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A Bipartisan Bill Worth Celebrating
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Thanks to Hatch, many provisions of the law are aimed at increasing opportunities for those unpaid volunteers, including help for these organizations in recruiting, training and deploying the volunteers, and to the volunteers themselves in finding organizations that need them.
Despite all the goodwill, 19 senators, all Republicans, including the party's two top leaders, voted against the law. The arguments were spurious. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, for example, charged that "this new federal bureaucracy would, in effect, politicize charitable activity around the country."
But John Bridgeland, the former director of George W. Bush's domestic policy council who lobbied for the bill, points out that its supporters ranged from AARP to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Often, passage of a bill leaves the winning side exhausted and the losers bitter. Working together on this bill left most Republicans and Democrats feeling good about themselves.
They could feel that way more often if they would just work past the excessive partisanship.
![[slate.com logo]](http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/09/27/GR2007092701096.GIF)
