“There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican parties.” – former Gov. George Wallace

I read the articles and headlines about government just like you. They all use the words tribalism, polarization, factionalism, and whatever other synonyms a thesaurus can offer for the word division.

And yet, we just saw a Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives, a Democrat-led U.S. Senate, and a Democrat president come together and pass a foreign aid bill to assist Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

There were so many issues and circumstances that could have torpedoed this legislation – a faction of the Republican Party against foreign intervention, especially to Ukraine; a faction of the Democratic Party against funding Israel if it will not agree to a ceasefire in Gaza; a speaker of the house holding on to his leadership position with an unraveling string.

The odds for legislation like this passing had to be between slim and none with slim gassing up his SUV for an extended beach vacation, but pass it did.

It was nice to see anything pass after last year’s historically low level of production by Congress. How did that happen? Besides polarization, part of the blame is due to the House of Representatives basically shutting down for a few weeks in October when a group of eight Republican Congress members joined a unanimous Democratic Party in voting to oust Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker of the house.

This was the first time in American history a sitting speaker had been voted out in the midst of a Congressional session.

One of the reasons this had never been done is because the House of Representatives does not function without a speaker. The House was paralyzed for a few weeks until current Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was voted into the position.

If the supposed outcome of polarization is to have one group of people on one side and the remainder of the people on the other, then how do you have the majority party remove its own leader?

Because when you push polarization to its limits, you get into weird territory. Eventually, you reach a point where any compromise with the other party is a betrayal of your party’s principles. This creates an atmosphere similar to a witch hunt, and no one want to be the person caught conspiring with the dark forces of the other party.

Former Congress member Barney Frank, D-Mass., described this situation several years ago saying, “On both sides, the task is dealing with all the people who believe that insufficient purity is the reason why their party hasn’t won more elections.”

The Republican defectors forced the vote to remove McCarthy after he negotiated a compromise bill with Democrats to continue funding the government and avoid a shutdown. McCarthy chose to do this when he could not get enough Republicans on board to pass an earlier version of the funding bill.

In those eight defectors’ calculations, voting with Democrats and against the vast majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives to remove McCarthy was necessary because McCarthy was not Republican enough. Makes sense, right?

Whether or not you agree with the foreign aid bill Congress just passed or if you are a staunch Democrat or Republican, you still must recognize compromise is necessary for a democracy to survive. Our government is structured to make it difficult for the majority party to run roughshod over the minority, so some level of bipartisanship is usually needed.

Despite recent passage of bipartisan budgetary and foreign aid bills, we are still a long way from not being able to tell the difference between a Republican and a Democrat as Gov. Wallace claimed back in the 1960s.

For what it is worth, Wallace often used that line while running as a third-party candidate for president, so it benefitted him politically to get people not to vote for the Republican or Democratic presidential candidates. Wallace himself later went back to running as a Democrat winning the governorship in 1970, 1974, and 1982.

At least two Republican Congress members publicly stated they no longer support Johnson as speaker because he pushed through the foreign aid bill. It remains to be seen if they follow through on their threat to force a vote on removing him.

The Republican majority is so miniscule in the House it will only take a handful of Republican defections and a united Democratic caucus to remove the speaker once again.

Whatever the future holds in the House of Representatives, it is refreshing to see reports of the death of bipartisanship have been greatly exaggerated. Well, maybe slightly exaggerated.