I, For One, Don’t Miss It
By A useful reminder that of what the era of congressional bipartisanship actually consisted of:
The Senator in question was James Eastland of Mississippi and he was a good deal crazier and more repugnant than anyone currently serving in the Congress. But he was a Democrat. Just as there used to be a fair number of moderately progressive Republicans in Congress there used to be a sizable block of rabid white supremacists who operated with utter contempt for democracy and the rule of law inside the Democratic Party. This created structural conditions for a good deal of bipartisanship, but it wasn’t actually less deranged than present-day conditions. And note that Eastland persisted in the Senate, albeit in somewhat mellowed form, all the way until 1978!
Despite the tendency to fetishize this era of bipartisanship, it was just a quirk created by a fact that the regional party loyalites formed during the Reconstruction era were largely inconsistent with the ideological issues of the 20th century. But I see no reason to think that the modern system of ideologically coherent parties isn’t significantly preferable (and as long as it persists, party-line votes will be more, not less, common.)