“Is it possible that Congress would get more done if there were more women in Congress?” President Obama asked recently. Then he answered: “I think it’s fair to say. That is almost guaranteed.”
There’s no “almost” about it. Without a doubt, Congress would be a better place with more female members. Of course, women can be fierce partisan warriors (see Bachmann, Michele, and Pelosi, Nancy), but they often bring to the political process a sense of decency and a respect for others that is grievously lacking in their male colleagues.
One striking example: The female members of the Senate (now 12 Democrats and five Republicans) meet privately for dinner once a month. These days they can seem like renegade soldiers, meeting secretly in no-man’s-land under a truce flag while rival armies dig deeper trenches and hurl more incendiary invectives at each other.
”We are all a team as women,” Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, told CNN’s Dana Bash. “We may not agree on every issue, but that’s not the point. We know how to work together in the give-and-take of it and achieve results.”
The percentage of women in Congress has risen steadily but very slowly, and now stands at about 17 percent. On the state level, the numbers have dropped a bit. Today, women account for 23 percent of statewide officeholders, down from 28 percent in 2001, and 24 percent of state legislators, off one point from two years ago. One reason for this dispiriting trend is that women are increasingly frustrated with the hyperpartisanship that infects Washington and many state capitals. Snowe recently announced her retirement by denouncing the “political paralysis” gripping Capitol Hill and the “all or nothing” philosophy of congressional leaders in both parties.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, and former Sen. Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, were both attacked as heretics by primary opponents two years ago for daring to work with members of the opposite party. Lincoln barely survived the primary but then was clobbered in the general election; Murkowski lost the primary but retained her seat by running as a write-in candidate.
It’s more important than ever for women lawmakers to keep lines of communication open between the trenches. In this Congress, for example, Snowe and Sen. Barbara Boxer, a liberal Democrat from California, have cooperated on two useful transportation bills: a traveler’s bill of rights, and a law mandating tougher sleep rules for pilots of small planes.
