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Sun May 22 07:03:47 PDT 2005

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 The Wreck of the U.S. Senate

 By Dick Meyer

  The Senate has managed to conduct the business of confirming or rejecting federal judges with relative efficiency and only occasional controversy for some 200 years. That the Senate is now going nuclear (to use its own vocabulary) over this legislative chore is a symptom of a rather serious illness in the upper body. Face it: Giving or withholding consent for judicial appointments is not akin to reversing global warming or ending world hunger. As overheated as the current standoff may be, it is a solvable problem and, worse, a problem of the Senate's own making. What has created the conditions -- and prevents a solution -- for this uber-partisan debacle is a degradation in the culture of the Senate that has grown acute since 1989.

 The change has left the Senate less able to produce legislation on major issues, less able to compromise, less reflective of public opinion (ironically, since these people are obsessed with polls), and less able to produce leaders for both the institution itself and the whole nation. The current filibuster fiasco displays a Senate preoccupied -- no, paralyzed -- with issues that are simply not high priorities for voters but that are important to interests on the left and right. Meanwhile, the issues the majority of voters care most about -- such as securing the future of Medicare and Social Security, fixing the tax code, protecting private pensions and repairing health insurance -- are being punted.

 One casualty of the Senate's post-1989 cantankerous culture was Republican Sen. Trent Lott, who was ousted from his job as majority leader in 2002 for making a crack that implied sympathy for the segregation in the old South. "The club is dead," Lott said, a year after his fall. "I'm not sure when it died, but the club is dead."

 There are plenty of reasons not to mourn the passing of that club. A white male bastion, it tolerated segregation for far too long, was enamored of its pork barrel, and let its entrenched members linger well into undignified dotage. But the club had its merits. It facilitated compromise, character, competence and the occasional act of conscience, thus presenting a serious counterweight to White House power.

 If I had to etch a date on the tombstone of The Senate Club it would be March 9, 1989, the day the Senate rejected, with a 53-47 vote, former four-term Texas senator John Tower to be secretary of defense under the first President Bush. This was only the ninth time in history that a Cabinet-level nominee had been rejected.

 The Senate's clubby comity had already been strained by the bitter battle over Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court and by the Iran-contra affair. But the long debate over Tower's misadventures with women and defense contractors and, most of all, his drinking was, if you will, a tippling point. Camaraderie became cat-fighting. That they did it to one of their own only made it worse.

 Congressional cannibalism moved to the House. Two months after the Tower vote, the House Democratic whip, Tony Coelho, resigned under pressure over an inappropriate loan deal. Two weeks after that, House Speaker Jim Wright threw in the gavel because of ethics charges.

 In 1991, the Senate confirmation struggle over Clarence Thomas made the Battle of Bork seem like a "Mork and Mindy" rerun, though he was eventually, and bitterly, confirmed. Also that year, the Senate Ethics Committee held extraordinary, trial-like public hearings for five senators -- the Keating Five -- accused of violating ethics rules. Later came the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Then last year, Majority Leader Bill Frist broke long tradition by going to South Dakota to campaign against Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

 Is this all, in the grand sweep of history, merely a phase? Last summer, after Vice President Cheney told Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont what to do with himself in language unsuitable for a family newspaper, a slew of stories decried the end of civility in politics. But just about every generation thinks it is witnessing a decline in civility and good manners. Certainly, the indignity Leahy suffered paled in comparison to the crippling caning Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner endured on the Senate floor in 1856 at the hands of an irate Southern congressman. Certainly, today's incivilities seem silly compared with the poisonous antics that got Joseph McCarthy condemned for "conduct unbecoming a senator."

 The filibuster flap is emblematic of deeper and, sadly, more enduring and consequential cultural changes. Several trends both illustrate and explain this conduct unbecoming of the Senate.

 Legislative Paralysis . Last May, when the Senate was tied up in its usual election-year inertia, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia said to The Post's longtime Senate correspondent, Helen Dewar, "Have we lost the will to legislate?" Well, yes, sir, it seems that way.

 Quick: Name a bill that has passed since 1989 that you have a prayer of remembering 10 years from now? The Family and Medical Leave Act? Welfare reform? Bush tax cuts? Yes, the votes on the Iraq wars were important, but they were merely permission slips for executive action.

 The inability to produce landmark legislation on major issues is not just a symptom of an unhealthy legislative body. It becomes a cause. As they say about the politics of academia, the tempers are so high because the stakes are so low. Not doing creates more ill will than doing.

 Missing Moderates . When Lowell Weicker, once a Republican senator and governor from Connecticut, quit the GOP in 1990, he said the party's moderate wing had become just a feather. Now it's just a mangy tuft.

 The Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party almost got the nomination in 1968 and expanded in the Senate of the 1970s and '80s with names such as Mark Hatfield, Bob Packwood, Charles Mathias, Arlen Specter, John Heinz, Bill Cohen, Warren Rudman, John Chafee, John Danforth, Richard Lugar, Nancy Kassebaum and Weicker. Only Lugar and Specter are left, joined occasionally by Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and sometimes Arizona maverick John McCain.

 Last year, the Democrats lost two key figures who could work with Republicans -- John Breaux of Louisiana and Zell Miller of Georgia. Other conservative Democrats, such as Howell Heflin, are long gone.

 In legislatures, moderates orchestrate the compromises that get things done. They are an endangered species.

 The Permanent Campaign . When Breaux retired, he wrote a farewell piece in which he said: "Today, unfortunately, outside groups, public relations firms, and the political consultants who are dedicated to one thing -- a perpetual campaign to make one party a winner and the other party a loser -- have snatched the political process."

 Senators must now weigh every comment they make against its potential for being taken out of context and used in a 30-second attack ad. Leaders force kabuki votes on controversial bills that have no chance of passing, or withstanding Supreme Court judgment, simply to force the opposition to cast unpopular votes. To do this, they invent pseudo-issues such as the Terry Schiavo decision, flag-burning and funding for groups that may support the offbeat art of Robert Mapplethorpe, to name a few.

 Interest groups don't just write editorials and buttonhole senators in the hall anymore; they bankroll massive media campaigns and "astroturf" (as in fake grass-roots) lobbying blitzes, as they are doing now over the filibuster. Campaigns are entirely financed by private money, mostly from special interests, both ideological or commercial. With open primaries and private funding, parties have no control over who runs and no way to enforce party discipline when it's time for unpopular but important decisions.

 Politicians respond to this by running for office constantly; governing is a side dish to the entree of campaigns.

 Senator as a Vocation . All this has made being a senator less fun. Few senators actually enjoy fundraising; most consider it humiliating, but they all spend enormous amounts of time on it, and not just in election years. Powerful senators such as Breaux and Don Nickles left the Senate last year to become lobbyists. Veteran senators such as Lawton Chiles of Florida and Frank Murkowski of Alaska left to become governors, as did a young Idaho Republican, Dirk Kempthorne. Rising Democratic star Jon Corzine of New Jersey plans to do the same.

 The Senate has been less able to produce veteran members whose clout and stature come from their expertise and seniority. This used to be how Congress was run: Senators would pile up the years of seniority and institutional wisdom on committees they someday would dominate. They became like shadow ministers. The Richard Russells, Everett Dirksens, Sam Ervins and Henry Jacksons would be anachronisms today. The last senator to gain national stature and real Washington clout this way was probably Sam Nunn, who nonetheless left the Senate at a relatively young age of 59.

 Now the ability to raise campaign funds and provide sound bites is the path to power.

 24/7 News . Our final culprit is the proliferation of news outlets. During the Tower struggle, there were three networks and CNN. The information superhighway wasn't even a glimmer on Al Gore's windshield. Now we have two more all-news cable stations, scores of news Web sites and the explosion of political talk radio.

 Senators have direct access to national media, which would rather cover food fights than policy debates. Politicians oblige. And senators are human beings. (Really. My source: the Senate physician.) They like to be on TV. It offers a path to national name recognition that was once available only to the most senior and accomplished legislators.

 Add all this up and it's no great shocker that the Senate is cramping over issues of only mild concern to voters and is far more polarized than the electorate as a whole. A Pew Research Center poll published last week shows that only 14 percent of Americans are following the filibuster flap closely and that most see the merits of arguments both for and against the use of filibusters on judicial nominations. So it's no surprise that 64 percent think the parties are "bickering more than usual."

 If renegade senators from both parties buck their leaders and pull off a compromise that averts things nuclear, it will at least slow the metastasis of the Senate's cancerous culture. And why shouldn't they succeed? There's no shortage of motives. After all, it shouldn't be terrifically hard for Republicans to figure out that if Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, she'll be able to put Barbra Streisand on the Supreme Court (you don't have to be a lawyer, you know). And the Democrats shouldn't find it that hard to imagine that they would want her to have that right.

 If ever the Senate were going to restore the virtuous aspects of the old club, it would have done so amid the nation's post-9/11 sense of unity. That didn't happen.

 Author's e-mail: grain at cbsnews.com

 Dick Meyer covered the Senate from 1987 to 1993 for CBS News. He is editorial director of CBSNews.com, where he writes the "Against the Grain" column.

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