Emergency Security Supplemental to Respond to January 6th Appropriations Act, 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. KING. Madam President, I rise to speak of a friend and colleague whom we lost this week.

Mike Enzi, a Senator from Wyoming, retired from this body in January of this year when his successor was seated but served here honorably for several decades.

I think the simplest description I can give of him is that he was a kind, good, and decent man. I worked with him on the Budget Committee, but I got to know him best through the Wednesday morning Prayer Breakfast, where to say he was a regular participant is an understatement. Even after he left the Senate, he was at every single Prayer Breakfast, including last week's, from his home in Wyoming via Webex.

He was a devoted family man and a devoted man in the service of his country in this body. He had a rare quality. Unfortunately, I don't think it was all that rare some years ago, but it seems to be becoming rarer and rarer. It is a quality my father preached to me years ago. You can disagree without being disagreeable. That was the way he was. He and I disagreed on a large number of matters, particularly on the Budget Committee, but he never was overbearing; he never was condescending; he never was harsh. It was always in the spirit of disagreement, in good faith, based upon principle.

I want to talk about Mike Enzi, but I also want to put him in the context of modern politics because I think there are a couple of lessons we can learn from him to try to change the course that we seem to have embarked upon.

One of the problems with modern American politics is, we don't have opponents; we have enemies. We have converted those we disagree with to people we demonize and say are bad people; they are evil. They aren't. They have different views. They have different values. Perhaps they have different principles. But to convert opponents into enemies is to poison our democratic system. It is to poison our ability to work together in the common good. If you make someone into an enemy, they are going to be an enemy even when it comes to something where you might agree, and Mike Enzi never did that.

One of the things Mike Enzi taught me was the 80-20 rule. We have all heard of 80-20 rules in various contexts. His 80-20 rule was, if you are working on a difficult public issue, work on the 80 percent where you can agree, and put the 20 percent where you disagree aside. He was able to do that throughout his career.

He was famous before I got here, but he was famous for working with Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts when they were both on the HELP Committee.

I said: Mike, how did you get along with Ted Kennedy?

He said: It was easy--80-20. We put the 20 percent aside where we knew we were going to differ, and we worked on the 80 percent where we could, and if everybody applied that principle around here, we would get a lot more done.

He was also a principled Senator. Indeed, he would have been on the floor today, making a point of order about the supplemental budget that we just passed because he believed in the principle of the Budget Act; he believed in the principle of balancing budgets. He was an accountant, and he was a principled man.

And he was also decent and kind, as I mentioned, but there is one story about him that I want to tell that has stuck with me, and I have told it 100 times, although I never told it while he was with us. Now that he is lost to us, I think he would be OK with my telling this story.

I was having dinner with him one night early on when I was here in the Senate, and he mentioned that he was concerned about the possibility of having a primary opponent in the Republican primary in Wyoming, and I was incredulous.

I said: Mike, you are one of most conservative Senators here. How can somebody possibly get to your right? And here was my precise question:

What will they charge you with?

And his answer was as profound as it was disturbing. He said:

They will charge me with being reasonable.

Think about that for a minute. He was concerned about the possibility of losing a primary election because he had been reasonable; because he applied the 80-20 rule and tried to work together to solve problems, even though there were disagreements on other areas. But he could lose--he could have lost his election because he was willing to listen to the other side, to be reasonable, to try to find accommodation, and, yes, compromise.

And this isn't only a Republican issue; this is a growing issue across our country in primaries, particularly in gerrymandered districts where the primary is the election.

And we are getting a new crop of Representatives and Senators who are coming here who have been told: Don't you dare compromise. Don't you dare listen to those other people. You better watch whom you are having lunch with.

I remember spending some time with our immortal Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine, whom I got to know fairly well before we lost her in the midnineties. And she said, during the McCarthy period, you literally had to worry about whom you had lunch with in the Senate dining room. Because of guilt by association, you would be associated with some liberal Senator.

We don't want that to be the case. It shouldn't be the case. But if you can lose a primary because you are viewed as someone who is willing to compromise, whether you are getting that primary from the left or from the right, imagine what it does to our ability to get things done.

If people come here knowing that one of the ways they can jeopardize their career is by listening to the other side, trying to get to know what is going on on the other side and compromising to get something done, it is paralysis. It is one of the reasons we are in paralysis.

Mike Enzi said:

They are going to charge me with being reasonable.

I think this is one of the hidden problems in American politics today. It is not what your position is on abortion or gun rights or foreign policy or any other--immigration--it is whether you are willing to talk to the other side, listen, and try to get to a compromise to solve a problem. That can cost you your seat. What a pernicious doctrine. What a dangerous situation.

Democracy is built upon compromise. We have 535 people in this building. We are going to have 535 different viewpoints, interests. We represent different States, different areas. We have different principles. We have different values. We have got to compromise, otherwise it is just perennial gridlock, which, by the way, our constituents hate.

When I talk to people in Maine, what they most--the biggest question I get is, Why can't you people work together? Why can't you get anything done? Why can't you talk to one another and sit down and break bread together and solve problems?

This idea of not being able to compromise--this body is a product of compromise. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the debate almost fell apart on the issue of representation.

There was the large State plan and the small State plan, and the worry was, if it was only one body of the legislature, that the big States with more population would overrun the smaller States. They couldn't figure out what to do, and finally one of the delegates from Connecticut proposed what was called the Great Compromise, which was the invention of the U.S. Senate.

This body itself is built on compromise. But there is no human problem that can be solved without compromise. Nobody has it all right. Nobody has all the answers. No party has all the answers. No group of people have all the answers. You always are better off listening to other people, debating, and coming to some consensus solution.

I have a friend in Maine who has a big sign in his office that says: ``All of us are always smarter than any of us.'' And I think that is a profound observation. It means that there is wisdom throughout this room and throughout this body and that we have to tackle these difficult problems--difficult, challenging problems that we have using all the wisdom that we could possibly get our hands on, and that means listening to other people even though we may not agree with them.

I just sat and listened to the Senator from Oklahoma make an impassioned and, I think, powerful statement about immigration. He raised questions in my mind that I want answers to. That is the way this place is supposed to work

But if I can't go back to Maine--if I can't go back and admit I listened to the Senator today and he raised questions that bothered me, if I can't say that, if that in itself would endanger my career, then if people are coming here fearing that kind of being locked out, we will never get anything done.

So, to me, Mike Enzi was a hero and a model--and a model of the kind of person that we need in this body. I didn't agree with him on a lot of issues, but he was always willing to listen.

And I did agree with him. There was some measurable percentage--I don't know, 10, 20, 30 percent--where we did agree, and he was a very effective ally because he was so respected here because people knew that he made his own decisions.

And we need more people like him, and we need to remember the principle that he shared with us, which is be reasonable.

When we are in a place where being reasonable is an offense that can cost you your job, we are in real trouble as a country. We are in real trouble as a democracy.

It is hard enough in a democracy to make decisions and to get things done. That is inherent in our system. The Framers wanted to design a system that was difficult and cumbersome to operate, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

But it was always based upon a principle of listening, of debating, of changing minds, and, yes, of compromising.

So I want to pay tribute to Mike Enzi today not only because, as I said, he was a kind, good, and decent man, but because I think he was an example of the kind of people that we need here and the way we should conduct ourselves and the way we should do our work.

And we also have to talk to our constituents and say to them: You have to let me listen to the other side. You have to give me a little space to try to do something good. It may not be perfect. It may not be just what you like. But it may be what we need. It may be the best we can do in a pluralistic, democratic system, where people have different outlooks, viewpoints, values, and priorities.

So we lost a great man this week. We lost a great person. We lost a great Senator. We lost a great friend. We will miss him.

I miss not only Mike and that great smile, but I miss what he stood for, the way he conducted himself, the way he treated his fellow Senators and everyone that he encountered.

Mike Enzi was a great man. I hope we can live up to his example.

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