The high price of disunity.(If I Had It To Do Over ...)

It might sound strange to hear from a man who made his name in politics as the fearsome House Republican whip, but if you want to know the truth, counting yeas and nays in the days and hours before a floor vote is possibly the least important activity that goes into passing legislation.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I saw my job as whip the way Vince Lombardi viewed coaching. Members of his famed Green Bay Packers teams used to joke that their brilliant, obsessively prepared coach was invaluable to the team's success between Monday and Saturday--but come Sunday, he was the most useless man in the stadium. Someone else called the offensive and defensive plays, and everybody knew their job and did it to perfection. Lombardi prepared his team so well during the week that they didn't need him come game time.

I like to think that when members arrived in the chamber for a big vote, I wasn't quite useless on the floor, but there's no doubt that 99 percent of my work should have been done long before the buzzers started ringing through the …