Senate Majority Leader John Thune said something out loud this weekend that many in Washington have long understood: Sen. Chuck Schumer, he argued, lives in fear of the far-left wing of his party. Thune pointed to Democrats blocking debate on military funding and a defense authorization bill, as well as resistance around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He also recalled the backlash Schumer faced after voting to reopen the government during an earlier shutdown fight. In Thune's telling, Schumer learned the price of defying his party's loudest faction and has deferred to it ever since.

Thune's criticism deserves scrutiny. He is a Republican leader making a partisan argument, and his account is not the whole story. But the larger point is difficult to dismiss: Party leaders increasingly govern under threat from their own flanks. That pressure weakens compromise, rewards confrontation and leaves basic responsibilities of government hostage to factions that often have little incentive to accept an imperfect deal.

Democrats are not alone in this predicament. Republicans have spent years watching members who once acted as reliable rubber stamps for Trump begin, however cautiously, to assert their own judgment. That independence is welcome when it reflects principle and a willingness to answer to the Constitution, their constituents and the national interest. It is less impressive when it appears only after a political cost becomes impossible to ignore. Still, the willingness to push back matters. It takes some nerve to disagree with a president who has shown he will publicly punish dissent even by exposing a senator's personal phone number.

That is exactly what Trump did to Sen. Tom Cotton after Cotton opposed the president's effort to make daylight saving time permanent. Trump shared a number he said belonged to Cotton and urged people to call him. Cotton defended his position on the merits, arguing that Arkansas children should not have to travel to school in darkness during winter mornings. The disagreement concerned a clock policy, but the method of pressure was far more serious: a president using his platform to direct a crowd at a senator for exercising his judgment.

There is no need to pretend the two parties are identical. They are not. Their policies differ, their coalitions differ, and the factions pulling on them have different aims. But both parties have become beholden to forces that punish moderation and treat compromise as betrayal. On the left, Democratic leaders face pressure from activists who may reject bipartisan measures even when they address national security or the ordinary work of governing. On the right, Republican lawmakers face demands for personal loyalty to Trump, sometimes regardless of the merits of a policy or the damage to democratic norms.

The result is a Senate that too often seems more concerned with surviving the next primary, online pile-on or public dressing-down than with solving problems. Leaders calculate how their own factions will react before they ask what the country needs. Legislation stalls. National security debates become opportunities for political theater. Members who might negotiate learn that taking a position can bring swift punishment from their own side.

Schumer cannot blame every Senate failure on the left. Thune cannot claim that Republicans have consistently put principle above party. For years, too many Republicans defended conduct from Trump that they would have condemned in any other president. They excused insults, threats and tests of personal loyalty because the political consequences of resistance seemed too steep. Democrats, too, have at times mistaken the demands of their most energized activists for the views of the entire country.

That is the deeper problem. A party's most intense faction is not necessarily its broadest constituency, and a president's loudest supporters do not own the party. Senators are elected to exercise judgment, not to outsource it to political influencers, activist networks or the president of the moment. They should listen to their voters, defend their principles and explain their decisions plainly. They should not need a guarantee that their party's base will applaud.

The American people have reason to distrust a politics in which every disagreement is treated as disloyalty and every compromise as surrender. The public needs leaders who can say no to their own side when the facts demand it and yes to a workable solution even when ideological purists object.

Thune is right to call out the pressure Schumer faces. But Republicans should hear the same warning. If one party's leaders are captive to the left and the other's to Trump's most loyal enforcers, neither is leading. Both are being led by factions with the power to punish, while the country waits for the people it elected to govern.

Armstrong Williams is manager/sole owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast owner of the year. To find out more about him and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Connor Gan at Unsplash