PARTY'S OVER — The term "MacGuffin" is most commonly associated with Alfred Hitchcock, used to define a trope that's common in his movies — a sought-after item that propels the tension of the plot but has little importance on its own. Other directors have used their own MacGuffins to great effect, too: Take the Ark of the Covenant in Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark," craved by every character but ultimately stashed away on the dusty shelves of an Army intelligence warehouse. Politics has its share of MacGuffins, too. One might argue that Obamacare repeal became a MacGuffin for the GOP during the first two years of the Trump administration, as Republicans warred among themselves over their own inability to achieve an unpopular goal that some senior members of their party are now openly disavowing. But I'm here to identify another MacGuffin: socializing across the aisle. It's common to hear mourning from some of Congress' more senior members — most recently voiced by new dean of the House Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) — for a bygone era, in which the two parties maintained better relationships by breaking bread together. Earlier in Rogers' career, he told Spectrum News this week, lawmakers' families stayed in Washington and "found ways to socialize — play at golf together, making dinner together. Democrat and Republican. Families sharing this and that and so forth." The reality, as our Congress Minutes author Anthony Adragna explained in a response to Rogers, contains far more shades of gray. Shared gatherings didn't stop the Watergate scandal from coarsening politics 50 years ago, nor did such glass-raising deter outright violence on the House floor during the runup to the Civil War. And particularly now, with a new pandemic wave that's pushed Covid cases higher in the capital in recent weeks, it's naïve to assume that a return to bipartisan bonhomie would do anything to lessen the bleak deterioration of relationships between the parties. If anything, it's reasonable to suspect that the pre-virus dynamics of lawmaker social engagements may never return to the Hill, as mask-wearing and mandate-heeding becomes another tool of polarization. And beyond Covid, let's not forget how frayed relationships got over the past year thanks to the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol by Trump supporters. Just like Indiana Jones' artifact in "Raiders," Cary Grant's mistaken identity in "North By Northwest," and that suitcase full of … something shiny in "Pulp Fiction," the idea that socializing can restore bipartisanship is merely a plot device without actual substance. Now, bipartisanship is not dead just because socializing to achieve it is a MacGuffin — nor is the socializing itself. Less than a year ago, the Senate passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill (which proceeded to earn a thrashing from conservatives who'd have preferred not to give the Democratic president a victory). The 10 negotiators of that bill even held their share of Rogers-style get-togethers, as POLITICO reported at the time. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other, much-easier-to-achieve bipartisan deals available to lawmakers. Our Marianne LeVine wrote about one today : a bill that would take a significant step on racial justice by eliminating the federal sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine offenses. That legislation has ample Democratic backing and 11 Republican cosponsors in the Senate — enough to surmount a filibuster — but it faces an uncertain path to a floor vote. More wine and cheese or book clubs for the Judiciary Committee's Democrats and Republicans won't fix that. The only thing that will shake loose that bill, or the other broadly popular proposals that fail to translate bipartisan cosponsorship into passage, is tough decisions by party leaders to burn time on trying to take them up. Some of those bipartisan bills may feel small in scope or politically irrelevant to one or both parties' bases, but they're around for the taking if Congress wants a debate. There's no shortcut to more bipartisan legislating, in other words — besides doing more of it. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight's author at eschor@politico.com, or on Twitter at @eschor.
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