War & Peace Quote by John Dingell

Bipartisanship is supposed to be a flex. In John Dingell's mouth, it reads more like an indictment. When he calls something "one of the major problems we have" and then rattles off endorsements from "both sides of the aisle", "both ends of the Capitol", and even the NRA alongside gun control groups, he's not celebrating consensus; he's diagnosing a system where agreement can be a symptom of capture, not clarity.

The phrasing does quiet damage. "By the way" performs casualness, as if the most damning detail is almost an aside. But the list is the point: Dingell is painting a picture of Washington's full-spectrum validation machine, where institutional leaders and opposed interest groups can all sign on because the product is engineered to offend no one powerful. That kind of all-stakeholders approval often signals a bill that's been sanded down into procedural comfort food: it moves, it passes, it funds, it avoids accountability. In the gun policy space especially, rare joint endorsements can mean the text is narrow, symbolic, or larded with trade-offs that keep the status quo intact while letting everyone claim a win.

Dingell's long tenure gives the line extra bite. He'd seen how "responsible" dealmaking can become a substitute for governing: consensus as camouflage. The subtext is less about guns than about the choreography of power. When everyone agrees in Washington, Dingell suggests, citizens should ask what got left out of the room.