The list of important legislation that will die from inattention or political suffocation at the end of the 108th Congress is long and distinguished one: energy legislation, welfare reform, highway funding, asbestos compensation, medical-malpractice liability, a tax overhaul for corporations that do business overseas and that are now subject to sanctions by the European Union.
Part of the choke hold is a natural outflow of the legislative slowdown that comes with any election year. But another huge factor is the standoff in the Senate, where minority Democrats have come to understand the power of “no.” Exercising the only real leverage the party has in Washington, Senate Democrats are making it difficult, and impossible when they can, for the Republican majority to work its will and that of the White House. The result is that much of the much-touted collegiality and courtesy of the Senate is working it way up the endangered-species list.
Republicans have a name for these Democratic tactics: obstructionism. It's turned into a mantra. Senator Judd Gregg on medical-liability tort reform: “This obstructionism is overwhelming on a lot of issues. But on this issue, the obstructionism is going to actually affect people's lives … . We certainly hope that these obstructionist tactics will abate and we'll get at least to debate it on the floor.”
They didn't -- because they don't have the 60 votes they need to shut down debate and kill a filibuster.
On the same bill, Majority Leader Bill Frist lamented that the obstruction keeps “coming back again and again and again.”
“Not much is going to get done,” says Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who heads the Senate Energy Committee. “The Democrats don't want anything. They don't want judges, or anything else. This is the worst I've seen it in all the time I've been here.” And Domenici was elected when Richard Nixon won re-election in 1972.
Of course, one man's obstructionism is another's wily parliamentary maneuver. And Tom Daschle is the master of the wily maneuver.
The Democratic leader has so infuriated the Republicans that Frist, in a sharp break with tradition, will go to South Dakota at the end of the month to campaign against Daschle, who is in a tight re-election fight with former GOP Representative John Thune. It is the first time that anyone can remember a party leader in the Senate actively campaigning against his opposite number. These are extraordinarily bitter times, indeed.Says Frist, “I may sound a bit frustrated, but in truth, I'm really bothered by the fact that we are not being allowed to govern, to debate, to amend, to pass legislation that is in the best interest of the American people.”
And there, of course, is a real point of contention: The “best interest of the American people” is not a universally agreed-upon concept.
Daschle affects a bemused smile when asked about the obstruction charge. Across from the Ohio Clock in the Capitol in front of which he and other lawmakers meet with reporters every week, he puts an open palm to his chest as if to say, “Who me?” And then sternly explains that the problem lies with what he sees as a high-handed, nonnegotiable approach by the GOP.
“Listen,” he says. “I don't call 18 amendments on the [corporate-tax reform] bill obstructionist. The best they could do was 50 amendments. So where's the obstruction here? You know … I think I laid out pretty clearly all the actions that I took personally and that our caucus has taken to get a resolution on asbestos. So I wouldn't call that obstructionist. Again, as I say, they seem to say, ‘We want it our way or we don't want it at all.' Well, this is a republic, and in a republic you have got to have the kind of vigorous debate on issues of consequence that the Senate allows. And that's all we're asking: a good, vigorous debate with amendments, with opportunities for senators to express themselves.”
For Democrats, that self -expression increasingly taking the form of a single word: no.
Outnumbered on both sides of the Capitol and operating in an atmosphere of full combat, Democrats have no way to advance any parts of their own agenda, except by barter or extortion, and they must thank the Founding Fathers everyday for the little device known as the Senate filibuster.
In many ways, Senate Democrat are no only doing battle with the Senate GOP colleagues but fighting a battle that House Democrats are ill-equipped to fight. “For the most part, we don't play a role in the House when we get to the floor,” laments House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer.
“The fundamental issue is that Republicans are refusing to allow Democrats to offer any amendments on important issues,” says Jim Manley, spokesman for stalwart Democrat and uber-obstructionist Senator Ted Kennedy. “All Frist is trying to do is pander to his right wing by putting bills on the floor that he knows is not going to go anywhere.”
Frist's communication director, Bob Stevenson, told me a few weeks ago that the GOP was not going to be pushed around by the Democrats. “We are not going to let them run the place,” he said.
Quietly, some Democrats are chuckling and saying the same thing.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.
