Thankless Bipartisanship
On Monday, with few of his colleagues present and the Senate press galleries largely unoccupied, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee took the floor to make one of those statements that fill the Congressional Record but rarely go any further.</br></br>"Last week," he said, "while the media covered Iraq and U.S. attorneys, the Senate spent three days debating and passing perhaps the most important piece of legislation of this two-year session. Almost no one noticed."</br></br>Alexander has a point. The bill, boldly named the America Competes Act, authorized an additional $16 billion over four years as part of a $60 billion effort to "double spending for physical sciences research, recruit 10,000 new math and science teachers and retrain 250,000 more, provide grants to researchers and invest more in high-risk, high-payoff research."</br></br>As Alexander noted, "these were recommendations of a National Academy of Sciences task force" that he and others had asked to tell Congress the 10 things it most urgently needed to do "to help America keep its brainpower advantage so we can keep our jobs from going to China and India."</br></br>Back in December 2005, I wrote about the report that Alexander and Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici, both of New Mexico, had requested -- and about the bipartisan support that seemed to be available for this "competitiveness" agenda. I even suggested that it was a natural topic for President Bush's 2006 State of the Union address if he wanted to break through the growing partisan roadblocks on Capitol Hill.