This article is adapted from a case study commissioned by the Brookings Institution as part of its Profiles In Negotiation project. The full Brookings paper on the veterans deal is available here. Jill Lawrence is a columnist for Creators Syndicate and a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report.

Just before Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders excoriated Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s record to a cheering crowd of 10,000 at a Madison arena on Wednesday night, Walker’s staff tweeted: “Thousands of veterans suffered in VA scandal yet @BernieSanders downplayed it & attacked those who exposed it.”

The tweet, to say the least, was misleading. The Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist, now seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has long supported our veterans—even if he doesn’t support all our wars. And in 2014 he accomplished the last thing you might expect from a candidate whose campaign brand is firebrand: He negotiated a major bipartisan agreement with two conservatives to deal with the veterans health care crisis.


In spite of—or perhaps because of—his aversion to war, Sanders has a long history of committed service to veterans. He became chairman of the Senate Veterans Committee in 2013, and that is how he wound up at the negotiating table with Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida.

They were driven there by scandal. Veterans across the country were waiting months on end for appointments and the wait times were being hidden. Up to 40 veterans in Phoenix died while waiting for appointments. Hundreds never even got onto a list. And retaliation was the order of the day for those who tried to blow the whistle.

From the moment the long-gathering scandal broke into public view in April 2014, it took Congress less than four months to produce a new law—a split second by Capitol Hill standards. That it happened at all, and so fast, was a testament to the determination of Sanders and his partners to surmount the red-blue divide in American politics. It speaks volumes in particular about Sanders, who pushes for a single-payer government health system in every speech, that the law introduced a private-care option for veterans.

Sanders’ broadsides against greed and international trade agreements, his calls for “Medicare for all” and new taxes on Wall Street and “the billionaire class,” suggest he is a left-wing analogue to Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. That is, the candidate as movement leader—an identity that is helping him gain ground in Iowa and New Hampshire polls against establishment favorite Hillary Clinton.

And Sanders has certainly had his insurgent moments, including an impassioned 8.5-hour floor speech in December 2010 protesting a tax deal struck by President Obama that, in Sanders’ opinion, did not ask enough of the wealthy. It went viral, crashed the Senate server and quickly became a book entitled The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class.

But Sanders is not an ideologue in the mold of a Michele Bachmann or a Ron Paul, both of whom made far more headlines than laws during their years in the House. He is not averse to compromise or incremental progress, and he works within the system to make that happen. In January, for instance, he and Sen. Patty Murray were the lead writers of a letter asking Obama to update overtime standards in order to make more people eligible for overtime pay. Obama announced such an update a few days ago.

Sanders served as Burlington mayor and in the House before his election to the Senate in 2006. He hasn’t survived in politics for more than three decades by courting confrontation and operating on the fringe.

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Sanders and veterans may not seem like an obvious match, but they have been a constant in his career. When he rose to chair the Senate Veterans Committee in 2013, he noted that the first bill he ever introduced in Congress—in 1991—called for reimbursing members of the National Guard and Reserve for income they lost while deployed in the Persian Gulf War. Now veterans and the committee Sanders once led are touchstones for him as he runs for president.

His connection with them is an extension of what Brenda Cruickshank, a retired Army nurse and immediate past commander of the Vermont Veterans of Foreign Wars, describes as Vermont’s ethos of making sure people are taken care of. Sanders listens to his home-state veterans at town meetings, private meetings and through a veterans council, she says, and his staff does an excellent job when veterans call with questions or needs. “He works for veterans. He’s not just saying that. He does do the work,” she says.

When he announced his White House bid outside the Capitol in April, Sanders summoned veterans in an argument against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing individuals to contribute as much as they want to campaigns. “I’m the former chairman of the Senate Veterans Committee,” he said that day. “And I can tell you I don’t believe that the men and women who defended American democracy fought to create a situation where billionaires own the political process.” In his stump speech he routinely calls for a country “where every veteran who defends this nation gets the quality health care and benefits they have earned and receives the respect they deserve.”

There are pockets of Sanders devotees in the veterans’ community, among them liberals and people who most need specialized government care, such as disabled veterans. There are veterans organizing for his campaign, turning out at his events and finding each other online to exchange tips on how to promote him. “His work on veterans issues is already one of my main talking points with people in general,” Reddit user NateCadet of California wrote a few weeks ago on a thread of veterans supportive of Sanders.

The son of a Polish immigrant father, Sanders grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Vermont in 1968 as part of what The Almanac of American Politics calls the “hippie migration.” He’s gruff, direct, funny, sometimes sarcastic and given to “raised decibels” on the floor, as one observer put it. McCain, his Senate negotiating partner on the 2014 veterans deal, is a former Vietnam prisoner of war and 2008 GOP presidential nominee. Miller, chairman of the House Veterans Committee, is a small-government, low-taxes conservative from the religious, military-heavy north Florida panhandle.

All the players, from Congress to the White House, agreed on two overarching goals amid the veterans health crisis: to assure that veterans received timely care and to give authorities at the Department of Veterans Affairs the tools they needed to fire bad apples. Despite that clarity, however, the process was anything but straightforward.

Both the Sanders-McCain and Sanders-Miller negotiations were to a large extent a proxy for the two parties’ epic, long-running battle over the size and role of the federal government and, in particular, its involvement in health care. Furthermore, some of the conditions the American Political Science Association has identified as ideal for reaching compromise were conspicuously absent. Sanders did not have a personal relationship with McCain or Miller. The negotiators were operating in a fast-moving environment rife with opportunities for mistrust and misunderstanding. The process was closely watched and occasionally explosive. At one point the media reported that prospects for a deal had disintegrated.

But deadline pressure, political pressure and a sense of duty prevailed. Lawmakers were heading home for a five-week pre-election recess and no one in either party wanted to tell constituents they had failed to help veterans.

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The VA runs the largest health care system in the nation, with some 1,600 medical centers, community clinics and other facilities. It has 288,000 employees, a $55 billion medical care budget and 236,000 appointments daily. In recent years the system has confronted the twin challenges of an aging veteran population and the toll of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At a July 2014 news conference, Sanders said some two million new veterans had enrolled in four years, most as a result of the two wars. Moreover, he said, half a million troops had returned from those wars with post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury.

It turned out that nationwide, the VA was coping with the spike in demand by delaying appointments and treatment, manipulating schedules, falsifying records and possibly engaging in fraud. An interim report from the VA inspector general on May 28, 2014 found it was taking an average 115 days for veterans in Phoenix to get primary care, as opposed to the 24 days shown on official records—and 1,700 people seeking appointments were not on any list at all. The IG called the Phoenix problems systemic and said he had opened investigations at 42 VA health centers. On June 9, the VA reported that 57,000 veterans at its facilities were waiting more than 90 days for an appointment, and another 64,000 were not on a waiting list although they had sought care.

McCain introduced a major bill in early June that embodied his party’s response to the scandal. His bill put a new issue on the table—giving a choice of private care not just to veterans who could not get timely appointments but also to those who lived far away from VA medical facilities. Over in the House, Miller saw the McCain provision, liked it, and added it to a fast-moving House bill that passed 426-0 a few days later.

Things were more complicated in the Senate. Sanders had been focused on fixing scheduling and strengthening the VA internally, and only learned about the distance idea when it showed up in McCain’s bill. As one Democratic aide put it, “This was not an element of the initial crisis. Distance was not necessarily the problem that everyone had been talking about. This was adding a new dimension.”

Sanders and McCain lived up to their reputations as scrappers. They argued practically until the moment they announced their deal, culminating in a last-minute clash over McCain’s long-distance provision. It was not “a knockdown drag out fight. A little heated? Yes. A lot heated? I wouldn’t characterize it as that,” said a person familiar with the incident. “I don’t think they ever had a full breakdown. There were moments when folks needed to go off and think a little. But you never had that ‘we’re going to go to our corners for a week.’ They both did their best to negotiate very quickly.”

The roots of the problem, as usual, were conflicting core philosophies of government and wariness of the other side. “Sanders had the view that McCain was trying to take away the VA and that was his ultimate intention. McCain had the view that Sanders was always going to prop up the VA and never accept any criticism of it,” says Ian DePlanque, chief lobbyist for the American Legion, the country’s largest veterans organization. Neither was actually the case, he says, but that was the impression the pair gave. McCain’s statements were focused on choice and private care, while “if you look at Sanders’ statements, he wanted to use the VA as a model for what single-payer could look like across the country. He has had a tendency to want to show the best of it.”

In the end, the pair were pragmatic if occasionally hotheaded negotiators. McCain did not want to get rid of the VA and Sanders did not believe the VA was perfect. Sanders agreed to give veterans the choice of private care for both scheduling and distance reasons, and McCain agreed to limit the choice program to a two-year trial. Both agreed on expanded firing authority, and they compromised on how much due process to allow for those who were dismissed.

When they went to the floor to announce their deal, McCain joked about the behind-the-scenes drama. “I respect the fact that Bernie Sanders is known as a fighter, and it’s been a pleasure to do combat with him,” he said with a laugh. Sanders said that “reaching a compromise among people who look at the world very differently is not easy,” but that he and McCain had “tried our best.”

Five days later, the Senate passed the Sanders-McCain bill 93-3. And then the real political fireworks started.

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Even within a wildly diverse Congress, the strangeness of the Miller-Sanders pairing was “not lost on anybody involved in this negotiation,” one Republican familiar with the discussions said wryly. The contrasts were cultural, temperamental and ideological. Miller’s Florida panhandle district is “culturally part of Dixie,” his website says, and geographically so far west it is in the central time zone. He is “soft-spoken and a good listener,” according to The Almanac of American Politics, and he tied with nine other House members as most conservative in a National Journal analysis of 2011 votes.

The staff aides who worked to reconcile the House and Senate veterans bills had long-standing relationships, but Miller and Sanders did not. They couldn’t compare notes on their favorite football teams or fishing spots, as Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had done during painstaking 2013 negotiations on a budget deal. Asked if the two veterans chairmen had anything in common, one aide replied, “No—aside from the goal that failure wasn’t an option.”

Underlying the talks was residual Democratic bitterness over George W. Bush’s military and fiscal policies. The negotiators were also coping with a telescoped time period that didn’t allow for much study of options; non-stop press coverage that magnified every step forward or back; pressures from leadership on both sides and repeated episodes of Republicans, Democrats or both feeling blindsided.

At first it seemed the House and Senate were not all that far apart. But Sanders and his party, with strong backing from the disabled veterans community, wanted to add new money to bolster the VA internally. Miller and the House leadership, meanwhile, wanted to focus on the private-choice program. That produced the one issue big enough and controversial enough to sink the whole enterprise: Whether the VA health system itself should get more money to fix its problems—and if so, how much and where to find it.

The American Federation of Government Employees called understaffing at the VA “the number one cause of this crisis” and Sanders was a strong advocate of what he called strengthening VA capacities. From the start of the scandal, he had been asking for numbers from the VA—how many doctors it needed how many facilities, how much money. At the same time there were many concerns about VA management and spending decisions, among them that money the department already had was going unspent and that VA doctors weren’t seeing as many patients as they should.

The whole process was nearly derailed when acting VA secretary Sloan Gibson told senators at a July 16, 2014 hearing that the VA needed $17.6 billion to put itself right. He said $10 billion would be used to hire doctors, nurses and other clinical staffers, $6 billion would go toward building and leasing new medical facilities and $1.5 billion would be for tech needs.

Five days after the Gibson bombshell, Sanders, Gibson and staff experts gathered in Sanders’ office. Miller, calling in from Florida, cross-examined Gibson about the basis for his request and was not happy with what he heard. “There wasn’t a lot of detail behind these answers,” said a person who was in the room. Miller “kept his cool” but “what we all heard was frustration.”

Four days later, the usually stolid Miller engaged in what for him qualified as a temper tantrum. He stood on the House floor and held up what he said was a typical VA budget request from the administration, four volumes and more than 1,300 pages. Then he held up Gibson’s request. “I have in recent days called it a three-page document,” Miller said. “But actually, if you take the cover letter off, you take the closing page off, you have one page to justify $17.6 billion.” He ripped off the pages as he spoke, held up the one page, and leveled his final salvo: “I actually believe that we could have already come to an agreement if Sen. Sanders had not insisted on moving the goal posts and adding this $17.6 billion ask into a clearly defined conference committee.”

Sanders himself had said in opening the July 16 hearing that “we have been making significant progress in the last month and I believe that we can reach an agreement very soon.” But the Gibson request and the phone call with Miller marked a turning point. “From that point forward it was difficult,” said an aide close to the negotiations. “From that point forward it seemed like there was a huge difference in opinion. Part of the problem was that they weren’t in fact talking.”

Republicans felt it was out of bounds to interject such a huge sum into the negotiation at such a late stage. They were also annoyed by floor speeches by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. On June 2, Reid said Republicans had blocked a Sanders bill to help the VA meet veterans’ needs back in February because they were worried about “busting the budget.” He said they didn’t worry about that when they sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq on “the credit card of the taxpayers of America” and ran up a $1.5 trillion debt on that war alone. “Republicans ignore the true cost of democracy,” Reid charged. “Republicans focus on the monetary costs only, the dollar bills, because any money going to our veterans is $1 less going to billionaires, corporations and unnecessary tax cuts.”

On July 21, the same day as the phone call that so perturbed Miller, Reid was back on the floor. “We have spent trillions of dollars in two wars—unpaid for, by the way. That is what President Bush wanted, and that is what he got. He squandered the surplus we had—a surplus of over 10 years when he took office that was trillions of dollars,” Reid said. “But now we are being asked to spend a few dollars to take care of these people who have come back in need—as our veterans,” he said, and “it looks to me” as if the conference committee will fail. “Why? Because they have to spend money on these people on whom they were glad to spend money to take them to war. But now they are back. They are missing limbs. They have many post-traumatic stress problems, a lot of medical issues and no money is there.”

These were not unusual sentiments among Democrats. Sanders himself had made similar points in February when Republicans thwarted his bill, which had been backed by the American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, Veterans of Foreign Wars and other groups. “When our men and women come home from war, some wounded in body some wounded in spirit, I don’t want to hear people telling me it’s too expensive to take care of those wounded veterans,” Sanders said in an angry floor speech. “I don’t accept that. If you think it’s too expensive to take care of veterans, don’t send them to war.”

But now, several months later, with veterans in distress, Reid’s comments were not helpful. Sanders was “working to get to a place of yes,” as one aide put it, and Republicans felt like Reid was beating them up. From their standpoint, they had proven with passage of the private-choice bill and the earlier bills expanding tuition breaks and facilities for veterans that they were not pinching pennies. Now they were out to prove they could compromise. According to a Republican close to the negotiations, they were planning to do it by asking House and Senate conferees to a meeting July 24. The purpose was to vote on a “serious proposal” that amounted to “basically conceding” to the Senate.

The offer, however, did not include any money at all toward Gibson’s $17.6 billion request, which had arrived weeks after the House and Senate passed the bills the negotiators were trying to reconcile.

Sanders and other Senate Democrats were predictably livid. Instead of going to Miller’s meeting, they held a press conference to vent about money and collegiality. Sanders responded to Miller’s moving-the-goal-posts charge by saying he did move them—“to a much lower and more realistic number,” $10 billion less than the initial Senate bill. He said he had tried to meet the Republicans “more than halfway,” but was sad to conclude “the good faith we have shown was not reciprocated by the other side.” Miller’s approach, he said, amounted to saying “come to a meeting, vote for my bill, end of discussion.” He added: “That is not democracy.”

Montana Sen. Jon Tester, head of the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee, then picked up where Reid had left off. “I was not here in 2003. But I would be willing to bet anybody that’s here that they did not talk about offsetting the wars in Iraq when they decided to go in and fight that war. Taking care of our veterans is a cost of war,” he said. “We need to depoliticize this and do right by our veterans. The fact is it’s going to cost some money.”

On the other side of the aisle, House Speaker John Boehner blamed the impasse on Obama. "Bipartisan, bicameral negotiations were making good progress, until the White House began demanding more money with no accountability, and no strings attached. Now, I want to be clear: there's going to be no blank check for the president and his allies,” Boehner said. Other Republicans blamed Sanders, who had invited Gibson to assess VA’s internal needs and ended up with what a Republican aide called “a half-baked proposal” that arrived smack in the middle of a negotiation.

With the clock ticking toward a five-week recess starting Aug. 4, the parties had fallen into their usual roles and stereotypes: Democrats focused on strengthening a frayed safety net, Republicans fretting about spending—in this case not just the amount but also the prospect of throwing good money after bad. The media reported that tensions had erupted into the open, negotiations had broken down and failure was imminent. “ How VA Reform Fell Apart In Less Than 4 Days,” blared the Huffington Post headline.

But while Sanders and Miller were not talking, their aides continued to negotiate. They were still trying to think of new ways to pay for things, still trying to find ways to bridge the fiscal gap. “There was a brief moment when each side was questioning the intentions and the motives of the other,” said a Republican familiar with the negotiations. But both sides quickly realized that “we cannot go home in August without a deal because that would be a colossal failure of our responsibility first and foremost, but it would also be a political disaster.”

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The Sanders-Miller meltdown turned out to be the last cathartic paroxysm before a compromise was reached just a couple of days later. The House had offered zero money for VA improvements, while Sanders had asked for close to $9 billion. In the end, both sides agreed to $5 billion. Another $1.5 billion went for leases of 27 major medical facilities in 18 states and Puerto Rico. The two sides also agreed to create a Veterans Choice Fund and put $10 billion into it. The House, which had offered no due process to people being fired, agreed quickly to an appeal within a week, a decision within a month and no pay for the duration of the appeal.

At a press conference announcing the deal, Sanders said getting to that point had been very difficult, due in part to “a lot of partisanship going on.” He said it would not have happened without Miller’s “determination and hard work.” For his part, Miller called Sanders his good friend and said the volatility of the process had been exaggerated by the media. Asked if conservatives would support a bill with such a hefty price tag, Miller replied, “Taking care of our veterans is not an inexpensive proposition and our members understand this.”

In the end both votes were close to unanimous—420-5 in the House, 91-3 in the Senate. Obama signed the VA bill Aug. 7 at Fort Belvoir. The new law, he said, “will help us ensure that veterans have access to the care that they’ve earned.”

The architects of the Senate-House agreement are moving on. Sanders is now the senior Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee as well as a surprisingly strong challenger to frontrunner Clinton. Miller, also interested in a promotion, is reportedly on the verge of announcing his candidacy for the Florida Senate seat open due to Marco Rubio’s GOP presidential bid. The VA, alas, is facing soaring costs and demand and is once again mired in long wait times, fiscal shortfalls and allegations of mismanagement. Its troubles, however, should not erase a significant bipartisan achievement, however temporal, for negotiators who overcame deep divisions to honor their mutual commitment to veterans.