Opinion: Bipartisanship saves the world
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A couple of years ago, if anybody had suggested that fighting global warming and increasing taxpayer spending on foreign aid programs would soon become bipartisan issues with widespread agreement from both right and left, it would have provoked lots of giggles and maybe some heart attacks on the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Yet the lion and the lamb are lying down together, and it’s not even the apocalypse. Republicans and Democrats are working together on bills to impose cap-and-trade systems and looking at other approaches to climate change, while senators as far right as Kansas’ Sam Brownback and as far left as California’s Barbara Boxer are in total agreement about the need to boost spending on Third World development programs like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and President Bush’s anti-AIDS initiative.
On the latter front, the most encouraging news to date was today’s passage by the House of a $463.5-billion spending bill that surpasses the wildest dreams of development advocates. It provides $4.5 billion to fight developing-world diseases, a $1.3-billion increase over last year’s level. This will be enough to scale up many highly successful programs and will likely save thousands of lives, while improving health standards to give indigent people in Africa and elsewhere at least a fighting chance to get out of poverty (it’s pretty hard to be a productive worker when you’ve got AIDS or malaria).
So many attaboys are deserved on this one that they can’t be listed, but deserving of special praise are House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who fought hard to win the aid increase, and Reps. Barbara Lee (a Democrat from Oakland) and Christopher Shays (a Republican from Connecticut), who authored a letter signed by 92 members of Congress of both parties urging the funding boost. A similar letter, authored by Democrat Richard Durbin of Illinois and Republican Brownback, has also made its way through the Senate, raising hopes that the disease spending will make it through both houses. A guy could get used to this bipartisanship thing.