Congressman Dusty Johnson says we CAN get along, and work for solutions in Washington

The Argus Leader has a USA today article on the efforts that a pair of Congressmen are making to find bi-partisan solutions in Congress for solving our nation’s troubles.  And one of those two Congressmen is South Dakota’s Congressman Dusty Johnson:

As members of that caucus, Johnson and Phillips were key players in the development and passage of a roughly $900 billion bipartisan COVID relief package in December that included another round of direct payments to millions of Americans and added billions to the Paycheck Protection Program to help small businesses nationwide struggling in the face of the pandemic’s suffocating grip.

“At the end of the day, what our country needs more than anything else is more unlikely friendships,” Phillips said. “And they happen here every day in the strangest moments between the most unlikely people.”

Read that here.

There’s too much of the article that’s quotable, and far too much you should read, so I would encourage you to go do so.

I do note that as part of the article, Dusty notes that part of the problem is that there’s an atmosphere of division in Congress that needs to be bridged, and maybe a bit less bombast needed in our politics:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the freshman Georgia Republican who was stripped of her committee assignments in February for incendiary, conspiratorial and menacing social media posts before she was elected, said she can’t work with Democrats because of their policies which she says border on “communism.”

and..

Johnson said it’s a shame that most of the attention follows members who are outlandish or uncompromising while those who quietly work to reach common ground are often overlooked.

“All of the incentives in the system reward bad behavior, right?” he said. “You can raise a lot more money if you sound like a crazy person. You get a lot more Twitter followers if you sound like a crazy person. And you can get a lot more people at your rallies – and a lot more cable news hits – if you say things that are over the top.”

Read it all here.

Can people bridge the gap and fix Congress? We can hope.