The recent passage of the omnibus John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act is one of the rare moments in modern political culture when Congress does what is it tasked to do and passes major legislation benefiting millions of Americans across the county.
The huge 698-page bill created five new national monuments, protects 1.3 million acres of wilderness and permanently reauthorizes the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
Locally, the bill permitted Yavapai County and the U.S. Forest Service to exchange land in Cottonwood and Cornville with each other.
The USFS gave to the county an 80-acre parcel of land next to Windmill Park in Cornville. In trade, Yavapai County gave to the USFS a 369-acre parcel near Mingus Avenue just east of the bridge where it crosses the Verde River.
The local land exchange came to the fore last summer as the Cottonwood Land Exchange Act of 2018, introduced into Congress by U.S. Paul Gosar [R-District 4].
To ensure its passage and avoid it being lost in the shuffle on Capitol Hill, Gosar’s bill was added to the Dingell Act. The bill passed in Dingell’s name is a final tribute to the Democratic lawmaker who served Michigan for 59 years — the longest tenure of any member of Congress — before dying in February.
The bill was a also a rare moment of bipartisanship in an era of toxic politics. The bill passed the Senate on Feb. 12 by a vote of 92 to 8. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives two weeks later on Feb. 26 by a vote of 363 to 62. The president signed the bill into law a month after the Senate vote, on March 12.
Partisanship in Washington, D.C., has been an escalating issue for decades as conservatives and liberals view any compromise with the other side as treason to their base and party loyalists. Incumbents then face primary challengers who vow not to bend, citing such beneficial compromises to the majority of Americans as caving to the other side, dooming incumbents.
Hyperpartisan challengers are winning more and more primaries for Congress by narrower and narrower margins, leaving voters with candidates in general elections who are far-right conservative reactionaries or far-left liberal revolutionaries unable to admit, at least in public, that they agree on about 95 percent of the same issues and are in line with most Americans. Voters no longer have the choice of a left-of-center Democrat and a right-of-center Republican who differ in outlook but otherwise both fairly represent the majority of their voters who also tend toward the center rather than the extremes.
Instead, voters are asked to weigh candidates by the slim 5 percent we can’t agree on without debate and compromise.
In the end, the winner of these battles heads to Congress with the narrowest of mandates and, fearing a primary challenge themselves, refuses to compromise on most everything. This leads to a gridlocked Congress that can’t pass basic legislation and, as we have seen in the last two decades, can’t even keep government functioning without a budget shutdown.
Pundits and we voters may point to individual figures in the political landscape as the “problem” without admitting that the real problem is systemic and does not lie with just the people elected into the White House or the halls of Congress every two or four or six years.
While journalists in print and the airwaves are restricted to merely report on the chaos, it is the non-journalist pundits who proffer opinions on these battles that harden lawmakers into their silos. Every gaffe or misstep or tweet is escalated to a “-gate” scandal that these talking heads opine on for days until the next pseudo-scandal emerges, while the basic functions of government are barely mentioned between breaths.
The Dingell Act is one of the rare moments when politicians from both sides and from around the country passed legislation that benefits us all. It should be celebrated instead of the partisan victories that will be in the news cycle this week and the week after.
We hope that voters will commend members of Congress on both sides for supporting the legislation and remind lawmakers that bills like these are what they should be focusing on as servants of the American people.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
