THE TROUBLE WITH THE SENATE.

THE TROUBLE WITH THE SENATE. A few days back, Brad Plumer highlighted this excerpt from a New York Times piece on Iraq oversight; he was focusing on something else in the excerpt, but my attention turned to the mention of Jay Rockefeller:

It is unclear how far chairmen like Mr. Rockefeller may push the administration to obtain more information about secret programs. The committee, like many others, has often degenerated into partisan rancor over the past two years, and Mr. Rockefeller, like other incoming chairmen, has told colleagues that one of his priorities is to restore the committee�s historic bipartisanship.

Needless to say, everyone's making happy talk like that right now for public consumption and one should avoid taking it all at face value. That said, Rockefeller's political fecklessness as the leading Democrat on the Intelligence committee is by now a matter of established empirical fact. (He's "a wimp � not confident of his own judgments,� was how one source put it to Laura last year.) His ascension to commitee chair shouldn't inspire a great deal of excitement in Democrats eager for some aggressive investigations, strong policy stances, and partisan hardball. And frankly, he's not the only incoming Senate chairmen about which this could be said. Joe Biden on Foreign Relations will be in constant danger of losing himself in a fog of self-aggrandizing bloviation on crucial foreign policy issues of the day (Iraq topping the list); Bad Max Baucus, meanwhile, will be back in charge of the Finance committee. And then, of course, there's an openly defiant Joe Lieberman taking the helm of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction to investigate just about anything (the counterpart to Henry Waxman's panel in the House). Any takers on a bet that Lieberman's not going to be carrying out that job quite to the satisfaction of most Democrats?

UPDATE: See Mike Crowley on an early potential dispute between Baucus and the Dem caucus, regarding authorization allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Crowley remarks, "Baucus faces re-election in 2008, making him likely to tack rightward to please conservative Montana voters. (Although it's possible that drug-price negotiation would play well in a Montana that just elected a populist like Jon Tester.)" For what it's worth, I think Crowley's "on the other hand" parenthetical is more on the mark. Blocking Medicare's ability to bargain for cheaper drugs seems like significanly less of an electorally seductive move than backing lavish tax cuts (which Baucus did prior to his 2002 race).

--Sam Rosenfeld