This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beaon, Feb. 25, 2011 - What do you get when you put two Democrats and one Republican from the House of Representatives on a panel to talk about civility in public debate in the wake of the shootings in Tucson?
You get a surprisingly civil discussion, it turns out, with more emphasis on candor and conciliation than on conflict.
The members of Congress -- Democrats Russ Carnahan and William Lacy Clay, both of St. Louis, and Republican Jo Ann Emerson of Cape Girardeau -- appeared at Washington University Thursday afternoon in an event sponsored by its John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics.
Wayne Fields, director of the center, introduced the dialogue by noting that "democracy assumes we can govern each other by persuasion, not by force," but the atmosphere that led up to the Tucson shootings had become overly strident.
On Jan. 8, while speaking at a meeting with constituents in her home district, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others were wounded and six others were killed when a lone gunman began shooting. Jared Lee Loughner, 22, of Tucson, has been charged in connection with the incident.
Since the shootings, Fields noted, there has been a "widely expressed longing for a civil society," one that can go a long way toward "reconciling forceful representation with civility and respect."
Is that possible? All three Congress members said they think so, but it won't always be easy. The three are part of something called the Center Aisle Caucus, devoted to fostering dialogue, not dissent.
"You can agree to disagree without being disagreeable," Clay said. One of the conditions of serving in Congress is that "you're always going to make someone mad and going to make someone happy," he said.
Emerson noted that given the issues that Congress deals with on a daily basis, people are always going to feel strongly about the topic at hand. The trick, she said, is not to let that passion spill over into rancor.
"I can be passionate," she said, "but I don't have to be nasty to Lacy or to Russ, and they don't have to be nasty to me. At the end of the day, our constituents want us to get things done."
The Center Aisle Caucus was established in 2005 to help keep that passion in check, Emerson said. Too often, she said, people might question her relationship with a more liberal colleague in terms like, "You're friends with her?"
The effort, she said, does not mean you abandon your principles. It just means you advocate for them in a more accommodating way.
"It doesn't mean you are a moderate," Emerson added. "It means you are more willing to talk to the other side and find the common good. It's less about being moderate and more about being tolerant.
Clay added: "People will still harass you and harangue you and try to get you to vote the way they want you to vote. But that's OK. I can take that."
Emerson said she never thought of her friendships in Congress in terms of liberal or conservative; instead, she said, the goal should be finding the "common nugget" that will let you bridge differences and come together, despite sometimes strong feelings.
"We want to have passion," she said. "We want to have debate. We don't want everybody to be namby-pamby. That's boring."
Carnahan said it was particularly tragic that Giffords became a victim when she was doing precisely what she and her colleagues should do -- meeting with citizens to find out their views and concerns.
"That was a real wake-up call," he said.
"At the end of the day, we each have one vote in a chamber of 435 people. It's all about building coalitions, and not always with people of your own party."
They agreed that having members of different parties sit together at the State of the Union address last month was a helpful step, though Emerson noted that because she had slipped and broken her arm on the ice, she was not even able to attend the speech. "I was on my couch in Cape Girardeau," she said.
All three representatives agreed that the endless news cycle and dueling cable news networks have contributed to an atmosphere of incivility. New technology -- like Facebook and Twitter -- often doesn't help either, they said.
Emerson said she wished anchors would let the newsmakers express the opinions and absent themselves from the fray.
Added to that mix, Clay said, is the seemingly endless need to bring in campaign cash.
"The person who has the loudest microphone or says the most outrageous things will raise the most money," he said.
The Missouri delegation is generally a close-knit group, Clay said. "We are together on more issues than we are apart."
One of the problems in the larger Congress, the representatives said, is that these days, members often don't move their families to Washington but instead spend weekends shuttling back and forth to their districts. The result, they said, is that colleagues don't always have the opportunity to get to know each other as people and not as political antagonists.
And just to make sure that everyone realizes that disdain and disagreement in politics are nothing new, Carnahan related this story from the career of his father, the late Gov. Mel Carnahan, when the elder Carnahan was starting his career in elective office.
He knocked on the door of one would-be constituent, Carnahan said, and made his best pitch for her vote. At the end, the woman said she wouldn't be voting for him.
When he asked why, she replied:
"You look like such a nice young man. I hate to see you get mixed up in politics."