While we work hard to provide you with an issues list informed by views from Congress, now, the most important view is yours. Your views are also important for the bipartisan congressional groups we’re working with.
How Your Ratings Will Drive Our Issue and the Bipartisan Groups’ Issue
For the first time this year, we’ve agreed to work with the Senate and House bipartisan groups to see if we can find consensus on the same issue. We did this after 88% of you supported the idea in the survey we posted in mid-November.
Neither we nor the bipartisan groups have committed to working on the same issue. Instead, we’ve simply agreed to consider each other’s perspectives when choosing an issue. We all agreed to this because we recognize how much more effective we can each be by working together.
Your Ratings
Below, we ask you to rate how promising each proposal is on a 5-point scale from “Not promising” to “Extremely promising.” Please rate no more than three proposals as “Extremely promising.”
We also ask you whether you would support or oppose CommonSense American picking that issue if it’s the issue that the bipartisan groups ultimately choose.
Finally, we ask you to give your rank order of the 12 topics from most to least promising.
Advantages of Working with Bipartisan Congressional Groups on Same Issue
Let’s face it, it’s getting even more difficult for Congress to address problems in a practical, bipartisan way. You could be forgiven if you think it’s becoming nearly impossible. The prospects of overcoming these daunting challenges increase substantially if the bipartisan congressional groups and we are working on the same issue.
In fact, these bipartisan groups play a more central role than you may realize. Over the last eight years during the narrow partisan majorities that have become the rule, only two major new policies have been passed on a purely partisan basis: The Republican Tax Cut Bill in 2017 and the Democratic Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Over those same eight years, Congress passed six other major bills with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. All six of them were led by the Senate bipartisan group that we’re working with. They passed three of those with our help (bill ending surprise medical billing in 2020, infrastructure investments in 2021, and reforming the Electoral Count Act in 2023).
The collaboration of CommonSense American, the Senate bipartisan group at the fulcrum of American policymaking, and a new House bipartisan group could be a truly powerful force for common sense in Congress.