With praise from members on both sides of the political aisle, Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Georgia, bid farewell to the Senate last week.
"I have long said if the Senate were to hold a secret-ballot popularity contest," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor, "Johnny Isakson would win in a bipartisan landslide, quite possibly in a unanimous vote."
As much as individual Senate members like McConnell, R-Kentucky, Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, are partisan in tone and in opposing the other party's policies, each would probably be surprisingly friendly and disarming if you sat down and had a cup of coffee with them.
Perhaps even Sen. Kamala Harris, D-California, whose haughty arrogance, hypocrisy and lack of truthfulness drove her from the 2020 presidential race last week, might be pleasant in person.
Chattanoogan and former U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, in editorial chats with the Times Free Press, used to talk about his friendship with senators whose public face often made them seem the most disagreeable, intractable, unlikable faces in Washington, D.C.
Isakson, in his farewell speech on the Senate floor after saying he would resign for health reasons, urged his colleagues to work together in bipartisanship.
"We may be called liberal, we may be called a RINO (Republican In Name Only), or we may be called whatever it is," he said. "Let's solve the problem and then see what happens. Most people who call people names and point fingers are people who don't have a solution themselves."
Fair enough.
We, too, advocate compromise, trade-offs, each side giving a little in Congress. It's worked that way in the past, and we think it could still work that way.
But, unfortunately, Washington, D.C., has become a different animal. Between 1933 and 1995, with only four years of exception in the House and 10 years in the Senate, Democrats ruled. They had the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, higher education, the media, the entrenched federal government employees and for more than half the time the presidency. They were used to winning.
During that period, if any Republican-desired legislation was to be considered, Republicans were the ones who did most of the compromising.
But in the last 25 years, with the GOP in control of both houses of Congress through most of those years, little has changed. With higher education, the media, entrenched federal employees, the courts and often the president allayed against them, Republicans still find themselves doing most of the compromising. Democrats do very little of it.
So, Sen. Isakson may be the popularity contest winner. But how effective was he in getting Democrats to support Republican-sponsored legislation? How valuable was he in getting his good friends across the aisle to get behind bills President Donald Trump wanted to see passed and which he could support? How beneficial was he in getting his partisan fellow senators to tone down their hatred and intolerance of Trump because he happened to be the upset winner of the presidency?
When Georgians sent their senior senator to Washington in 2004 with nearly 58% of the vote, we don't believe they sent him there to see where he could compromise with Democrats. A Republican, George W. Bush, was president, and the GOP held both the House and Senate. Georgians sent him there to set the agenda and then persuade Democrats to go along with his party.
Now, we're not faulting Isakson for his credentials. By all measures, he was a middle-of-the-road Republican. For those who track such things, he was pro-life, pro-gun and pro-border security.
But calling for bipartisanship in a milieu where the media always holds Isakson's GOP up for scorn only seems to feed the problem. We'd have preferred if he'd called for bipartisanship because Democrats have thwarted and failed to work with Trump at every turn.
After all, we've never heard - at least in recent years - of a Democrat retiring and being praised by his or her Republican colleagues for the way in which he or she worked closely with them. We're not sure if there's been such an outlier.
Now the worry by some in Georgia is that Gov. Brian Kemp replaced Isakson with Kelly Loeffler, a little-known, untested finance executive who must run for Senate election on her own next year. Reports say he selected her to help the party win back suburban voters the party may have lost in 2018. But if her way to do that is to compromise with Washington Democrats, what has Georgia's conservative majority gained?
Only time will tell how she responds. And if she leaves office as the most popular senator too, that's OK, as long as she also fights for her party. Because Democrats sure will.