by Ira Shapiro
The comeback was not to last.
IN RETROSPECT, THE SPIRAL downward for the Senate began in earnest in January 1989, coinciding with the arrival of Republican Trent Lott of Mississippi after an impressive sixteen-year run in the House. The son of a shipyard worker, Lott attended college and law school at the University of Mississippi. After a brief stint in private practice, Lott came to Capitol Hill in 1968, to work for Congressman William Colmer, an extremely conservative Democrat who chaired the House Rules Committee. When Colmer announced his retirement in 1972, Lott, understanding the way the political winds were blowing in the South, decided to run for his seat as a Republican, and won handily, aided by the strength of Nixon’s landslide.
In the House, Lott rose to become Republican whip. His influence increased after the 1980 election, as he proved extremely effective in helping the Reagan administration gets its tax and budget cuts through the House. Lott allied himself with Newt Gingrich and other young House Republicans who resented the high-handed treatment they had received from the House Democrats and disliked the go-along attitude of the House Republican leaders. He was deeply involved in Gingrich’s successful effort to bring down House Speaker Jim Wright on ethics charges. In 1988, when a Mississippi Senate seat opened up, Lott won easily.
Most newly elected senators come to the institution with a sense of deep respect, if not awe. Lott was an exception. As he describes in his candid and fascinating memoir, Herding Cats, he hated the place from the moment he arrived. “After giving up real national power in the House, after winning a score of victories for Ronald Reagan,” Lott wrote, “I expected a warm welcome in the Senate.” Instead, Lott and the other freshman “found themselves in ‘storage’ as the Senate machinery creaked to life.” Lott viewed many of his fellow senators as “distant, impossible to befriend.” The Senate itself was a “confused and disorganized institution,” with chaotic and unpredictable hours. He also concluded that “the Democrats had been in power so long they had adopted bullyboy tactics to enforce their power,” ignoring the fact that the Republicans had just recently been the Senate majority for six years.
Lott started making lists of things that he would change if and when he got the chance. He decided that he could rely on a “tight conservative clique of young senators,” some who had recently arrived and some who would soon follow: “We were conservative, we were hungry, we intended to make a difference and eventually capture the leadership.” The goals would be to make the Republicans both more right wing and more unified and to remake the Senate in the House’s image—efficient, driven by the leaders, and deeply partisan. Lott made it into the Republican leadership after the 1992 election, on the bottom rung, and started looking upward immediately.
Lott’s arrival in the Senate coincided with what would prove to be a major event in recent Senate history. President-elect George H. W. Bush had nominated John Tower to be his secretary of defense. The Senate had never rejected a Cabinet nomination made by a new president, and Tower, the former chairman of the Armed Services Committee and Reagan administration arms negotiator, had defense credentials that were long and strong. But Sam Nunn, the new chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had concerns about what he believed to be Tower’s alcoholism and womanizing. Other senators, notably Carl Levin, focused on possible conflicts of interest arising from Tower’s representation of defense contractors after he had left the Senate. The investigation of the nomination became protracted and ugly, as Democratic opponents in the Senate derived further support from right-wing conservative activist Paul Weyrich, who hated Tower for being a defender of abortion rights.
On the floor of the Senate, Rudman, a respected former prosecutor, launched a powerful critique of the Armed Services Committee report against Tower, saying that he had tried hundreds of cases and had never seen anyone “trashed on such flimsy evidence in my entire life.” Dole accused the Democrats of using the nomination to bloody the Bush administration in its infancy. John McCain, recently elected from Arizona, and William Cohen both argued passionately on Tower’s behalf. (Even today, Cohen still expresses outrage at the treatment that Tower received.) Democrat George Mitchell, who had just become Senate majority leader, made the vote a test of party solidarity, and Tower’s nomination was rejected 53–47, virtually along party lines.
The bitter battle did much to change the tenor of the Senate. The grievances of Lott and other younger Republicans about their treatment by Democrats no longer seemed so far-fetched. Two years later, the partisan divide deepened even further as the nation was treated to the extraordinary spectacle of Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court and his confirmation despite serious questions about his qualifications and the allegations of sexual harassment by Anita Hill.
When Bill Clinton entered the White House, ending twelve years of Republican presidential rule, the Republican attitude was: “You have the reins of power. You’re on your own. Don’t count on Republicans for support or votes.” None of Clinton’s recent predecessors had faced an absolutely unified opposition party on the issues most central to their agenda. Dole, once again showing his partisan side, announced “the good news is that he’s getting a honeymoon in Washington. The bad news is that Bob Dole is going to be his chaperone.”
“Dole didn’t really dislike Clinton,” former Clinton aide and author Sidney Blumenthal would write. “But when the whole Republican Party swiveled against Clinton to deny him any victory, Dole rushed to get to its head. He had prided himself on being a master of the Senate and now he turned his legislative skills to the purpose of blocking everything.”
The change in the Senate was palpable to the moderate Republicans. Rudman left first, retiring after two terms at the end of 1992, uncomfortable with “the confrontational, take-no-prisoners attitude” that the new Republicans brought to the Senate. In 1994, John Danforth, just months from retirement, joined Democrats in voting for cloture to pass Clinton’s crime bill. When Danforth joined Republican colleagues at lunch, he was met with silence. “It was as though someone had pushed a mute button,” he recalled. “It was devastating.” At the end of an eighteen-year career, Danforth found himself being treated like a pariah.
A year later, Republican leaders pressured Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield relentlessly to support legislation for a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. The Republican caucus, fired up by Rick Santorum and others from the New Right, virtually ostracized Hatfield when he refused to go along. Hatfield, who had a strong moral streak, finally told Dole that he would resign if that was what the caucus wanted, but that he would not vote in favor of a balanced budget constitutional amendment. It failed to get the requisite two-thirds of the Senate by one vote.
There had certainly been countless times in the past where Senate leaders had urged members of their caucus to vote with them on key issues. But if senators told the leader they could not do so, that traditionally ended the matter. Such decisions were regarded as being motivated by the senator’s sincere judgment on the merits, or the senator’s perception of political imperatives. Putting the screws to senators and treating them like pariahs if they refused to go along—this was a dramatic departure from the way the Great Senate had always worked.
In November 1994, Republicans led by Newt Gingrich took control of both the House and Senate in a rout reminiscent of 1980. In January 1995, Lott, who had gotten on the Republican leadership ladder, challenged Simpson, the popular Republican whip. Although Simpson was well liked and had Dole’s strong endorsement, Lott had been building support almost from the day he reached the Senate. When the Republican caucus met to decide, Connie Mack of Florida, a former House member and one of the most conservative senators, spoke for Lott, arguing that his long friendship with Gingrich would give Republicans a more unified front in their battles against Clinton. That type of argument would have cut no ice in the Senate just a few years before—relationships inside the Senate were what mattered—but the mood of the Senate Republicans had changed dramati
cally. One senator previously pledged to Simpson—Mitch McConnell—changed his mind and gave Lott a narrow margin of victory.
In 1996, when Dole resigned from the Senate to run for president, Lott became majority leader. As Lott noted proudly, for the first time, both the Republican Senate and the House had leaders from the South, the culmination of the GOP transformation that began with Goldwater.
Lott made his impact felt almost immediately. He ordered the comfortable but casual Republican cloakroom redecorated in a much more formal way. He established a strong whip system to ensure Republican Party discipline. “To bring order to the chaos,” Lott wrote, “I commanded the divided Senate through a team of six or seven Republican members. . . . The panel was nicknamed ‘The Council of Trent.’”
Few Republican moderates remained in the Senate, and Simpson, Hatfield, Cohen, and Nancy Kassebaum, finding the place much less congenial, decided to retire at the end of 1996. With increasing frequency, the new Republican senators would come from the House, bringing hard-edged, right-wing credentials—one thoughtful academic study described the group as “Gingrich senators.” One new Republican senator decidedly not in that group was Susan Collins, who had been a Senate staffer for Cohen from 1979 through 1986 before returning to Maine to serve in the state government. After she was elected to the Senate to replace Cohen in 1996, Collins was amazed to find how much more partisan the Senate had become in the ten years she had been away. In his own characteristically outspoken way, Alan Simpson would later say: “The Senate changed when the battered children from the House arrived, led by Trent Lott.”
The change in the Republican ranks would have a profound impact soon enough. In 1998, after the stunning revelation of President Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, House Republicans moved aggressively to consider impeachment. Clinton’s egregious bad judgment and behavior hardly seemed to reach the constitutionally mandated impeachment threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but Republicans plowed ahead, even after polls showed 70 percent of the nation wanted Clinton to stay in office, and as a result of their overreach, the 1998 off-year elections went surprisingly well for the Democrats. In the end, the Senate concluded the tragic farce of Clinton’s impeachment. But even with the eyes of the nation upon it, the Senate could not transcend the partisanship that had fueled the fires of impeachment. Only five Republicans voted against the Article of Impeachment charging Clinton with obstruction of justice.
PARTISAN POISON CONTINUED TO plague the Senate during the presidency of George W. Bush. Senator Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, took the majority leader’s post in 2002 after Lott was forced to resign as Leader following racially insensitive remarks at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday. For those who believe that the Senate should include exceptional people from diverse walks of life, Frist represented a potentially exciting choice. He was one of the nation’s leading heart surgeons, and a humanitarian who continued to make regular trips to Africa to perform heart and lung transplants.
Unfortunately, whether because of inexperience or presidential ambitions, the Senate leadership position did not bring out the best in Frist. It was an unwritten rule that Senators did not campaign against their colleagues. Certainly, Senate leaders, responsible for working closely together every day, did not campaign against each other. Frist ignored that rule, going to South Dakota to campaign harshly against Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader. Daschle lost narrowly, and one more tradition that had previously contributed to Senate comity came to an end.
Many Americans were deeply troubled when the Senate intervened in the case of Terry Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years after suffering a loss of oxygen to the brain at the age of twenty-six. If there was ever a moment for a wise and brave doctor to be Senate majority leader, this was it. However, purely on the basis of a videotape of Schiavo, Frist challenged the considered opinions of the Florida court that she was in a persistent, vegetative state. Frist’s opinion helped justify the congressional rush to action, which flew in the face of basic Republican principles about deference to states’ rights.
John Danforth, an Episcopal priest as well as a lawyer, now in private life, had watched the Republicans’ march to the right with mounting concern. The Schiavo case pushed him over the edge. Danforth was appalled that his party would inject the federal government into the most personal and agonizing decision a family could face. “This is not a coalition of traditional Republicans and the Christian right in the nature of a merger of equals,” Danforth wrote in a book entitled Faith and Politics: How the Moral Values Debate Divides America. “This is the takeover of the Republican Party by the Christian Right.” Danforth expressed particular contempt for Frist’s role, saying he could not “imagine a physician making a medical diagnosis without examining a patient unless he had a special need to appeal to the Christian Right.”
Senators still played an important and self-important part in the national debate, appearing on the Sunday talk shows in large numbers. But even as three senators—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain—battled for the presidency in 2008, many of their colleagues had stopped performing the principal function of senators: exercising wise and independent judgment in the national interest. “We have been miniaturized,” Olympia Snowe of Maine said sadly. And the situation was destined to get even worse.
BARACK OBAMA’S ELECTION WAS a moment of great national hope and pride, but it came at a time of near catastrophic economic turmoil. The nation’s economy had fallen off the cliff in the weeks before the election with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and AIG. By the time of Obama’s inauguration, the economic crisis had deepened. It is a core part of our national narrative that crisis brings out the best in Americans, and there was reason to believe the very real prospect of another great Depression would galvanize politicians from both parties to put aside their differences.
Events soon proved otherwise. The Republicans in the Senate and House quickly made it clear that the Obama administration and Hill Democrats were on their own. They were using the same playbook they had used against the Clinton administration sixteen years before, but this time their obstruction came at a time of absolute crisis for the country. As the Obama administration worked feverishly to put together a major economic stimulus bill, Senate Republicans focused primarily on preventing Obama’s appointees from taking office. The constant threat to filibuster made garnering sixty votes to invoke cloture an absolute requirement to accomplish anything. The White House and the Senate Democrats struggled to find Republicans to support the stimulus, finally winning support from Collins and Snowe as well as Arlen Specter, who decided to switch parties. Republican leader Mitch McConnell and members of his caucus put powerful pressure on Collins and Snowe to get with the program. A picture of Collins in the New York Times, which showed her walking up a staircase in the Capitol absolutely alone, spoke volumes.
The courage and independence of Collins and Snowe reminds us that today’s Senate does represent a real advance over the great Senate of the 1960’s and 1970’s in one vital respect—it is no longer a Senate that is exclusively made up of men. In 1979, the Senate included exactly one woman—Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas, who had just been elected. Thirty years later, there were seventeen women senators, not yet half of the Senate or even close, but a huge increase from what it had been. From all reports, the seventeen women senators, led by their “dean,” Barbara Mikulski, see themselves as a distinct group, and share uncommonly close friendships that transcend party lines. But despite their close ties, the women senators have been unable to alter the overall harsh and partisan climate of the Senate.
As Obama’s term continued, the debate about health care grew long, ugly, and bitterly partisan, with no Senate Republican supporting the effort. The anger across the country fueled further anger in the Senate, and vice versa. The enactment of the legislation by a united Democratic majority was made necessary by the unified opposition,
but predictably, passage of the legislation did not cool the partisan fires, as the Republicans promptly pledged to seek its repeal and to block funding for it.
By October 2010, the Senate had come to an extraordinary juncture. Against the odds, it had passed three momentous pieces of legislation—the economic stimulus, the health-care legislation, and a sweeping reform of financial regulation—and yet it was universally regarded as dysfunctional. Carl Levin, a thirty-two-year Senate veteran, was struck by the paradox. “It’s been the most productive Senate since I’ve been here in terms of major accomplishments,” Levin said, “and by far the most frustrating. It’s almost impossible, day to day, to get anything done. Routine bills and nominations get bottled up indefinitely. Everything is stopped by the threat of filibusters—not real filibusters, just the threat of filibusters.” In a New Yorker article titled “The Empty Chamber,” George Packer noted that “the two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body.” In August 2011, the Senate did play a more constructive role than the House in narrowly averting a U.S. government default on its debt, but no branch of government acquitted itself well in creating the crisis that brought the country to the brink.
As debate and despair about the Senate intensified, the two most iconic senators, Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, passed away. Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer in August 2009; Byrd to old age, in June 2010. Although Kennedy was only forty-eight when he challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980, he never again sought the presidency. Instead, he became, undeniably, one of the greatest senators in the history of country. Everyone who watched him marveled at how Kennedy could combine such passionate commitment to his liberal beliefs with a constant willingness to work successfully with other senators, and presidents, who held dramatically different views.