I'm very much in agreement with the spirit of Jon Chait's latest article. Kent Conrad's insistence on farm subsidies and tax breaks stands in mocking contradiction to his emphasis on deficit reduction. Ben Nelson's affection for the Nebraska-based middlemen in the student loans program will cost taxpayers $4 billion even as Nelson cries over the debt. The rules of the Senate and the incentives of obstruction render decent governance a touching impossibility. But Chait uses these examples to argue that "Democrats are especially susceptible to the dysfunction of the Senate." This is something of a familiar argument. Republicans, we're frequently told, are a well-oiled congressional machine. They put party before person. They show due deference to their elected leader. They deal viciously with strays and traitors. They merrily ram legislation through the reconciliation process and strong-arm their members to ensure cooperation. And that may all be true. But my sense is that Democrats are more certain of Republican unity than Republicans are.Chait casts the Bush record as a fairly clear procession of legislative victories. "Bush managed to enact several rounds of tax cuts that substantially exceeded those in his campaign platform, along with two war resolutions, a Medicare prescription drug benefit designed to maximize profits for the health care industry, energy legislation, education reform, and sundry other items," he writes. "Whatever the substantive merits of this agenda, its passage represented an impressive feat of political leverage, accomplished through near-total partisan discipline." It's hard, of course, to match Obama's few months against Bush's eight years. But even so, I'm not sure Bush's eight years lend themselves to such a clean history.The original tax cuts, for instance, traveled through a Democratic Senate and found their key partisans on the opposite side of the aisle. Max Baucus stood behind President George W. Bush at the signing ceremony. The second round, which came after the 2002 midterms, ran through a Republican-chamber, but here told a story more familiar to stimulus-watchers: A group of moderate Senate Republicans, led by the then-heterodox John McCain, partnered with centrist Democrats and halved the size of Bush's tax cuts. Other Bush accomplishments followed similar paths. No Child Left Behind was a compromise bill built with the cooperation of Ted Kennedy and George Miller. George Voinovich and Bob Bennett opposed the legislation. Medicare Part D began as a bipartisan effort (again with Kennedy) and only became a war after Bill Thomas and the House Republicans warped it in conference committee -- which they did because they could barely pass it through the partisans in the lower chamber. In the Senate, Orrin Hatch, Trent Lott, John Sununu, Judd Gregg, and a handful of other Republicans voted against the final bill. In all these cases, Republicans evinced the exact same frustrations with their moderates, and the compromises they forced, that you hear from today's Democrats. IS THE PROBLEM SENATE DEMOCRATS OR THE SENATE?
I'm very much in agreement with the spirit of Jon Chait's latest article. Kent Conrad's insistence on farm subsidies and tax breaks stands in mocking contradiction to his emphasis on deficit reduction. Ben Nelson's affection for the Nebraska-based middlemen in the student loans program will cost taxpayers $4 billion even as Nelson cries over the debt. The rules of the Senate and the incentives of obstruction render decent governance a touching impossibility. But Chait uses these examples to argue that "Democrats are especially susceptible to the dysfunction of the Senate." This is something of a familiar argument. Republicans, we're frequently told, are a well-oiled congressional machine. They put party before person. They show due deference to their elected leader. They deal viciously with strays and traitors. They merrily ram legislation through the reconciliation process and strong-arm their members to ensure cooperation. And that may all be true. But my sense is that Democrats are more certain of Republican unity than Republicans are.Chait casts the Bush record as a fairly clear procession of legislative victories. "Bush managed to enact several rounds of tax cuts that substantially exceeded those in his campaign platform, along with two war resolutions, a Medicare prescription drug benefit designed to maximize profits for the health care industry, energy legislation, education reform, and sundry other items," he writes. "Whatever the substantive merits of this agenda, its passage represented an impressive feat of political leverage, accomplished through near-total partisan discipline." It's hard, of course, to match Obama's few months against Bush's eight years. But even so, I'm not sure Bush's eight years lend themselves to such a clean history.The original tax cuts, for instance, traveled through a Democratic Senate and found their key partisans on the opposite side of the aisle. Max Baucus stood behind President George W. Bush at the signing ceremony. The second round, which came after the 2002 midterms, ran through a Republican-chamber, but here told a story more familiar to stimulus-watchers: A group of moderate Senate Republicans, led by the then-heterodox John McCain, partnered with centrist Democrats and halved the size of Bush's tax cuts. Other Bush accomplishments followed similar paths. No Child Left Behind was a compromise bill built with the cooperation of Ted Kennedy and George Miller. George Voinovich and Bob Bennett opposed the legislation. Medicare Part D began as a bipartisan effort (again with Kennedy) and only became a war after Bill Thomas and the House Republicans warped it in conference committee -- which they did because they could barely pass it through the partisans in the lower chamber. In the Senate, Orrin Hatch, Trent Lott, John Sununu, Judd Gregg, and a handful of other Republicans voted against the final bill. In all these cases, Republicans evinced the exact same frustrations with their moderates, and the compromises they forced, that you hear from today's Democrats. 
