U.S. Senate Is Certainly Up to This Challenge

There are probably some mixed feelings among Senate Republicans about the victory of President-elect George W. Bush; it makes their life a good deal tougher and more complicated than if Vice President Al Gore had prevailed. Subtracting Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman from the Democratic ranks and having Connecticut Gov. John Rowland almost certainly replacing Gore’s former running mate with a Republican would have given the GOP a clear, albeit hardly commanding, 51-49 margin in the chamber.

Slight as that edge would have been, it would have blunted Democratic demands for parity of seats on committees, substantial increases in their budgets and even the more far-fetched proposal to rotate majority leadership.

Moreover, with no Republican in the White House, the party’s leaders in both houses would have had unchallenged national preeminence as GOP spokesmen. As it is, however, Republicans and Democrats alike will have to find a way to accommodate to the reality of a Senate in which majority status for the Republicans will result merely from the technicality of having a GOP vice president to cast tie-breaking votes. My guess is that the Senate will meet the challenge.

My optimism in this era of hyper-polarized politics is based upon the distinctiveness of the Senate as an institution that accords an extraordinarily large amount of power to its members. So, while senators can, almost on a whim, propose amendments to bills, the same privilege on the House side is strictly rationed by the leadership. Accordingly, House members feel more free to denounce their own chamber’s work, and many do. Senators, who have the ability to make themselves players, have a hard time disassociating themselves from the work of their chamber.

A second factor that argues for bipartisan accommodation in the Senate is that the constituencies of its members tend to be more diverse than those of House members. Accordingly, a California senator will have to juggle a bewildering variety of interests, ranging from agriculture to the entertainment industry and from tourism to immigration policy. A member from one of the state’s 52 House districts may have constituents who are predominantly employed in agriculture or are members of a particular minority group. Most will represent districts that, because of political gerrymandering, will be either preponderantly Democratic or overwhelmingly Republican. That fact alone adds fuel to the intensity of House deliberations.

Recent history suggests that senators have a way of working things out when the reputation of the institution is threatened. We need go back no further than the Clinton impeachment to see evidence of the Senate’s deep-seated ethic of self-preservation. The debate over the articles of impeachment in the House sparked such an acrimonious battle between Democrats and Republicans that the articles were adopted by an almost party-line vote. But it wasn’t the final vote that senators found unsettling. In the words of one senator I spoke with in the aftermath of the House vote, it was “their willingness to bust up the furniture over there.”

Fearful that the same kind of intemperance would ignite the Senate, both Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) worked together, although not always easily or successfully, to find a way for the chamber to survive the stresses of the Clinton trial. In the House, where Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) are barely on speaking terms, such collaboration would be out of the question.

It should not be assumed, however, that senators are cut from a finer bolt of cloth than House members. After all, about one-third of the Senate consists of former members of the House, and the personalities of mature people do not change by moving from the south side of the Capitol to the north. What does change is the power of the individual member. That increased power is, in a curious way, ennobling. It gives each senator a considerable stake in the well-being of the Senate.

Some Republican chairmen have shown a commendable willingness to acknowledge the enhanced power of the Democrats by acceding to their demands for additional seats, more staff and larger budgets for the opposition. Sharing the chairman’s gavel on committees is probably further than Republicans will want to go, but some symbolic gestures, such as the invitation by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, to Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the committee’s Republican chairman, to accompany him to the Supreme Court to hear the first oral arguments in the contested presidential case are suspicious.

In the close confines of the Senate, there are few places to hide from political enemies. Vested with great powers of obstruction, senators make formidable adversaries. It is probably this domestic version of a mutually assured destruction pact that offers the most substantial promise that they will find a way to work things out.