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Feb. 8, 2013
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Jewish World Review
July 11, 2012/ 22 Tammuz, 5772
The missing giants of the Senate
By
Dana Milbank
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Four years ago this week, Ted Kennedy changed history with the sheer force of his will.
Senate Democrats, battling with the Bush administration, were one vote short of the total they needed to maintain a key provision of Medicare. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, then used a lifeline: He called Kennedy, who was in Boston receiving chemotherapy for brain cancer, and pleaded for the liberal giant to return to Washington to provide the clinching vote. When Kennedy walked onto the floor on July 9, 2008, senators on both sides erupted in cheers, and some wept. The Medicare bill passed — with nine Republican senators switching their previous votes to be on Kennedy’s side. Among those cheering the loudest that day was Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, Kennedy’s longtime legislative partner, who wrote a song for Kennedy upon learning of his friend’s illness and eulogized him at his memorial a year later. I was reminded of this moment when talking in recent days with senators and veteran Capitol Hill correspondents about what has gone wrong in the Senate. A leading theory: There are no giants in the chamber today, no figure with the stature of a Kennedy who could carry 10 votes with his mere presence. There is no longer a revered figure — a Byrd, a Dole, a Moynihan, a Chafee, a Nunn, a John Warner — whose authority could transcend party and the usual arithmetic of vote counting. Some have died. Some have retired. Others, such as Hatch and John McCain, have been lost to the exigencies of survival in a hyperpartisan political system. Hatch, Kennedy’s longtime collaborator, could have been one of today’s giants. First elected in 1976, he is in line, as the longest-serving Republican, to be Senate president pro tempore if the GOP reclaims the majority in November. He has a long record of legislative success and a moral authority that is beyond question. But to keep his job, he had to fight off a primary challenge from the tea party — and to prevail last month, the would-be giant diminished himself, tacking sharply to the right. When Hatch gave a speech on Obamacare on Monday — four years to the day since he cheered Kennedy’s brief return — he sounded like just another petty partisan. “The difficulty that we face in undoing ‘Obamacare’ does not mitigate the necessity of repealing this law in its entirety,” he said at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “And should the Republicans take back the Senate, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, repeal of ‘Obamacare’ will be my first, second and third priority.” Really? A higher priority for the Senate Finance Committee chairman than balancing the budget, reducing the debt and reforming the tax code? In stooping to join the legislature’s Lilliputians, Hatch is just following the pack. Research by The Post’s Paul Kane turned up an extraordinary finding: Forty-three of the Senate’s 100 members are in their freshman term, the most since the post-Watergate cleanout. By comparison, after the 2004 election, there were only 30 first-term senators. In many cases, the voters didn’t trade up: Scott Brown for Kennedy in Massachusetts, Mark Begich for Alaska’s Ted Stevens, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin for Robert Byrd. John Warner was succeeded by Mark Warner, who is already looking for an exit. One cycle earlier, the venerable South Carolinian Fritz Hollings, of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-balancing fame, was replaced by Jim DeMint, of tea-party fame. Walk into the reception room off the Senate floor, and frescoes of the chamber’s giants gaze at you from all directions: Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun from the 19th century; Robert La Follette, Robert A. Taft, Arthur Vandenberg and Robert F. Wagner from the 20th century. A few steps away, their 21st-century successors were out on the floor on Tuesday, engaged in their usual smallness, debating tax credits that have no chance of surviving the legislative process. Reid led off the debate, accusing Republicans of helping “megarich celebrities like Donald Trump” and “fabulously rich so-called small-business owners like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.” Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, responded by blaming President Obama for the “slowest recovery ever” and for championing a “complete and total absurdity” of a tax policy. The No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, then accused Republicans of a record number of filibusters, reminding McConnell that he once said his priority “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” You don’t have to go back to Daniel Webster to appreciate the current plague of legislative dwarfism. When Hatch came to the Senate in 1977, he was surrounded by contemporaneous and future giants: Jackson, Javits, Muskie, McGovern, Baker, Goldwater — and a 44-year-old Ted Kennedy. Their bloodlines have all run dry.
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Previously:
• 07/09/12 Representative Gaffe
• 07/02/12 The umpire strikes back
• 06/25/12 Norquist delivers the GOP's marching orders
• 06/19/12 The left, feeling left out
• 06/18/12 Skip the falsehoods, Mr. President, and give us a plan
• 06/15/12 The Wall Street Senate
• 06/13/12 Jeb Bush's heresy
• 06/12/12 Pileup at the White House
• 06/11/12 Obama's fate could be in Europe's hands
• 06/04/12 Welcome to Camp Competitive
• 05/31/12 Digging a racial grave
• 05/30/12 A new conspiracy theory: Is Romney a unicorn?
• 05/29/12 Do Republicans really want to clone one for the Gipper?
• 05/24/12 Obama's protectors are under the microscope
• 05/22/12 Obama's Old World mess: Allies are coming up short at a key moment
• 05/16/12 Where have all the candidates gone?
• 05/15/12 Barack Obama, the first female president
• 05/14/12 Irrationality wins: Voter cure for Congress's failures will likely backfire
• 05/08/12 Obama's marriage mess: His advisers scramble to clean up his 'evolution'
• 05/07/12 Taking out Dick Lugar
• 05/03/12 Gingrich may have ended campaign, but he will remain out of this world
• 05/02/12 Our do-almost-nothing Congress
• 05/01/12 President Obama, campaigner in chief
• 04/25/12 Romney's immigration Etch a Sketch
• 04/23/12 A congressional deal on immigration? Dream on
• 04/19/12 Dems battle back against Republican 'war on women'
• 04/18/12 Debauchery: An American govermental specialty
• 04/17/12 Silent witness
• 04/12/12 Rebuffing Obama's gimmicky 'Buffett Rule'
• 04/11/12 Santorum's Gettysburg surrender
• 04/09/12 The facts vs. Mitt Romney
• 04/06/12 Mitt Romney, talking to the press, keeps the press at a distance
• 04/05/12 From tracking al-Qaeda to tracking the wayward spouse
• 04/04/12 Budget cuts as back-door deregulation
• 03/26/12 My pet Mitt
• 03/22/12 Mitt Romney's latest gaffe may be etched in history
• 03/20/12 Supreme Court conceives of life after death
• 03/15/12 Conservative for Obama: The British PM as campaign prop
• 03/14/12 In Section 60, a silent search for meaning
• 03/13/12 Super Friends, unite
• 03/12/12 It's time to believe: Romney's a winner
• 03/07/12 Settling in to Washington's ways
• 03/06/12 AIPAC beats the drums of war
• 03/05/12 Did Republicans forget the women's vote?
• 02/29/12 Mitt Romney's acceptance speech, in (mostly) his own words
• 02/28/12 Common ground becomes a great divide
• 02/27/12 An expert witness for the GOP gender gap
• 02/21/12 Where Romney shines
• 02/15/12 A Republican death wish?
• 02/14/12Obama's budget games
• 02/13/12 Are GOPers playing right into Obama's hands?
• 02/08/12 Obama pumps the compressor of Joe Hudy's Extreme Marshmallow Cannon
• 02/07/12 Abramoff's atonement
• 02/01/12 Why we in the media just love Newt
• 01/31/12 The end of the road for Newt Gingrich?
• 01/25/12 Gingrich is Obama's best surrogate
• 01/24/12 Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney's attack dog
• 01/16/12 Mitt Romney's Al Gore problem
• 01/12/12 Kamikaze Gingrich, on the loose in South Carolina
• 01/11/12 Journalists' campaign trail secrets revealed
• 01/10/12 Mitt Romney's money problem
• 01/09/12 Newtonian exceptionalism
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• 11/30/11 Barney the bully: Congressman Frank's other legacy
• 11/23/11 Jon Kyl's search-and-destroy mission
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• 11/16/11 Why Newt Gingrich won't last
• 11/08/11 The 2012 campaign gets seedier
• 11/06/11 A Machiavellian model for Obama
• 11/03/11 The Herman Cain crack-up
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• 10/27/11 Stuntmen of the supercommittee
• 10/26/11 Democrats on the sidelines
• 10/24/11 Rick Perry's birther Parade
• 10/24/11 The birthers eat their own
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• 08/04/11 Lt. Col. Allen West fires a round at the Tea Party
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• 07/13/11 John Boehner's bind
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• 04/11/11: Shutdown theatrics
• 04/06/11: Paul Ryan's irresponsible budget
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• 04/04/11: Robert Gibbs, Facebook and the White House corporate placement service
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• 02/09/11: Arianna Huffington's ideological transformation
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