Compromise not a dirty word for Tennessee senators - The Tennessean
Bob Corker was still savoring Tuesday's 19-0 committee vote for his legislation to review any nuclear deal with Iran when Sen. Lamar Alexander sat down next to him at a meeting two days later and passed him a note. The committee that Alexander chairs had just voted 22-0 to approve his massive rewrite of federal education law, the note said. It's especially unusual that committee chairmen from the same state would achieve two such votes on major policy issues in a single week. Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Alexander, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, could have rammed purely Republican bills through their panels. Very little gets approved in the Senate without 60 votes, which means the chamber's 54 Republicans need at least six Democrats to join them. This week's deal-making by Corker and Alexander recalled the late GOP Sen. "Howard Baker is very much in the bloodstream of this kind of behavior in Washington," said Tom Ingram, a Nashville political strategist who was Alexander's chief of staff and later an adviser to Corker. Corker's bill would require congressional approval for any agreement reached with Iran on that country's nuclear program. Corker struck the initial deal with Sen. Source: www.tennessean.com
