Ej Dionne's excellent column today notes the generational tension between the old liberal lions who'll be chairing the committees in the new Congress and the young turks, more used to a parliamentary, command-and-control system meant to support perpetual campaigning. I'm not sure if those groups will actually conflict, but the Speaker will have to navigate two very different types of perspectives: One in which Congressmen are powerful, the other in which they're drones.
You just wouldn't see any of the younger members shattering message discipline as violently as Charlie Rangel did when he stepped forward a week ago and proposed a draft. You don't do that to your caucus. Rangel, however, does not see himself as a cog in the caucus -- he's a committee chair, a power center, and can do as he pleases. Whether it pleases other people isn't his problem.
It's worth saying, though, that the composition of these chairs is very different than it has been in past Congresses. Whatever electoral difficulties it imposes, the South's abandonment of the Democratic Party has freed the Donkey from its eldest, most powerful conservatives. Southern Democrats used to chair all manner of committees (the South tends to elect younger and reelect longer than other regions, thus advantaging itself in the seniority oriented Congress) and formed an impenetrable voting veto against liberalism. That era is done. The new chairs are old school liberals, the new members a mixture of progressive populists and process-oriented technocrats. Whatever divides exist between those groups, they're far more bridgeable than anything that existed between the crusty Dixiecrats and the Democratic mainstream. It will be a Congress like this one that passes universal health care. And it will be because the South's hammerlock on the institution has lifted.
