On March 12, 1990, 8-year-old Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins took off her leg braces, abandoned her wheelchair and crawled up the marble steps of the U.S. Capitol. The next day, she joined a group of advocates who rolled into the Rotunda and chained themselves together to push for disabilities legislation, chanting “Access is a civil right!” Police in riot gear used chain cutters to dislodge the protesters and arrested them.
The following month, amid reports of smog-choked cities and historic levels of “acid rain” that was killing forests and lakes, more than 300,000 people ralliedon the National Mall and at the Capitol to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Earth Day and call for passage of one of the most sweeping environmental bills in the nation’s history.
Meanwhile, the murder of six priests in El Salvador in November 1989was leading to calls for a major increase in immigration, including the creation of “temporary protected status” for migrants who feared reprisal in their homeland. Topping it off, pressure was mounting to pass a balanced budget for the first time in a generation.
None of it seemed possible. The government was divided, with Republican George H.W. Bush in the White House and liberal Democrats controlling the House and Senate. The impossibility seemed even greater as the Republican Party tore itself apart with the rise of firebrand Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia. He relished orchestrating a collision with Bush as well as moderates within the House Republican leadership whom he deemed too willing to compromise. That session, he rose to the GOP’s second-ranking position in the House and reordered the party’s ideological focus.
Yet, by the time the 1989-90 session ended, with Bush making one deal after another with Democrats, all four of those bills passed, three of them overwhelmingly and with even Gingrich’s support. Today that session is widely viewed as one of the most productive and bipartisan congressional sessions of the last half-century.
As I covered those events as a reporter for the Boston Globe, they seemed to be the essence of what politicians did: the art of the deal, with compromise, just like it was taught in political science class. Back then, those who worked with Bush saw this period as a high point of collaboration. But with the hindsight of 36 years, many of those involved now see it as a turning point, the final days before a collapse that laid the groundwork for today’s historically wide partisan divide.
“You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, what the hell happened to us?’” said Jean Becker, who served as Bush’s post-presidency chief of staff for 25 years and now speaks across the country about the need for civil dialogue.
This is the story of what happened: Why that session was so bipartisan. Why Congress became so divided. Why, even today, there are so many efforts to reverse much of what was accomplished.
In recent months, the legacy of the session ending in 1990 has been on trial. The Trump administration is undoing key parts of the Clean Air Act. President Donald Trump has declared that he wants to end the temporary protected status currently granted to 1.5 million people, most of whom now face deportation. In many cases, these efforts are not debated in Congress but instead are carried out by executive action. Trump signed more executive ordersin the first year of his second term than in his entire first four years as president, including 54 on the economy and trade and 22 on energy and the environment, a Washington Post analysis found.
All of that makes the 1990 session seem like an alternative universe. Yet it holds many lessons for today.
The tone of that session was set with Bush, who promised to be a “kinder, gentler” president than Ronald Reagan, whom he had served as vice president. Bush said in his 1989 inaugural address that he wanted to lead “the age of the offered hand.” As he saw it, “The American people await action. They didn’t send us here to bicker. They ask us to rise above the merely partisan.”
With Democrats overwhelmingly controlling both chambers, Bush made a strategic decision to embrace issues that he thought would be supported by the majority of Americans, even if that meant opposition by a then-small faction of far-right ideologues. It was necessary, he wrote in his diary, because even with high approval ratings, he felt he was on “an uneasy precarious perch” in getting Congress to approve his program. And it was possible: During that time, the vast majority of members of Congress often congregated in the middle, and the president sought to govern from the middle — something unimaginable in the current moment.
Chapter 1: People-powered lobbying
The crowds gathered early on the morning of April 22, 1990, growing to hundreds of thousands of people throughout the day, to listen to singer John Denver and others exhort Congress to care for the Earth and pass clean-air legislation.
There had been many assemblies before at the same spot, against wars and for civil rights, but the gathering in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Earth Day was one of the greatest examples of people-power lobbying that Congress had seen in years. And it had blessings across the political spectrum, from the most liberal to conservative members of Congress as well as Bush, who made environmentalism a surprising — if little-remembered — centerpiece of his presidency.
By today’s standards, much of Bush’s program would be deemed liberal and probably would have no chance of passage. One of the most audacious moves came when Bush sought to turn the tables on Democrats during the presidential campaign by declaring that he would be the “environmental president.” Efforts to pass clean-air legislation had gone nowhere during the 1980s, stymied by the Reagan administration. Bush vowed to change course.
Bush highlighted his vow during the New Hampshire primary, pledging to eliminate acid rain — largely caused by emissions from mostly Midwestern power plants — that was killing forests and lakes in the Northeast. At the same time, tens of millions of people lived in areas with unhealthy amounts of smog fueled by auto tailpipes, factories and other sources.
As Congress began seriously debating the issue in 1989, Democrats wanted to deal with acid rain by forcing coal plants to curb pollution through government-mandated controls. Republicans refused on grounds that the costs could be too high, and the effort might have ended there, as it had for years.
But after Bush urged the two sides to find a compromise, Republicans embraced an innovative system in which companies could trade pollution “credits,” enabling a company that could cheaply reduce emissions to sell credits to polluters facing higher costs. This market-based approach meant that the same bottom-line reduction in pollution could be achieved at a much cheaper price. It was favored by Bush’s White House chief of staff, former New Hampshire governor John H. Sununu, whose state was hard-hit by acid rain, as well as by a politician who might be considered his ideological opposite: Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Massachusetts).
Recently, both of those men said in interviews that a willingness to compromise and listen to each other’s ideas was essential. Kerry recalled how he and others got behind a conservative group’s market-based solution.
Gingrich said support for the legislation rested on health benefits. “Clean air came down to fundamental questions about asthma and lung disease and a whole range of environmental things,” he said in a recent interview.
And key to passage of the clean-air legislation was a little-remembered but crucial Republican supporter: Sen. Mitch McConnell, who represented the coal-rich state of Kentucky. McConnell said at the time that “I had to choose between clean air and the status quo. I chose cleaner air.”
(McConnell declined to comment for this article. When I asked him in a 2021 interview about his quote about choosing cleaner air, he responded: “You don’t hear much about acid rain anymore.”)
The bill passed the Senate 89-10and 401-25 in the House. After signing the legislation, Bush wrote in his diary: “What got me was the emotion of it … I realize more fully now how important this legislation was.”
That was, indeed, the case. From 1990 to 2023, the sulfur dioxide emissions that caused much of the acid rain were reduced from 16 million to about 1 million tons annually, mostly eliminating the problem, according to an analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency. The initiative is widely considered one of the most successful anti-pollution programs in history. While critics said at the time that curtailing emissions would cost $1,500 per ton, the price wound up being $15 a ton, according to a New Hampshire study. And a report by the EPA found that health benefits — which Gingrich had said were key to his support — were worth $2 trillion and prevented an estimated 230,000 early deaths annually.
The Clean Air Act, however, did little to address global warming. So, in 2009, Kerry tried to emulate the anti-acid-rain strategy of trading pollution credits to address climate change. Once again, a bipartisan coalition seemed to be in the making as Kerry gained the support of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina); Graham and Kerry co-authored a New York Times op-ed titled “Yes We Can Pass Climate Change Legislation.”The op-ed, which remains on Graham’s Senate website, said, “We refuse to accept the argument that the United States cannot lead the world in addressing global climate change.”
But after it was published, Graham was attacked by well-financed coal interests and pulled out, according to Kerry. It was a pivotal moment in the collapse of bipartisanship on one of the most important issues facing Congress then and now.
“Lindsey Graham called me on a Saturday, almost in tears and deeply, deeply distressed, more so than I had ever heard any United States senator in all my years in the Senate,” Kerry said in an interview. Kerry said Graham told him that a coal company had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking him. “And Lindsey just said: ‘I’m getting hammered. I can’t do this.’” (Graham did not respond to a request for comment.)
The climate change bill died, and similar measures have imploded ever since. To Kerry, that failure was one of the bitterest of his career, and he blamed the weakening of campaign finance laws. “They opened up these remarkable sums of money that completely distorted American politics,” he said.
President Barack Obama could not understand how Republicans could fight against the concept of trading pollution credits — which they had once so vociferously backed. He wrote in his memoir that “the mere fact that Republicans had once supported a policy idea championed by one of their own did not mean they’d support the exact same idea coming from a Democratic president.”
McConnell’s view on campaign funding had changed as well. When he began his political career, in the Watergate era, he urged strict limits on campaign funding, calling such expenditures a “cancer” and demanding “complete disclosure of ALL donors, regardless of the size of their contributions.” But as McConnell rose in party leadership, a post reliant on fundraising capabilities, he supportedunlimited contributions from corporations and unions to certain kinds of political committees and nonprofits, and he became lead plaintiff in opposition to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which had sought to ban certain kinds of unlimited contributions. The Supreme Court upheld that ban, but later rulings undermined or overruled it.
In 2010, as the climate change legislation died, the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that corporations and unions could spend unlimited amounts on “independent” committees. Other court cases further eroded limits on campaign spending, leading to the current situation, in which donations from the nation’s 100 wealthiest people in 2024 covered 7.5 percent of the total cost of federal elections, The Post reported last year, up from a quarter of 1 percent in 2000.
With little chance of congressional action on clean air, presidents more recently have used executive actions to change policy.
Trump has exempted dozens of power plants from having to comply with parts of the Clean Air Act. In addition, the Trump administration announced in a news release what it called the “Single Largest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History,” dismantling an Obama administration rule that had regulated global warming emissions as a public health threat. That means the health benefit cannot be calculated when determining the cost of climate change rules. The EPA said that dismantling the rule will save consumers more than $1.3 trillion.
The result is that last year, the coal emissions that cause acid rain rose 18 percent, the second-largest increase over the past 30 years, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Chapter 2: The civil rights battle
Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins battled her cerebral palsy with civic activism. She had participated in her first demonstration when she was 6 years old. Now, at 8, she arrived in Washington with more than 1,000 other activists. Most of her compatriots were adults, and she was concerned that no one would represent her generation. Learning about a plan to crawl up the Capitol steps, she left her leg braces behind at her hotel and then, at the bottom of the staircase, abandoned her wheelchair. Photos that showed her struggling up the steps became some of the defining political images of the movement.
“I wanted to do that Capitol Crawl no matter what, not just for me but for all the kids whose voices aren’t being heard,” she recalled in an interview.
The Senate had passed a bill in September 1989 that required businesses and government to provide accessibility for people with disabilities. The bill’s chief advocates included Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kansas), whose right arm had been wounded during his World War II service; he gripped a pen in his right hand so that unknowing visitors would not try to shake it.
But six months had gone by without approval by the House, where some Republicans objected to the cost. After the Capitol Crawl focused attention on the House’s failure, Keelan-Chaffins and other advocates gathered the next day in the Capitol Rotunda as if they were taking a regular tour. Some of the activists chained their wheelchairs together. The scene became tense. Keelan-Chaffins recalled her sister confronting a congressman, saying, “This is my sister’s future!” One of the protest leaders announced, “If the United States is not prepared to give us our civil rights, then the United States is going to have to arrest us and carry us out of the building.”
Keelan-Chaffins’s mother was among those arrested by Capitol Police.
Gingrich became one of several key Republicans to provide vital support for the bill. Gingrich, who was the first Republican to represent his district, had initially run as a moderate, and one of his early efforts at branding was to spend 24 hours in a wheelchair: News reports showed him trying to open a bathroom door and maneuvering into a van. By the time the activists arrived for the Capitol Crawl, he said, he had bonded with Democrats over the issue.
“I advocated for it, I worked for it,” Gingrich said in an interview. The legislation, considered the most sweeping civil rights bill since the 1960s, passed the Senate 91-6and 377-28 in the House. Bush called it one of his proudest accomplishments.
The legislation soon made an extraordinary impact on Keelan-Chaffins’s life. She was able to attend the same school as her sister instead of going to a separate school for people with special needs. Millions of people with disabilities have been directly helped by the law.
The legislation was so successful that Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, used it as the basis to negotiate an international treaty on disabilities, which Obama later signed. It seemed a sure thing that the Senate would ratify the treaty by the required two-thirds vote.
But by the time the matter came to the Senate in 2012, the nation’s politics had changed dramatically. Some conservative activists said the treaty would limit the ability of people to home-school children who have disabilities, a charge that the pact’s advocates said was false.
Dole, who by this time had retired from the Senate and used a wheelchair, was wheeled onto the Senate floor by his wife, Elizabeth Dole, who had also served as a senator. He pleaded with his former colleagues to pass the measure, noting how many millions of people in the United States had been helped by the original act. Most other countries had already signed on to the treaty, with the ADA legislation as a role model.
But with activists claiming that the treaty would give the United Nations too much power, even the two Republican senators from Dole’s home state of Kansas voted against it, and it failed on Dec. 4, 2012, by a vote of 61-38, short of the needed two-thirds. All 38 opponents were Republicans. (Since then, there have been numerous efforts to undermine the original law, and a number of states are trying to gut rules that enable people with disabilities to receive services in integrated settings instead of being institutionalized.)
Several months later, I visited Dole at his office and asked what had changed in the Senate to cause such a seemingly straightforward and popular measure to be defeated.
“The home-schoolers thought the U.N. would be involved in how they dealt with their children,” he said. “I don’t know how they got there, but once the stampede starts, they notify their leaders to start ringing the phones, sending the emails. It’s really effective.”
To Dole, it was the opposite of bipartisanship, and he was angry that his party had turned against him. A fundamental change had taken place, he said.
“If somebody is at a two and you are at four, there ought to be some way to get to three,” said Dole, who died in 2021. “And you settle on three.”
Too often, he said, compromise was seen as giving in, when in fact it was the art of legislating. “I thought when I was elected,” he concluded, “I was supposed to do something.”
Chapter 3: ‘There was give and take’
The birth of the immigration program known as “temporary protected status,” or TPS, began with the murder of six Jesuit priests during the civil war in El Salvador in 1989. Jim McGovern, a legislative aide to Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Massachusetts) who later was elected to the House, had visited the priests shortly before they were pulled out of their beds and executed by the Salvadoran army, which had received support from the Reagan administration.
The attitude toward immigration at the time was vastly different than it is today. I had interviewed Ronald Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign, and he told me, “I don’t believe the way to overcome the illegal alien problem is to build a six-foot fence on our borders.” (Trump’s wall approaches 30 feet.) As president, Reagan signed “amnesty” legislation in 1986 that led 3 million illegal immigrants to apply for legal status, 2.7 million of whom were approved, while instituting measures to stop further unlawful immigration.
So, after the priests were murdered, and with many undocumented Salvadorans living in the United States afraid to return to their homeland, Moakley made a bipartisan deal. He worked with the leading Republican on the issue, Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, on a compromise that included temporary protection for Salvadorans and gave the administration the right to grant the status to people from other countries. Though Bush said he was “concerned” about the TPS program when signing the bill, his administration used the authority the following year to extend its protection to migrants from Liberia, Kuwait, Lebanon and Somalia. The TPS portion of the legislation did not create a path to permanent residency or citizenship, but it offered people temporary protection from deportation, which could be renewed, and the ability to work legally. The bill also increased permanent legal immigration and created a visa lottery that Republicans have since tried to end.
“It really wasn’t that difficult,” recalled Fred McClure, who had worked for the Reagan White House and was Bush’s director of legislative affairs when the immigration bill came before Congress.
The bill passed 89-8 in the Senate and 264-118 in the House. No major immigration bill has passed since then.
When Trump began his second term, 1.5 million people had temporary protected status. Trump said conditions in many of the affected countries had improved, and thus his administration has sought to end the status for most of those covered. A Trump administration news release quoted a homeland security official as saying that “Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be just that: Temporary. Yet, previous administrations abused, exploited, and mangled TPS into a de facto amnesty program.”
Trump has canceled TPS for people from 13 countries, with people from the four other countries covered by the program also facing cancellation deadlines, according to José Palma, national coordinator for the National TPS Alliance. The cancellations are the subject of litigation that has delayed their implementation.
Palma, a Salvadoran who was granted TPS in 2001, said he faces possible deportation in September, when that country’s protection is slated to end. He worries about what will happen to his four children, who are U.S. citizens, if he has to leave. He stressed that those with TPS have legal status and pay taxes, making them “the best of the best,” not the worst of the worst, as Trump has characterized the subjects of his deportation efforts.
In the past, canceling such a vast program initiated by Congress probably would have prompted congressional leaders in both parties to insist on asserting their authority to review, revise or revoke it. And as it happens, McGovern, the former legislative assistant to Moakley, who in 1996 was elected to the U.S. House from Massachusetts, has found himself trying to salvage the TPS program, which began after he visited the Salvadoran priests 37 years ago. He has tried, like his former boss, to work with Republicans to come up with a compromise that would forestall some of the deportations.
But these days, McGovern said, “there is no Alan Simpson” or anyone else in the Republican Party he can negotiate with as Moakley did. Nor is there much likelihood of amending a bill to make it more palatable, McGovern said, citing a Democratic study finding that under the current Republican House leadership, 89 percent of Democratic amendments and 54 percent of GOP amendments have been blocked.
“When Moakley was there, there was give and take,” McGovern said of the former Rules Committee chairman. “Now it’s take it or leave it. It’s the most closed Congress in history.”
Chapter 4: A broken promise, a party torn apart
Bush had won election in part because of one unequivocal vow at his party’s nominating convention: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” But shortly after taking office, he made a confession in his diary. He was convinced that the country would face disaster unless he balanced the budget, and that probably meant breaking his word. He rationalized his conclusion: Solving the budget crisis “could mean a one-term Presidency, but it’s that important for the country.”
For months, Bush tried to avoid abandoning his pledge. He submitted a budget in January 1990 that kept his vow. Then the Congressional Budget Office in March warned that a 1985 law would trigger automatic cuts unless deficit targets were reached. Bush in June saidtax revenue increases were necessary; his promise seemed on shaky ground.
Still, the president and his advisers believed they had elided the issue because they planned to support only sales tax hikes, such as those affecting gasoline and alcohol. They thought they had a deal and in September gathered with bipartisan leaders at the White House to announce it.
But Gingrich, who had been elected to the No. 2 House leadership position in March 1989, refused to go along and took much of his caucus with him.
“Newt and some of the Republicans turned it down after they told us they would support it,” said Sununu, who dealt with the matter as Bush’s chief of staff.
The Oct. 5 vote in the House was a crushing 254-179 against the deal. Gingrich had beaten the president of his own party: 105 Republicans voted against it, and 71 were for it. Nor could Bush count on Democrats who had supported his other top successes; 149 voted against and 108 in favor.
Returning to negotiations, Bush now had little leverage and agreed to raise the top income tax rate from 28 to 31 percent. With Democrats controlling the House and Senate, Bush saw no other path to erasing the deficit. That led to a much closer vote than on his other signature domestic achievements: 54-45 in the Senate and 228-200 in the House. Each time, the majority of support came from Democrats, but the votes were not strictly party line, and there was much division within each party. For example, in the Senate, Democrats voted 37-19 for the bill, and Republicans voted 26-17 against it.
Bush signed the legislation, eviscerating his pledge and leaving little chance ever since of bargaining that includes bipartisan support for income tax increases or the prospect of a balanced budget.
That is because by the time the 1990 session came to a close, many more Republicans had joined the intraparty war. Busloads of wealthy donors arrived at the White House, expecting apologies from Bush for breaking his no-new-taxes pledge, but instead they were blasted by Sununu as “loudmouthed conservatives,” according to my account in the Globe at the time. The right-wing Heritage Foundation, which had given Bush an A-minus for his domestic and foreign achievements in 1989, lowered those grades to a D and a C-minus for 1990.
Gingrich, asked in an interview whether he deserved blame for tearing apart the Republican Party, responded: “Let me be clear, I did.”
As for Bush’s legacy, his former chief of staff, Jean Becker, said that he took a little-known action shortly before his death in November 2018. The 94-year-old former president was adamant that he cast his midterm ballot in person, and the result showed where he stood: for bipartisanship.
“He voted all over the board,” she said. “He voted half Republican, half Democrat.”
Epilogue: A growing divide
With the rise of political money, the takeover of the Republican Party by Gingrich and his soulmates, and gerrymandering that gave the GOP more safe districts, the balance started to shift. Gingrich became speaker in the wake of the 1994 midterms and, while he would be best known for blowing up his own president’s budget deal, he collaborated with President Bill Clinton on issues such as welfare reform that he viewed as favorable to Republicans. Bush, meanwhile, finally saw his dream of a balanced budget come to pass in the late 1990s under Clinton, in part thanks to the budget deal that cost him reelection.
But after a brief spell of bipartisanship that included passage of an initial tax cut package, Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, ushered in a new chapter in partisanship by signing a second tax cut bill, in 2003 that was supported by only two Democrats in the Senate and seven in the House. President Obama, meanwhile, joined the tax-cutting fray, lowering taxes for 97 percent of Americans under a 2009 stimulus bill, among other measures, according to the Tax Policy Center.
The government, meanwhile, has gone deeply into debt, precisely the situation the senior Bush sought to avoid when he put his reelection at stake in the budget deal. The federal government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in 2025. And, because of the long-term accumulation of money owed by the government, future generations will have to deal with a compilation of debt that had reached nearly $39 trillion as of April 7, amounting to $114,217 for every person in the United States, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
The partisan divide has been bipartisan in one way: It has continued under presidents of both parties. Obama’s signature health care legislation passed in 2010 without a single Republican vote. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which included tax cuts, passed last year without a single Democratic vote.
By the time Trump took office in his second term, asserting that his Make America Great Again movement and the Republican Party were one and the same, a smattering of independent-minded GOPers had left Congress. The transformation was complete.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in response to questions for this article that “President Trump has worked closely with Congress to deliver on key campaign promises and provide major wins for the American people,” citing tax cuts, increased funding for border security and other measures that she said “are favored by Americans, regardless of political affiliation. But Trump Deranged Democrats in Congress have done their best to try and obstruct proposals that receive bipartisan support amongst hardworking Americans.”
The budget deal aside, the major domestic achievements of 1990 were passed with large shares of each party crossing into the other’s territory. The measures were born of enough compromise that it would be difficult to say whether they were Republican or Democratic bills. They were negotiated with amendments that expanded support — but that probably would not be allowed now. And they won the backing of moderates, who are fewer today.
Former senator Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), who did not seek reelection in 2022, said the demise of a middle ground has fundamentally changed Congress and campaigns. In 1999, when he served on a committee exploring a potential presidential bid by George W. Bush, he said, its members counted 30 states that could vote for either party. Now, he said, there are seven. And there are fewer states with a senator from each party.
“That makes a difference in how officeholders function,” with less willingness to look “beyond party affiliation,” he said.
The result is that Congress in 2025 was ranked as the most partisan since Congressional Quarterly began tracking the measure in 1953. The tally found that 85.3 percent of roll calls were what CQ called party unity votes, meaning a majority of each party was on opposite sides. In 1990, the comparable rate was 54 percent in the Senate and 49 percent in the House.
The midterm elections could further the divide as candidates in primaries seek to present themselves as most loyal to their party — and thus even more unlikely to bargain with the other side. It is also possible, however, that if Democrats control one of the chambers of Congress, Trump, who changed party registration seven times before running for president, might shape-shift and be more inclined to make deals.
Gingrich said he worries that things have gone too far. Citing his work with Clinton on welfare reform, he lamented that there is not enough effort anymore to focus even on legislation supported by most of the country. So, he said, he recently formed America’s New Majority Project, a polling and research group that searches for issues with broad support. His hope is that the public, in turn, pushes Congress to vote for the ideas favored by Republicans.
Asked if he was working with Democrats on the initiative, he responded: “No. No. The trick is to find the issues that drive the other party to be for you.”
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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