Owens-Hanna alliance blurs lines of partisanship

WASHINGTON — On a December afternoon, the House of Representatives was wrapping up one of its most partisan annual sessions with one of its more partisan pieces of legislation, an eight-figure spending bill to rescue the federal government from yet another threatened shutdown.

Rep. Richard L. Hanna, a Utica-area Republican, was sitting on a bench in the ornate hallway just off the House floor, taking a break between votes.

As Mr. Hanna summed up his first year in office for a reporter — 55,000 emails and letters to constituents, three bills passed, 1,300 cases opened and closed in his district — Rep. William L. Owens, D-Plattsburgh, walked by. The two men — upstate moderates in opposite parties — jabbered for a moment.

They congratulated each other on passage of legislation they introduced together, the Civil Employees Recognition Act, and bragged about their bipartisanship. Mr. Owens recalled a favorite story about his former high school friend, the conservative Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, saying he would have voted for Mr. Owens in 2009 had he lived in the north country.

“I’m glad to hear you went to high school,” Mr. Hanna shot back with a smile.

Then Mr. Hanna delivered the ultimate blow: “I’d vote for you!”

In a Congress marred by ideological division, Mr. Owens and Mr. Hanna are trying to wedge in some pragmatism and good cheer, at least as far as their party identification will let them.

“I think these two are kind of an oddity in Congress,” said Jeffrey M. Stonecash, a political science professor at Syracuse University who follows the upstate delegation and sees their alliance as a reflection of each man’s need to break from the mold of party loyalty that makes compromise harder on Capitol Hill.

Some numbers bear out the story. Mr. Owens voted with his party 73.6 percent of the time last year, far below the average of 92.9 percent for Democrats, reported Open Congress, a website that tracks House votes. Mr. Hanna voted with the GOP 87 percent of the time, also below average. The two men have voted together 52 percent of the time, compared with 44 percent between the average Democrat and Republican, the site reported.

Open praise for members of the opposite party doesn’t endear rank- and-file lawmakers to their leadership. But both men talk openly about their distaste for party politics, and about their fondness for working with each other. And while that may serve political purposes mainly for Mr. Owens, who needs Republican votes to win re-election in November, the growing relationship has the early signs of cooperation that their predecessors, Republican Reps. John M. McHugh, R-Pierrepont Manor, and Sherwood L. Boehlert, R-New Hartford, practiced routinely with Democrats and liberal-leaning Republicans — and which sometimes ran Mr. Boehlert into trouble with Republican voters at the ballot box.

The two lawmakers agree on agricultural immigration policy, opening doors for dairy farmers to keep workers, most of them Latino, on the farm. Each has tried to direct federal dollars to the area through creative ways around a ban on earmarks, including jointly seeking funds to help defense-related research at Rome Labs. They agreed on raising the federal debt limit, and on preserving a rural broadband program that the GOP leadership aimed to eliminate. Both agree the government will need more revenue to help balance the budget, even if they diverge on specifics.

They cosponsored legislation to boost farmers’ access to credit and agreed on preserving funds to help low-income homeowners protect their houses against the cold — a program that has taken some criticism from more conservative Republicans.

“I know Bill. I like Bill,” Mr. Hanna said that day in the Capitol. “I know he’s going to have a tough race ahead of him.”

The relationship goes only so far. Each lawmaker sticks with his party line on most major issues such as the annual budget resolution and increasing taxes on the wealthy to help reduce the deficit. Mr. Owens backs more taxes on millionaires; Mr. Hanna has opposed that.

Mr. Owens has said that upstate Democrats and Republicans work well on local issues but that as soon as talk turns to big-picture items, the conversation ends — except with Mr. Hanna, whom he calls “Rich.”

“He and I are much more closely aligned on those issues,” Mr. Owens said. “We can have a talk about increased revenue.”

Mr. Owens attributes his chumminess with Mr. Hanna to personal connections as well as their approach to legislating. Both have a background in business, and they have acquaintances in common around Utica because of Mr. Owens’s time on the board of directors of NBT Bank, he said.

Like Mr. Boehlert before him, Mr. Hanna is solidly Republican but cringes at what he hears from the right flank of his party. “It’s difficult some days to be part of a process that’s so partisan,” he said. “It’s not my nature, and it’s not why I came here. ... We’re just here trying to fix things.”

In a general way, Mr. Owens and Mr. Hanna agree on what needs fixing. Spending and revenue are out of whack. Government programs can work better. The legislative process has bogged down, victim to lawmakers averse to compromise.

Even when agreements seemed forged, as with extending the payroll tax holiday, rebel lawmakers find a way to scuttle them — or come perilously close. Rank-and-file Republican and Democratic lawmakers complain privately about the breakdown.

Politically, a relationship between Mr. Hanna and Mr. Owens makes sense, said Syracuse’s Mr. Stonecash, because Mr. Hanna’s district has been shifting Democratic and Mr. Owens needs to distinguish himself from the liberal-leaning Democratic leadership to win in Northern New York.

Mr. Hanna’s district has trended Democratic particularly in and around Oneida County, Mr. Stonecash said, as the national GOP has turned more sharply to the right than New York voters like.

“He probably knows he has to come across as moderate or he’s dead in the water,” said Mr. Stonecash, who recently wrote on upstate New York’s political realignment.

“It’s unusual that they’re in office,” Mr. Stonecash said of the two men.

Both came to Washington through good luck as well as effective campaigning. A door opened for Mr. Owens when Mr. McHugh left in 2009 to become Army secretary; Mr. Hanna rode a wave of voter sentiment against President Barack Obama when he beat second-term Rep. Michael A. Arcuri, D-Utica, in 2010.

So far, Mr. Hanna has no major challengers for next November’s election. Mr. Owens faces a challenge from Matthew A. Doheny, the Watertown Republican he beat last time with help from Conservative challenger Douglas L. Hoffman.

Whether Mr. Hanna eventually weighs in on his new friend’s race remains to be seen. If Mr. Hanna endorses his challenger, Mr. Owens said, that won’t change his willingness to work together.

“If he did, I wouldn’t be offended,” Mr. Owens said, “because I see that in the realm of party politics.”