Senate has become a chamber of failure
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Senate has become a chamber of failure
By: David A. Fahrenthold and Paul Kane, Washington
Post
On Tuesday evening, a landmark jobs proposal from a Democratic
president came before the Democratic-controlled Senate. There were
50 votes for it and 49 votes against it.
And it failed.
Just as everybody expected.
The fate of the bill - which lost by winning, in a vote that
didn't really matter in the first place - made perfect sense in the
Senate. It may be the Washington institution most warped by the
current culture of gridlock, transformed from a balky but
functional legislative body into a strange theater of failure.
The reason: In the Senate, it takes 60 votes to do anything big.
And neither party has them.
So the huge tactical question is not whether big ideas will
lose. It is who will own the failure politically.
The Senate's top two leaders have spent the past nine months
trying to trick, trap, embarrass and out-maneuver each other. Each
is hoping to force the other into a mistake that will burden him
and his party with a greater share of the public blame.
On Tuesday, as usual, it was hard to tell whether anyone was
winning.
"Democrats have designed this bill to fail - they have designed
their own bill to fail - in the hopes that anyone who votes against
it will look bad," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),
one of the two combatants, said Tuesday.
But at the same time McConnell was blaming Democrats for the
measure's demise, he was hoping for it to go down, too. He had
pushed for Tuesday night's vote because he knew it would reveal
that some Senate Democrats were against their own president's plan.
Indeed, two voted no - three, if you count a late-game maneuver by
Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) to preserve his procedural
options going forward.
For Reid, the bill's failure was an opportunity to cast
Republicans as spurning solid ideas for creating jobs, including a
Democratic plan to raise taxes on millionaires.
"I guess Republicans think that if the economy improves, it
might help President Obama," Reid said on the Senate floor Tuesday.
"So they root for the economy to fail."
The vote on Obama's jobs proposal was, technically, a vote on
"cloture" - to force the Senate to proceed to a formal debate on
the legislation. These measures require 60 votes for passage, more
than the simple majority required to pass the bill itself.
So, by that chamber's logic, a vote of 50 to 49 was as much a
failure as a vote of 99 to 1.
The Senate's strange turn this year is partly a result of these
odd rules - and the bitter political times.
The House is in Republican hands. The White House is held by a
Democrat. Stuck between them is the Senate, whose rules require the
kind bipartisan cooperation that neither side seems capable of
providing.
But this drama is the creation of its protagonists, Reid and
McConnell.
The two are remarkably similar. Reid, 71, grew up in a Nevada
cabin, the son of a miner who committed suicide. McConnell, 69,
struggled with polio during childhood. Both of them moved up
through local elected offices and reached the Senate in the
1980s.
Today, both are quiet loners in a Capitol full of backslapping,
glad-handing pols. They are inside men, masters of procedure and
rules, skills they now deploy to try to get each other to make
politically costly mistakes.
"It's how these parties try to build majorities for their
positions," said Sarah Binder, a historian of Congress at George
Washington University. "It's certainly not a great use of time - I
mean, debating a bill that's not going anywhere. At the end of the
day, one has to wonder why they can't sit down and talk about a
bill that's going somewhere."
This spring, Reid won a round when he forced Republicans to vote
on an austere budget plan approved by the House. That bill failed,
and some Senate Republicans took embarrassing votes against a GOP
plan.
Then, in the summer, McConnell scored his own
victory-in-failure.
He made Democrats vote on Obama's months-old budget request -
which by then seemed far out of step in a Capitol focused on
spending cuts. The measure failed. But every Democrat was made to
oppose the president's ideas.
The two men rejoin this battle nearly every morning when the
Senate opens for business. Reid often speaks first, with the mien
of an exasperated grandfather. He simply can't believe that "my
good friend" across the aisle is trying to pull a fast one.
McConnell often follows. His manner is that of a disappointed
innocent: He knows the American people expect more of Democrats and
thought that this time they would do better.
"Democrats are showing the American people that they have no new
ideas for dealing with our jobs crisis," McConnell said this week.
"Democrats' sole proposal is to keep doing what hasn't worked."
If this is theater, the audience doesn't appear to be
responding. Neither Reid nor McConnell seems to be doing well in
public opinion polls. In August, a Quinnipiac University poll
showed that only 18 percent of registered voters had a favorable
opinion of Reid, and only 14 percent thought favorably of
McConnell. In both cases, more than 40 percent didn't know
enough about the leader to form an opinion.
But the fight keeps on. A high point in the two leaders' battles
came last week - although understanding it required a trained
parliamentarian.
Reid was about to make Republicans take a vote that could
embarrass some of them: The bill would let the United States punish
China for undervaluing its currency. A "no" vote could make some
Republicans look soft on China.
McConnell, in turn, was trying to make Democrats vote on Obama's
jobs plan, and on the idea of the Environmental Protection Agency
regulating "farm dust" as an air pollutant.
In the real world, none of these bills are likely to become law.
But the real world was not really the point.
Finally, Reid took an unusual step: He gathered enough votes to
declare McConnell's tactics formally out of order.
That amounted to only a small change in the Senate's rules. But
it was a real loss for McConnell, because the precedent might limit
the minority party's ability to make the majority party take votes
it dislikes.
McConnell took to the floor. After months of theater, he really
did seem to be mad at Reid.
"I like him. We deal with each other every day," he said. "We
are fundamentally turning the Senate into the House." There, the
majority rules absolutely, and there is no art to failure.