Getting out of line: Four departures from the partisan

WE PROBABLY shouldn’t have wondered. When you spend enough time in the bizzaro world of presidential politics, anything, it seems, can happen. Anything at all.

The one undying catechism of Republican identity in Trumptime, the absolute enduring reality is that the Republicans, from rank & file to leadership, constitute a solid wall for support for President* Trump in particular, and the Republican / conservative agenda generally.

But few things monkey-wrench a rule like a real-world, working exception to that rule. Or four of them. Within the last month, four things happened that call into question the willingness of conservatives — from everyday-people Republicans in two deep-red states to lawmakers on Capitol Hill — to abide by the expected Republican orthodoxy of behavior toward those on the other side. There’s been listening going on, and maybe even a reach, back and forth, across the aisle.

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On April 15, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Democrat seeking the presidency, was favorably received by the audience at a Fox News town hall in Bethlehem, Pa. — an audience you’d think would be predisposed to make a red-meat meal of the progressive Sanders, by way of interrogation by two aggressive Fox News moderators, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

But it didn’t happen like that. It was more than halfway civilized, Sanders in a spirited serve & volley with the Fox News team, and with the audience. Sanders engaged positively with the audience in a call-and-response that effectively made the town hall stage Sanders’ own campaign event.

And then there was the set-piece moment — when Baier asks the presumably conservative audience if they could support Medicare for all, and the presumably conservative audience applauded. For more than a moment.

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ON MAY 8, news reports surfaced that the Senate Intelligence Committee, stealing a serious march on the functions of the Senate Judiciary Committee, subpoenaed Donald J. Trump, Jr., a son of President* Trump, to examine his possible role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Intelligence committee is chaired by North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr ... a Republican.

“The subpoena puts Burr at odds with some of his Republican colleagues who want to move on after the release of Mueller’s findings,” The Associated Press reported. Those colleagues include Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina pepper pot whose hair self-combusted when he learned of the subpoena.

“ ... if I were Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer I would tell him, 'You don't need to go back into this environment anymore, you've been there for hours and hours and hours,” Graham said on Fox News Sunday, in an expression of toweringly bad advice. “And nothing being alleged here changes the outcome of the Mueller investigation,” Graham said. I would call it a day.”

Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster told USA Today that the subpoena “is a courageous move for Burr, for the senator, because he knew that the angriest people would be members of his own party. It shows that he is pretty secure both in his position in the Senate and among his own voters.”

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On May 10, Politico reported that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee — Texas Rep. Mike Conaway leading the way — praised California Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the committee, “for creating a newfound sense of comity on the Intelligence Committee — reflected in the committee’s bipartisan request for all of special counsel Robert Mueller’s files.” This after Conaway took Schiff to task, about six weeks ago, in the wake of the Mueller report's release, urging Schiff to submit “your immediate resignation.”

“Schiff probably deserves the lion’s share of the credit because he sets the tone as chairman,” Conaway told Politico. “Let’s keep looking through the front windshield and not reprise a fight that’s behind us. The committee for the last several weeks has operated old school, and that’s a credit to leadership — Adam Schiff’s leadership as well as Devin’s,” Conaway said, giving a shoutout to California Rep. Devin Nunes, the panel’s top Republican.

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ALSO ON MAY 10, Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, headlong into her own campaign for the White House, was similarly received in Kermit, West Virginia, heart of the coal belt and as rock-ribbed a Trump constituency as Trump could ask for. Warren was heartily applauded by the audience, as she held forth on different issues, most notably the 800-pound gorilla crisis: the opioid epidemic for which West Virginia is one of several grounds zero in the United States.

Politico reported: “Warren entered the room from behind a large American flag draped in the station. Roving around a circle of people seated in fold-out chairs, she tried to strike a tone equal parts empathy and fury, while avoiding pity. She went full prairie populist, telling people their pain and suffering was caused by predatory pharmaceutical barons.

“The 63-year-old fire chief, Wilburn ‘Tommy’ Preece, warned Warren and her team beforehand that the area was ‘Trump country’ and to not necessarily expect a friendly reception. But he also told her that the town would welcome anyone, of any party, who wanted to address the opioid crisis. Preece was the first responder to a reported overdose two years ago only to discover that the victim was his younger brother Timmy, who died.

“Preece said after the event that he voted for Trump and that the president has revitalized the area economically. But he gave Warren props for showing up.

“She done good,” he said. LeeAnn Blankenship, a 38-year-old resident and Trump voter in 2016, told Politico she may now back Warren in 2020. “She’s a good ol’ country girl like anyone else,” she said of Warren, who grew up in Oklahoma. “She’s earned where she is, it wasn’t given to her. I respect that.”

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What may be happening, maybe, is the first real proof of philosophical fissures forming within the monolith, the presumed bedrock of what conservatives have been calling “the base” for three years. It’s not realistic to think these four events happened in a vacuum. They’re a subset of the spasms of rationality, pragmatism and comity emerging, here and there, both around the country and in Washington in the context of politics. The same spasms of civic duty that carried the Democrats to victory in the House last November.

Not to overstate the case: There’s still a profoundly solid bloc of Pantone-red support for the Republican identity, at all its levels; for the Republican agenda; and for Donald Trump, the man who embodies everything about the GOP in 2019.

But there’s no way to get away from the sporadic but apparent shifts in attitudes and beliefs expressed in these real-world examples, the evidence of Americans thinking for themselves and not swallowing the transmitted wisdom from party elders. The fire-breathing perceptions of “the other side” have been mutually tabled, at least in these cases.

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SOME OF that rapprochement is especially telling. We’d expect that ability to find facts and resolve differences to (finally) come out of Congress. That’s what they get paid, handsomely, our money, to do. But the stump appearances by Democrats in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the reactions to them, indicate that, when and where it counts, at the civic level, this cordiality is emerging organically among ordinary people in two pivotal red states.

This wasn’t a focus-group reaction; this was real citizen response in candidates’ enemy territory — or what Washington Republicans want people to think of as enemy territory. You don’t get much more real than unvarnished citizen reaction to a candidate at a town hall.

It shouldn’t be so surprising, and it won’t be surprising at all when more such departures from the current political orthodoxy take place. Lawmakers, some of them anyway, are coming to grips with their purpose for being in Washington in the first place, regardless of partisan perspective. And citizens at the town halls of the 2020 campaign are relearning what they must already know: You can’t snarl at your opponents forever, whether they’re running for president ... or living down the street. Or right next door.

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Image credits: Sanders: Matt Rourke/Associated Press. Burr: Erik S. Lesser: EPA-EFE. Conaway: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Warren: Craig Hudson/Charleston Gazette-Mail via AP.