to overlook the aisle

There were two State of the Union addresses this year: one on Jan. 20 in Congress, the other on Jan. 22 at the Anschutz Sports Pavilion on the Kansas University campus. The differences between them were telling. The president’s address in Washington began with a house divided — an aisle down the center of the chamber — Democratic members on the right side; Republicans on the left, as they sit during sessions of Congress.

The one at KU began with a house united — no aisle, no right side, no left side, just 7,000 people standing shoulder to shoulder. There were no large wall placards directing Democrats to one side of the pavilion and Republicans to the other.

In Washington, Obama presented a series of ideas about domestic affairs and foreign policy for Congress and the nation to consider–from child care, taxes, minimum wage, and free community college education, to global terrorism and climate change. Throughout, you would have thought that the chamber was inhabited by automatons — the ones on the right programmed to rise, cheer and applaud; the ones on the left bolted to their seats, motionless and mute.

Was not even one of the president’s ideas worthy of unanimous consent? Free community college? Affordable child care? A family’s living wage that’s more than $15,000 per year? But Congress could not bring itself to forgo its orchestrated puppet show for one evening, to unite behind ideas that are ideals for the nation. It could not decouple the virtue of these ideas on Tuesday evening from the partisan rough and tumble that would begin Wednesday morning on how to implement and pay for them. Instead, we witnessed blind, robotic allegiance to the tribe — the political party — trumping principles and trampling the common good.

At KU, the president presented the same ideas, often verbatim from his Washington State of the Union. The 7,000 listeners cheered and applauded an uplifting vision for them and the future of their country. How to enact that vision would be their hard task in the coming years. For a singular moment, there was unity of meaning and purpose in the privilege of citizenship.

President Obama didn’t mention climate change at Anschutz. Dare one say that he did not have to? He knew he was speaking to a scientifically literate audience. That’s not a sure thing in Washington, where science is a politically expedient pick-and-choose game — pick the science you like, dump on the science you don’t. So, as recently as the day of the State of the Union address, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chair of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, still claimed global climate change was a conspiratorial hoax perpetrated by 98 percent of the world’s scientists. Hmmm. Would he claim that a medical diagnosis agreed on by 98 percent of the doctors he visited was also a hoax?

Nevertheless, on the day after the State of the Union address, Inhofe co-sponsored a feel-good amendment to the Keystone Pipeline bill: “It is the sense of the Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax.” It passed 98-1. Then, suddenly struck deaf to the very same scientific evidence, the Senate promptly defeated a follow-up amendment that said humans are contributing to this climate change. The lone dissenter in the 98-1 vote was Sen. RogerWicker, R-Miss., who cited the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a climate-change denier. Trouble is, this outfit is led by Frederick Seitz, who years earlier accepted $45 million from tobacco companies to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer.

At the conclusion of the State of the Union address in Washington, members of Congress left the chamber spewing slights and simplistic sound bites at any camera that would have them. Two days later at KU, 7,000 people left Anschutz ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work, buoyed by an agenda for the nation that matched its propaganda as the greatest on earth.

At the 2011 and 2012 State of the Union addresses, members of Congress sat side-by-side regardless of party affiliation. It was a show of solidarity after the tragic shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. Memo to Congress: What’s good for the nation one day of the year, is good for the other 364. Ditch the aisle.