Americans are witnessing a real-time demonstration of the fact that political people and parties show far more of their deepest individual and collective characters in how they deal with one giant defeat than in dozens of victories, thanks to the enactment of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB).

Consider how members of the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) reacted in the final days prior to the historic July 3 218-214 vote in the House of Representatives to approve the Senate version of the OBBB. The House had approved its own version of the massive legislation in May, including multiple key provisions demanded by HFC members and other conservative representatives.

Among those priority provisions were a 10-year defunding of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which facilitates millions of deaths of unborn babies every year through abortion. Another provision barred federal funds from being used to pay for transgender surgeries of young people.

But when the Senate got through revising the House bill and sent it back to the lower chamber in late June, HFC members faced a tough dilemma. The Senate stripped out the transgender surgery funding ban and slashed the Planned Parenthood funding from 10 years to one. There were other Senate changes regarding Medicaid funding and certain tax provisions that also angered the House conservatives.

They could have demanded that those Senate changes be reversed or killed the bill entirely in protest, thanks to the razor-thin House Republican majority (220-212). Either way, the OBBB would have been delayed for months or, quite possibly, even killed permanently.

Both courses of action would have produced no positive reforms sought by the HFC and other conservatives in Congress. It would also have condemned the nation to the biggest tax increase in history, crippled Trump’s border protection plans, hampered efforts to end federal deficit spending, and halted the tremendous political momentum the chief executive had enjoyed since his first day in the Oval Office.

But instead, the representatives on the Right, led by HFC Chairman Andy Harris (R-Md.) and HFC Vice-Chairman Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), chose a better way, one that would have been heartily approved by the authors of “The Federalist Papers.” That is the way of patient public persistence in accumulating legislative advances and political leverage over the long run to help bring about enduring positive conservative reforms.

The Constitution’s separation of powers among three distinct branches of government and the further decentralization of power within the Congress forces contending factions to seek mutually beneficial and agreeable compromises to maintain public order and progress. Ultimately, the alternatives to that process are violent anarchy or dictatorial centralized power.

So, HFCers used every media opportunity to explain the need for conservative reforms, while leveraging their individual votes in private discussions with congressional, White House, and Republican campaign leaders to gain concessions and agreements on key aspects of OBBB implementation and other policy issues.

Perhaps the most important of those conversations came in a meeting the day before the final House vote among caucus members and Trump, as Norman told The Washington Stand.

“We met with Trump for two hours and learned … the Senate was anxious to get the bill back from the House with changes in order for them to get more concessions with more deficit spending,” Norman said. That meant, according to the South Carolina Republican that “there was zero chance of getting a more conservative bill, so we had to pass what we had received back from the Senate.”

Between that meeting with Trump and parallel discussions among HFCers and multiple GOP congressional leaders, significant agreements were made regarding post-OBBB legislative and executive branch priorities.

“We got significant commitments on spending reductions outside the framework of the bill,” Harris told “This Week on Capitol Hill” host Tony Perkins. “We said let’s talk about some offsets elsewhere. Let’s talk about some things the executive can do to mitigate some of the concerns about what the Senate did with our House bill.

“We got a major commitment, a serious commitment on spending reduction,” as well as “a large commitment on social issues. We got an agreement that the administration will add adults to their transgender funding limitation. And we’re going to have a discussion with the administration on the egregious, cross-state trafficking in mifepristone … We talked about looking at program integrity in food stamps and in Medicaid.”

Commitments were also made, Harris added, on eliminating improper payments and waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the federal bureaucracy, and in how the Trump administration deals with the many egregious provisions of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Finally, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) agreed to back a new campaign to pass a constitutional amendment requiring the federal government, like most state governments, to balance its annual budget. The last time Congress voted on such a proposal was 2011.

“Everything we did was perfectly in line with the president’s agenda. So, he went along with it,” Harris told Perkins. “We gained, America gained.”

The contrast could not be greater between how the HFC members responded to a challenging legislative situation and how Democrats in Congress have responded to the OBBB, particularly the new law’s strengthening of Trump’s border security and immigration policies.

In recent months, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) has been indicted by the Department of Justice on two charges of assaulting federal immigration officials during a May 9 confrontation at a Newark, New Jersey facility used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials as a detention center.

Then on June 12, Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) was handcuffed and forcibly removed after not identifying himself while aggressively moving toward Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem during a news conference in which she strongly defended immigration officials during a week of violent anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. The California Democrat was not charged after Noem invited him to a meeting to discuss his concerns.

Throughout the Los Angeles riots, Mayor Karen Bass, a former Democratic congresswoman, has demanded that ICE stop arresting and removing illegal immigrants with criminal records in their home countries or who have been charged with criminal acts while here in the U.S.

Then, as the nation celebrated its 249th birthday during the July 4 Independence Day celebrations, ICE agents at an Alvarado, Texas, facility were shot at by multiple assailants. The FBI subsequently arrested 11 individuals for their alleged involvement in what it called a “planned ambush” of the federal officials. Dressed in military fatigues, the attackers only injured a local police officer assisting the ICE agents.

In the second ICE attack on July 7, a man also dressed in military gear began firing on U.S. Border Patrol officials at the McAllen, Texas, border crossing station. Law enforcement officials responded, killing the as yet-unidentified man before he was able to injure anybody.

As Congress returned from the July 4 weekend, multiple House Democrats and their congressional aides were quoted in numerous media reports describing growing pressure on their bosses to go beyond verbal and other protests against Trump policies, even to the extent of being willing to “get shot.”

In one such story, which Axios claimed was based on interviews with more than two dozen House Democrats, one of them said constituents are angrily claiming that “what we really need to do is be willing to get shot” when protesting at ICE facilities.

Democrats may want to reconsider the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence.”