Last week, 14 U.S. senators reached an agreement concerning the filibuster of judicial nominations, thereby avoiding the “nuclear option” which might have stalled Senate business for the rest of the session. Half of the 14 negotiators were Republicans, and they’re being attacked by right-thinkers for compromising.
James Dobson of Focus on the Family called them “Republicans who had betrayed their trust,” while Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said they had “cut and run at this critical moment.”
“Compromise” is not a virtue in modern America. It has come to mean something like “selling out your principles,” and no one wants to be caught in a “compromising position.”
Even so, our political system was founded on compromise, starting with the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson’s first draft indicted King George III for waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
South Carolina’s representatives objected, and so it was deleted – a compromise necessary to unite the 13 colonies against British rule.
Then came the U.S. Constitution, which provides for a bicameral legislative branch on account of at least two compromises.
One was between big states and small states, and so the House was apportioned by population, thereby serving the big states, while each state got two senators, thereby protecting the small states. Another compromise was between democratic radicals, who got the House with its frequent direct elections, and conservative men of property, who got the Senate with its long terms and selection by state legislatures.
The original Constitution also compromised on slavery. Importation was forbidden after a certain date, but the federal government was empowered to compel the return of fugitive slaves from free states. On that account, Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burnt a copy of the Constitution in public and called it a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”
As the U.S. added territory, more compromises were necessary to hold the country together. Following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Compromise of 1820 allowed Missouri in as a slave state, but forbade slavery in U.S. territory north of a line that ran west from Missouri’s southern boundary.
Similar digestion problems happened with the spoils of the 1846-48 Mexican War and concurrent settlement of the Oregon question with Great Britain. The Union was again strained with talk of secession by a South that wanted slavery to expand into the new territory, and Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky cobbled together the Compromise of 1850.
Both sides conceded some points. California was admitted as a free state, but New Mexico and Utah would get territorial governments without mention of slavery. The fugitive slave law would be strengthened, but the domestic slave trade would be abolished in the District of Columbia.
In other words, a lot of values and principles were compromised to hold the Union together. Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts gave a famous speech in support: “I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American.”
In his own Massachusetts and elsewhere, he was viciously denounced as “a bankrupt politician gambling for the presidency” and “a fallen star.” Poet John Greenleaf Whittier complained that “from those great eyes, the soul has fled.”
But not all compromisers suffered politically. It was his willingness to compromise on an issue where he had strong personal beliefs – he pledged to respect slavery where it was legal – that got Abraham Lincoln the Republican nomination in 1860. His chief rival, William Seward of New York, scared people when he said that “there is a higher law than the Constitution.”
All those compromises may have delayed the American Civil War, but in the end, they could not prevent it. Our system works pretty well when we’re compromising about who gets what in a pork-barrel spending bill, but it runs into trouble handling those uncompromising moral positions.
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
