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In the typhoon of congressional brinkmanship weve witnessed this week, one detail caught my eye that could easily have been lost in the gales.

A group of 35 Republican senators signed a letter to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden about an aspect of the House reconciliation bill that they find disturbing.

As you know, current marriage penalties occur when a households overall tax bill increases due to a couple marrying and filing taxes jointly. ... Unfortunately, despite its original rollout as part of the American Families Plan, the current draft of the reconciliation bill takes an existing marriage penalty in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and makes it significantly worse. This is not the only marriage penalty created or worsened by the partisan bill.

For the record, I think this objection is completely sound. If theres one thing the social science literature is virtually unanimous about, its that two parents are better than one. And while marriage isnt essential to ensuring that a child grows up in a stable home some cohabiting parents stay together for decades, and some single parents provide very stable homes the association is extremely strong. Anyone concerned about child poverty needs to be concerned about marriage. Kids who grow up in two-parent families have a poverty rate of 7.5%, compared with 36.5% of those raised in single-parent homes.

Its not just poverty. Kids raised in stable homes without a revolving door of new adult partners for their parents and new stepsiblings (actual or de facto) for themselves are healthier physically and psychologically. They are less likely to struggle in school, get in trouble with the law, engage in risky behaviors or get depressed and commit suicide. The United States has the dubious distinction of having more children living with only one adult (23%) than any other nation on earth. A Pew survey of 130 countries found that the global average is 7%.

This link between marriage and good outcomes for children is so robust that scholars across the political divide agree on it, though they may differ on what to do about it, or about whether it is even possible to do anything about the growing percentage of children growing up in single-parent homes.

Government efforts to encourage marriage, such as those undertaken by the George W. Bush administration, were well-intentioned flops. They included funding for programs that offered counseling for new mothers on the virtues of marriage as well as couples therapy and public service announcements featuring celebrities. The divorce/unwed parenting numbers didnt respond. (Divorce has been trending down since its peak in 1980, but the percentage of children growing up in single-parent homes has not decreased due to the rise of unwed childbearing.)

The governments failure to affect matrimony should surprise exactly no one. For one thing, the programs didnt last long, but thats probably for the best. A behavior as complex as choosing whether or not to marry is unlikely to be affected by government encouragement. Its the same with other behaviors. Remember the Presidents Challenge to eat healthy and exercise more? That was another Bush initiative. These hortatory programs have a long pedigree. President Dwight Eisenhower founded the Presidents Council on Youth Fitness in 1956. Rates of obesity have stubbornly increased in every decade since.

This is not to say that we should throw up our hands. Cultural change happens all the time. Just consider how much weve been able to curb drunk driving over the past 25 years due to changing mores and the activism of civil society groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

But there is one huge thing the government can do: stop making things worse. Every tax or safety net-related marriage penalty should be sandblasted out of the code. The Republican senators are completely right about this. If it means the programs cost more, so be it. Its worth it.

This is precisely the kind of perspective we need a healthy conservative party to advance. We need a party that is focused on the importance of the mediating institutions in society families, churches, schools and community organizations rather than simply on individuals and government. This is too frequently a blind spot for Democrats.

But todays Republican Party has forfeited the benefit of the doubt. You need a certain moral standing to be taken seriously on matters like the marriage penalty. You rely on voters to believe that you are at least partly motivated by good policy.

But when Sen. Mitch McConnell cynically filibusters a bill to raise the debt ceiling to cover bills his party helped to rack up; when Republicans open their ranks to the likes of Reps. Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene; when the party thwarts basic public health measures like vaccines and masks; and when the party closes ranks around former President Donald Trump by blocking an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot, well, people will doubt your bona fides.

Republicans are also endangering our democracy with their embrace of Trumps election fraud fantasy. Thats the most urgent threat. But its also a loss for this country that the Republican Party is discrediting conservatism, because we cant do without it.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the Beg to Differ podcast.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.

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What we lost when the Republican Party lost itself | Charen - Chicago Sun-Times

President Joe Biden said on Saturday that Republican efforts to block the US' ability to pay its bills on time would be "unconscionable."

Congress has about two weeks to raise or suspend the debt ceiling to avert what could be a catastrophic hit to the economy, ranging from delays in Social Security checks to seniors, turmoil in financial markets, cuts to safety net programs, and even a spike in interest rates.

Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have signaled they could try to block the effort to lift the debt ceiling and torpedo Biden's economic goals. McConnell has remained adamantthat raising the debt limit is something only Democrats must do. The US has never before defaulted on its debts.

"I hope that Republicans won't be so irresponsible as to refuse to raise the debt limit and to filibuster," Biden told reporters on Saturday. "That would be totally unconscionable. That's never been done before."

Raising the debt ceiling allows the US government to pay back what it owes, and the limit had to be lifted this year regardless of Biden's spending plans. Democrats are pressing Republicans to help raise it, arguing another $7.8 trillion in debt was racked up under President Donald Trump. Republicans also raised or suspended the debt limit three times under the Trump administration.

Democrats' best bet for lifting the debt ceiling on their own is reconciliation, an arduous, time-consuming procedure governed by strict budgetary rules. It also allows certain bills to be passed with just a 50-vote majority.

Biden said on Saturday that "everybody is frustrated" following a week of setbacks and squabbles over the debt limit and his economic agenda, but he added that he's confident both an infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion social spending bill will ultimately be passed by Congress.

Democrats need to keep the government funded while also keeping their promises to pass a $550 billion investment in US roads, bridges, and railroads as well as funding for childcare, healthcare, and fighting climate change. Two moderate Democratic senators are uneasy with the magnitude of the proposed changes and want the $3.5 trillion social spending bill to be trimmed.

Biden said he is "going to work like hell to make sure we get both these passed," adding that both plans have the support of a majority of Americans.

"There's nothing in any of these pieces of legislation that's radical, that is unreasonable," he said, adding he would travel the country to win more support for both bills. "I believe I can get this done."

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Biden calls Republican effort to block an increase to the debt limit 'irresponsible' - Business Insider

This questionable imitation of a column notwithstanding, Im not a journalist and therefore play no role in determining what the story is.

In my humble opinion, however, by focusing on one or two Democrats who may fail to support legislation deemed critical by the overwhelming majority of their co-partisan colleagues, actual journalists are missing the real story.

Famed New York Sun editor Charles Anderson Dana, who served as liaison between the War Department and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War, is said to have advised a younger colleague who asked what constituted news, If you should see a dog biting a man, dont write it up. But if you should see a man biting a dog, spare not money, men, nor telegraph tolls to get the details to the Sun office.

Ordinary, typical events are, by that traditional criterion, not really the story. That honor belongs to the unusual, the anomalous.

Im not here to defend the putative Democratic dissenters, with whom I personally disagree. But senators and House members differing with their party is neither unusual nor anomalous. Rather it is the norm.

What is historically atypical and extraordinary is unanimity within party.

In short, potential Democratic defections are not really the story. What is strange and striking is the Republican Party marching in straitjacketed uniformity, unwilling to brook any dissent.

When Medicare passed Congress in 1965, seven of 68 Democratic senators voted against it, while 13 of 32 Republicans supported it. In the House, 48 Democrats voted nay, while 70 Republicans were yeas.

Partisan defection on Medicare would have been no surprise to then-President Johnson. As majority leader, and later vice presidential nominee in 1960, Johnson joined Republicans on 12 of 76 mostly party-line votes, while his GOP counterpart, Everett McKinley Dirksen voted with the Democrats on 11 of those 76 roll calls.

Can you possibly imagine Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellOvernight On The Money Presented by Wells Fargo GOP senator: It's 'foolish' to buy Treasury bonds Overnight Health Care Nicki Minaj stokes uproar over vaccines Manchin-McConnell meet amid new voting rights push MORE (R-Ky.) opposing his fellow Republicans and voting with the Democrats on any significant piece of legislation?

Some partisan defection continued well into the current era. Eleven House Democrats opposed the stimulus bill backed by the newly elected President ObamaBarack Hussein ObamaGensler compares cryptocurrency market, regulations to 'wild west' We must mount an all-country response to help our Afghan allies Obamas, Bushes and Clintons joining new effort to help Afghan refugees MORE in 2009, while three Republican senators supported it.

Thirty-four House Democrats opposed ObamaCare, and when Senate Republicans tried to undo it, three of them rebelled, opposing their caucus, and voting to keep the law intact.

Yet today, not one single Republican seems willing to support President BidenJoe BidenNewsom easily beats back recall effort in California Second senior official leaving DHS in a week Top Republican: General told senators he opposed Afghanistan withdrawal MOREs economic recovery effort. Not one Republican supported the American Rescue Plan and not one seems likely to support the budget bill.

The anomalous fact that cries out for explanation the man biting the dog is not the possible defection of a Democrat or two, but the lockstep unanimity of the Republicans.

One could argue these Republicans are merely following the dictates of their constituents. But this seems quite unlikely.

Nine House Republicans and three Senate Republicans represent jurisdictions that voted for Biden. Far from perfect evidence, but do we really think those voters oppose the presidents economic recovery plan? No available polls suggest they do.

Nationally, a third or more of Republican voters favor the plans. Who is representing them? Zero percent of Republican legislators support those plans.

No doubt, as one recent study by half a dozen scholars concluded, Congressional partisanship has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years And yes, John F. Kennedys classic, Profiles in Courage, is a slender volume.

But until recently there have always been at least a few who saw things differently than their colleagues and were willing to defy their party.

No longer. The GOPs partisan straitjacket now exerts a wholly irresistible force.

Thats the story it deserves telling and understanding.

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for over 20 years, as president of the American Association of Political Consultants, and is president of Democratic Majority for Israel.

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Mellman: The anomaly of Republican unanimity | TheHill - The Hill

The speaker insists that the moves were primarily to push back against the growing power of the governors office and that he would have sought similar changes even if Walker had been reelected.

We made a mistake in the first two years after Governor Walker [took office]. We ceded too much authority to the governor. We did it for generations, Vos said. So when I became speaker, I became very focused on giving no additional power to the executive.

Whatever the motivation, it was certainly a rocky start for the relationship between the speaker and the governor.

It didnt get any better after Evers took office.

Vos says he asked for one-on-one meetings with the governor, with no staff present. The Evers camp accused him of being sexist, because the governors chief of staff is a woman.

Evers, meanwhile, remembers inviting lawmakers of both parties over for a night of euchre, a favorite card game of the governors and a staple of Wisconsin culture up there with Friday fish fries. But only one Republican showed up because, the governor says, Republican leaders warned their lawmakers not to attend.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic made the relationship between Vos and Evers even worse. Not only did they disagree over how to handle the public health crisis, the governor and speaker also lined up on different sides as Wisconsin became an electoral battleground and protests against police brutality in the state turned deadly.

When the pandemic started, Evers wanted to postpone Wisconsins April presidential primary and state Supreme Court election. Vos and other Republicans filed a flurry of lawsuits to block the governors moves and won, meaning the state held an in-person election (pictures of Milwaukee voters in long lines to vote in-person circulated the country) while the governors stay-at-home order was still in effect.

Vos volunteered as a poll worker on Election Day and conducted an interview with a local newspaper where he assured voters that it was incredibly safe to go out. The video showed him dressed in latex gloves, a surgical mask, goggles and a plastic gown. He later clarified that the city election agency he volunteered for required all poll workers to wear the protective gear, but Democrats mocked him for pushing for an in-person election under those circumstances anyway.

Later that month, Vos and Fitzgerald sued to block the Evers administration from extending a stay-at-home order, arguing that it would leave Wisconsins economy in shambles. The conservative majority on the state supreme court agreed in May, and Wisconsin became the first state where a court invalidated a governors coronavirus restrictions.

The rebuke from the high court left Evers with fewer options as the pandemic stretched on. He didnt issue a mask mandate until July, after most governors had already done so. Vos and Fitzgerald supported an unsuccessful effort to strike down the mask mandate last fall, but, eventually, the state Supreme Court also blocked Evers from requiring masks this March.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos shows off his signature on the state budget after signing the spending plan in his state Capitol office. | Todd Richmond/AP Photo

Protests against police brutality broke out in August 2020 in Kenosha, not far from where Vos lives, after a white police officer shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, seven times and left him paralyzed.

The governor tried to call the Wisconsin Legislature which had been largely absent in Madison during 2020 into a special session to address police misconduct. Predictably, Vos adjourned the session as soon as it started.

The Republican speaker also criticized Evers for not calling out the National Guard to disperse the protests. He blamed the governor after Kyle Rittenhouse, an Illinois teen, shot three protesters and killed two of them.

Those people did not need to die, Vos said in a radio interview at the time. But, because of Tony Evers actions, theyre dead. People are literally dead, because folks have had to take to themselves to try to protect their own property.

As the November elections drew near, the governor tried to blame Vos and other Republicans for not taking the Covid-19 crisis seriously. Evers wasnt even on the ballot last year, but Vos was. The speaker faced the best-funded Democratic challenger in his career in that election, thanks to outside groups that wanted to rattle the speaker. Vos won easily. Still, he admitted he was nervous about the outcome. When he won, he called the vote a repudiation of Tony Evers leadership style.

The pandemic is by no means over, but the governor says Vos and other Republican lawmakers did more to hurt, rather than help, the states recovery efforts.

They were not in session for 300 days during the pandemic, Evers said in an interview. The work that was done in the state of Wisconsin, that Im proud of getting the PPE, making sure we were getting shots in arms, making sure we had a good testing program all of the things that happened during this pandemic, we did alone. The Legislature had nothing to do with it, except to make it more difficult for people.

The speaker says the pandemic underscored how much power governors across the country exerted, and he worried that too many of them failed to work with their legislatures as the pandemic progressed.

Vos argues that it is legislatures that should take the lead.

I want the Legislature to never weaken, because we are the most representative body in the country, Vos said. We are the ones who have public hearings. We are the ones where you can call somebody and get a return call. You can go to a town hall meeting anywhere in the state and talk to a legislator, because were that accessible.

Democrats chafe at the idea that the Wisconsin Legislature is representative, because of what they see as gerrymandered districts that prevent Democrats in urban areas like Milwaukee and Madison from having their votes count in the statehouse. (A panel of federal judges also redrew two legislative districts under the original GOP plan, because they found the districts would have weakened Hispanic voting strength.)

Hintz, the leader of the Assembly Democrats, says the district maps protect Republican lawmakers from repercussions at the polls.

The speaker and the Republicans have suffocated the legislative process, because they dont want Gov. Evers to be successful, Hintz said. So they scheduled fewer days, we meet fewer days, we pass fewer bills and the governor signs fewer laws. And theres no accountability, because theres no chance that they were going to lose their seats.

But Evers could erase some of the Republicans advantages in upcoming legislative races. The governor can veto any redistricting plan Republican lawmakers advance now that new Census numbers are out, which would likely throw to the courts the decision over what maps to use. (Democrats have already filed a lawsuit to try to get federal judges to draw new maps.)

Thats not a guarantee that Democrats will prevail in the 2022 legislative elections, but it probably beats trying to win under the maps drawn by Republicans a decade ago.

The governor and Republican legislators recently clashed on the rules for the upcoming elections, too. Evers vetoed six GOP bills that would have made it harder for voters to obtain and use absentee ballots, put restrictions on voting in nursing homes and stepped up scrutiny of local elections officials.

That came after Vos announced the Assembly would hire its own investigators, including a former state supreme court judge, to investigate what he calls irregularities in the 2020 elections. Vos said he regards Joe Biden as the winner of the states presidential contest, but he raised questions about disparities in how officials in Wisconsins 1,850 municipalities ran their elections.

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How Wisconsin is ruled by a Republican shadow governor - POLITICO

That included a demonstration Tuesday near the Capitol, as well as nationwide rallies planned for Friday including in West Virginia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.

The compromise bill, dubbed the Freedom to Vote Act, incorporates much of a sweeping overhaul that House Democrats passed earlier this year. The Senate version of that bill remains stalled in the Rules and Administration Committee.

The Senate tried in June to bring a revised version of the elections and campaign finance overhaul up for debate but mustered only 50 votes, short of the 60 needed.

The new Senate version, like the original overhaul, would establish minimum standards for voting across the country, such as same-day voter registration, universal voting by mail and minimum periods for early voting.

It would also require additional disclosures for groups that engage in election-related spending. The revised bill seeks to put an end to partisan gerrymandering by setting specific criteria for congressional redistricting. It also provides new protections for election workers and would set Election Day as a federal holiday.

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New election overhaul bill faces same Republican opposition - Roll Call