Democrats Forced To Work on Margins
washingtonpost.com
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 22, 2003; Page A06
Many Democrats figured they had hit bottom last year when Republicans captured control of the Senate, completing their federal government takeover. Then the bottom dropped out, too.
By the end of this year's congressional session, Republicans had tightened their already firm grip on the House and moved to marginalize Democrats' influence in both chambers by shutting them out of negotiations on the final version of major bills.
They excluded Democrats from endgame bargaining over legislation to spur energy production. They allowed only Democrats of their choosing to participate in negotiations over restructuring Medicare -- Democrats who, it turned out, were willing to support the GOP-drafted version. And, after a bipartisan start, they barred Democrats from final decisions on the $328 billion spending bill for nonmilitary activities of government.
On several of the issues, Democrats were divided, and some concede their responses were limp and late. As a result, they had little impact on most of the major legislation that dominated Congress's agenda at year's end, although they blocked passage of the energy and spending bills, at least until Congress reconvenes Jan. 20.
With next year's elections already threatening to heighten political tensions, the power struggle over legislation sets the stage for what could be a particularly quarrelsome and acrimonious 2004 session. Republicans show no signs of yielding, and Democrats have vowed to fight back more vigorously than they did this year.
Republicans defend their tactics as an updated version of those used by Democrats when they ran Congress during most of the last half century and as necessary to carry out President Bush's agenda in a Congress where they control both houses by narrow margins.
Democrats say their party never went so far as to exclude Republicans from House-Senate conferences. They accuse GOP leaders, especially in the House, of trying to impose one-party government in a nation whose electorate is closely divided.
Some lawmakers in both parties chose not to participate in the partisan in-fighting and worry about its impact on Congress as an institution.
"It's almost anything goes," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.). "I think we're on the edge of something dangerous if we don't turn it around. . . . It's like the Middle East. You just keep ratcheting up the intensity of the conflict."
Although Democrats managed to thwart action on the energy and spending bills, they failed to stop 2003's biggest bill of all: a reshaping of Medicare that many Democrats see as a first step toward "privatization" of the government-run health care program for the elderly and disabled.
The Democrats' angst was deepened by the fact that the bill provides a prescription drug benefit, giving Republicans -- including Bush -- bragging rights for passing an initiative long championed by Democrats.
Too late to affect the Medicare or energy negotiations, Democrats started blocking House-Senate conferences unless Republicans gave ironclad assurances they would be able to participate in the negotiations. In doing so, they won compromises on forest fire and credit reporting legislation.
But they failed to keep the White House and its congressional allies from resorting to a Republicans-only operation in working out final details of the spending bill on such politically sensitive issues as overtime pay rules, media ownership, food labeling, gun control and travel to Cuba.
The Republicans' aggressive moves caught the Democrats off guard. Although they had come to expect tough GOP tactics in the House, they were stunned when the strategies moved to the Senate, where relations between the parties have been less confrontational. Some Democrats now regret they did not react more quickly and aggressively.
"We never imagined they would not include all conferees" in the negotiations, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said in an interview as the session was ending. "Our mistake was we didn't insist on inclusion" before key bills were sent to conference for final drafting, he added.
Democrats "probably should have done more" to protest the Medicare negotiations and will be "much more resolute" in confronting future GOP tactics, said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who played a pivotal role in the Democrats' response to the Medicare legislation.
The out-of-power party normally plays a secondary role in such negotiations, and Democrats were not shy about exercising their majority-party powers to relegate Republicans to the sidelines when they were in control. But Democrats and some outside observers contend that the new GOP tactics are changing the nature of power in Congress in a fundamental, even historic way.
"It really is one-party, winner-take-all rule, almost like parliamentary government," with its top-down chain of command and strong party discipline, said James Thurber, a political science professor at American University.
"Now Republicans have established the principle: We can do it without them," said Norman Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute.
Even in this climate, Democrats have powerful weapons in the Senate: the filibuster and other rules that require 60 votes to force passage of seriously contested legislation -- a difficult hurdle for the 51-vote Senate GOP majority to scale.
These rules, and the traditions that reinforce them, make the Senate the court of last resort for the minority party or a minority faction on any particular issue. By contrast, the House's rules and traditions clearly favor the majority.
But Senate rules also promote independence by individual senators, making it hard to impose the discipline needed to sustain filibusters or other forms of obstruction. "In the Senate tradition of individualism, it's hard to keep the troops together," Ornstein said.
Democrats showed notable cohesion in rejecting a half-dozen of Bush's most conservative nominees to federal appellate courts. But they split to varying degrees over most of the administration's major legislative priorities, including Bush's three tax cuts, abortion restrictions and the Medicare initiative. Although a substantial majority of Democrats opposed the energy bill, the vote split more along regional than partisan lines.
On Medicare, Democrats see plenty of blame to go around.
Some question Kennedy's early support for a Senate bill that opened the way for conference agreement. Many are furious at Sens. Max Baucus (Mont.) and John Breaux (La.), who stuck around to negotiate after Republicans barred all other Democrats, including Daschle, from the conference. Others say Daschle should have kicked up more of a fuss, although he insists it would have done little good. Still others say Democratic critics of the bill might have prevailed if the AARP had not endorsed it.
Daschle relies more on persuasion than force in dealing with his caucus, and senators of both parties caution that strong-arm tactics can backfire in the strongly individualist chamber. They point to the pressures that led Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) to leave the GOP and turn the Senate over to the Democrats in mid-2001.
But the problem may go deeper than tactics, Thurber said. "Republicans have a clear message and clear tactics" that the Democrats seem to lack, he said. "Democrats don't have fire in their bellies that they had" in the days of Franklin Roosevelt, "maybe because Democrats are defending what's there, while Republicans are pushing for change, which is always popular." |
