I have a cousin who, like every married person, gets in occasional arguments with her husband.  Sometimes, if the sparring gets too intense, her husband holds up his hands and forms a “T.” 

“Timeout,” he says.  “Same team.  Let’s remember that we are on the same team.”

More of us used to work as a team in this town – Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, in order to protect America’s common interests.  You still find this spirit in some places here, though it seems to happen more rarely now.  When I was a Senate staffer, I was lucky enough to work with a group of four people who lived by this principle.

We worked for different bosses on opposite sides of the aisle.  But I think it is fair to say we all felt we were ultimately on the same team.

I’ll tell you a little about us – but I’ll change a few names to protect the … well, I wouldn’t say “innocent.”  All involved have worked in this town for a while – for law firms, for heavy-hitting lobby organizations, on high-profile electoral campaigns, and then on the Hill crafting bills for our political parties’ powerful Committee leaders. 

And our political views were dramatically different.  Two of us were Democrats, working for a boss who was liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal ones.  Two of us were Republicans, working for a boss with strong old-school conservative credentials. 

Because we worked for the same Committee for the two leaders of our respective parties, we were put in the position to negotiate important bills with each other time after time on issue after issue.  It was somewhat like a marriage – or a prison movie, in which four convicts are chained together, and in order to move forward, all must work together.

We did not always work together smoothly.  Each negotiated hard for our side.  And we fought. And fought.  Like in a marriage.  Or a prison movie.  There were times I was so furious with my two opponents that I could barely speak to them for days.  But we always came together in the end.  We found a compromise, or we agreed to disagree and move on. 

And each of us made a choice – not to sell each other out for any short-term gain.  I know there were times when my opponent could have taken advantage of me and slipped language into a bill that would have benefited him.  I could have done the same.  But it did not happen.  It was too important to all of us that our atmosphere of honorable (though extremely passionate) negotiation be preserved.  (It was important to our bosses, too – “Work it out!” my boss told me often enough, like a parent talking to a child at the playground.)

We also made a choice to respect each other personally.  We tried to refrain from what lawyers call ad hominem attacks – attacks on a person’s character – and stick to the issues at hand.  Once, when I went over the line in the heat of battle, my opponent told me so.  At the time, I grudgingly apologized.  When I had cooled off a little while later, I realized that he was right, and that I had gone too far.  So I apologized again, a little better this time.

Not long ago, one of our Gang of Four earned a well-deserved nomination by the President to be the head of a federal agency.  He and I had lunch and talked about his upcoming nomination hearing.  We discussed things that might come up during the hearing, including his lengthy resume filled with negotiations over bills that became U.S. laws that made this country better for every one of us. 

Then we started talking about our Gang of Four.  All of us except him were gone from the Hill now.  He missed us, he said.  We agreed that we had all made each other better – smarter about policy, better negotiators, but most of all, better staffers – better servants of the people we worked for. 

He told me that one of the reasons he was being nominated was that one of our team member/opponents had chosen to take the high road during a crucial time during the negotiation on an important bill.  Our team member/opponent had rigorously upheld the Senate’s process, even though it meant language might pass that could be killed on a technicality had he taken the low road.  Our team/opponent respected the process of an American institution – the U.S. Senate – and honorably advanced the spirit of its rules – and therefore the will of the people represented in it – when he could have made another choice. 

During our friend’s nomination hearing, I sat in the crowd with the opponent who had done the right thing during that negotiation.  When our friend the nominee stepped into the room, we started clapping, and stood to give him an ovation.  No one in that room could be prouder than we were.  At that time, as in all the times before, we were not really opponents.  We were all a part of the same team.

Catherine McCullough is an attorney lobbyist who has worked in Washington politics for nineteen years.