When President Joe Biden walked down the steps from Air Force One and shook hands with Democratic mayors Jenny Wilson and Erin Mendenhall, and Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, he couldn’t really help but comment on how it was an example of bipartisanship.
The president shared his experiences working across the aisle in the Senate, including with Utah’s Republican senators, and “how productive that is and how much more we needed that in the nation,” Mendenhall told me afterward. “I think we all felt the translation being that that is the Utah Way here, keep working together.”
It’s easy to be cynical about how broken and polarized Congress is. When I left Washington 16 years ago it felt like it was already circling the toilet — and it’s only got worse since.
But every now and then there are times where the planets align and the system works like it should. The PACT Act — short for the Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act — turns out to be on of those.
It was the largest expansion of veterans benefits in three decades and — despite none of Utah’s congressional delegation voting for it — was an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill. It has already extended health care and benefits to more than 340,000 veterans, including more than 2,000 Utah veterans, who fell ill because of exposures to toxic chemicals like those emitted from burn pits.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Robert Gehrke.
It includes veterans like Army veteran Erica Smith, who introduced Biden at the Salt Lake City VA health clinic on Thursday. Smith enlisted at age 17, flew on a Blackhawk helicopter, and when she came home was diagnosed with cancer on her kidney, but has qualified for enhanced benefits under the bill.
After Biden left town I was able to talk to Bryan Kelley, who was 18 years old when he deployed to a base near Mosul, Iraq and got stuck with unenviable job of being in charge of the burn pits — dragging leftover food, human waste, basically anything they needed to get rid of to a big hole every day, dousing it with gasoline and incinerating it.
Now just 39, Kelley hasn’t had any health issues — at least not yet — but, having spent plenty of time around the burn pits, he has peace of mind knowing there is help if he needs it.
“I know that if anything serious were to come up, thankfully because of the PACT Act, I would most certainly qualify” for benefits, he told me.
When you hear stories like that and hear how the government can live up to it’s “moral imperative,” as Biden put it, it’s a little harder to be so jaded.
Sure, it’s still easy to roll your eyes when Cox talks about how we need to “disagree better,” knowing that most in Washington are experts on the first part of the admonition and so unfamiliar with the second part it might as well be a foreign language.
But then you see him greeting the president at the airport (hours after panning Biden’s latest monument designation) and riding with him in the motorcade, introducing him at the VA and handing over his daughter’s phone for a presidential selfie — suggesting it was “crazy” that some thought he wouldn’t meet with Biden (even though no other Republican officials did) — and maybe there is a path to forge common ground.
Even outgoing Rep. Chris Stewart, who couldn’t bring himself to vote for the PACT Act despite being the only member of the delegation to have served in the military, at least paid lip service to the need to bridge the divide recently when reflecting on his time in D.C.
Stewart characterized the polarization in politics as performative, driven by “voices on both extremes.” Even if it came from a congressman who voted with his party 93% of the time and opposed certifying the results of the 2020 election, at least it is an acknowledgment of the challenge we need to address.
Getting past the divide won’t be easy — the entire system is designed to supercharge polarization and reward divisiveness.
But, as Biden said Thursday, when we do manage to bridge the chasm, the results can profoundly improve the lives of our fellow Americans.
Passing the PACT Act, he said “is just another reminder of what we know to be true: We are The United States of America. There’s nothing, nothing beyond our capacity when we decide to work together to get it done. We never fail when we do that, never, on any major issue.”