WASHINGTON Sen. Pat Roberts likes to quote a piece of advice from his mentor, the late U.S. Rep. Keith Sebelius of Kansas: Smother your enemies with the milk of human kindness and pray it doesnt curdle.
Its a strategy the octogenarian Republican lawmaker used to help pass a farm bill this month with unanimous Democratic support in the Senate a notable feat in a Congress often gridlocked by partisan squabbles.
To Roberts, a Kansas Republican who first arrived on Capitol Hill as a congressional aide in 1967, this is how the legislative process is supposed to work: Collaborative, collegial, competent.
To some critics within his own party, however, Roberts alliance with Democrats to push what those critics considered a deeply flawed and costly farm bill represents a betrayal of conservative values.
Its a slap in the face to Ronald Reagan, said Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Its a victory for a massive welfare state without work requirements and an out-of-control budget.
The 82-year-old Roberts is up for re-election in 2020. Should he decide to run for another six-year Senate term, his future and possibly his undefeated record as a candidate hinges on whether his old-school approach to making policy through compromise has become a liability in the age of Donald Trumps winner-take-all politics.
I hope were not an endangered species, Roberts said of his breed of pragmatic lawmaker.
The difficulty for Roberts is that incentives in todays political system are far less geared toward working things out in a bipartisan way than they once were, said Dan Glickman, a Democrat and former Clinton administration secretary of agriculture who represented a Kansas district in Congress from 1977 to 1995.
Glickman believes a majority of voters still want a Congress that works well. But a small and very vocal minority want purity of ideological position. And that minority plays an outsize role in primaries.
Roberts must decide where he fits in or if he still does fit at all.
Were in a polarized world right now. Youre either in one end zone or the other end zone, Glickman said. Being at the 50 yard line or even the 40 yard line is not as appreciated as it used to be. Thats just the reality.
Prominent Kansas Republicans already are eying his seat, including Kansas outgoing GOP Gov. Jeff Colyer and Rep. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, in anticipation that Roberts might step aside.
No one has yet announced a primary challenge against Roberts, but conservative activists see him as vulnerable from the right. The senator narrowly survived a primary against Tea Party candidate Milton Wolf in 2014.
The national debt has soared over Pat Roberts time in both the House and the Senate and there are numerous examples of him contributing to that problem, said Andrew Roth, vice president of government affairs for Club for Growth, a group that advocates smaller government.
Conservatives such as Roth want to rein in taxpayer-funded subsidies for farmers and impose new work requirements on older people and parents enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps.
