Creature of dysfunction
Joe Lieberman's power is a sympton of senatorial gridlock
Creature of dysfunction
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
I'm not quite sure how we wound up with President Lieberman. Last I recall, he completed his sole bid for the presidency on Feb. 3, 2004, when he got his butt kicked by losing seven out of seven Democratic contests.
Yet thanks to the undemocratic rules and routinized dysfunction of the U.S. Senate, this guy gets the opportunity to issue peremptory decrees about health care reform, with the aim of bending the overwhelming Democratic majority to his whimsical will. All because he has set himself up as the crucial 60th vote in a chamber that now seems to require 60 votes for passage of anything remotely substantive.
My aim today is not to detail Lieberman's latest craven act, in which he declared his stalwart opposition to the Democratic health reform compromise that would've allowed people over age 55 to buy into Medicare - just three short months after he had publicly voiced support for allowing people over age 55 to buy into Medicare, a stance he had also supported when he was Al Gore's running mate. Nor is my aim to replay the ongoing debate over what really motivates Lieberman's obstructionism. (Is he still bitter about his '06 Senate Democratic primary defeat? Is he trying to torpedo health reform in order to please the private health insurance industry that has pumped $1 million into his career? At this point, who cares?)
What interests me most is how Lieberman has become a prime symptom of the Senate's institutional ills. He has been exercising virtual veto power over health care reform only because the Democrats sorely need him as the 60th vote, and the only reason they sorely need him is because - thanks to the omnipresent threat of a filibuster, and thanks to the extreme partisan polarization - the Senate can barely pass ordinary legislation anymore unless there are 60 votes to do it. That's the bare number required to break a filibuster and thus prevent a minority from thwarting the majority.
This routinization of the filibuster is actually a fairly recent development, little remarked upon in the press. For nearly 200 years, the Senate passed all kinds of important legislation via simple majority votes. Lawmakers on the left and right routinely compromised and formed bipartisan coalitions to get things done. Most importantly, filibusters were exceedingly rare. Senate scholars have discovered that there were only 23 filibusters during the entire nineteenth century; in the 2007-2008 Senate alone, there were 142.
In the words of Julian Zelizer, a Princeton history professor who has studied the Senate, "the filibuster has become a normalized tool of political combat. There have been more filibusters employed in any given single year since the 1980s than took place throughout all of the nineteenth century." He rightly attributes this "filibuster-mania" to the growing ideological divide between the parties, and the lessening appetite for compromise. All told, he says, the Senate today "is a source of obstructionism, anti-majoritarianism, and dysfunctional deliberation."
And Lieberman is its creature. In a normal era, he would not be flexing so much muscle. In a normal era, an overwhelming majority of Democrats (say, 57 or 58, all of them duly elected to get things done) would simply pass major legislation with, say, 57 or 58 votes, and Lieberman's independence would be an irrelevent footnote.
Instead, here was Lieberman recently, hurling thunderbolts on Fox News: "I will not allow this (health reform) bill to come to a final vote." And here he was on CBS News: "I will use the power I have as a single senator to stop a final vote."
But what's fascinating about Lieberman is how often his sanctimony is trumped by his hypocrisy. Back in 1995, he actually co-sponsored Senate legislation that would have curbed the filibuster. Back then, he complained that the power of a single senator was a bad thing. He complained about how the filibuster "has increased the power of every individual senator, and senators aren't too good at yielding individual power."
Today, thanks to the ever-present threat of a GOP filibuster on health reform, he revels in the power he wields "as a single senator." Yet here's what he said in November 1994, when his curb-the-filibuster bill was first being readied: "I think the filibuster has become not only in reality an obstacle to accomplishment here, but it is also a symbol of a lot that ails Washington today....The whole process of individual senators being able to hold up legislation, which in a sense is an extension of the filibuster - it's just unfair."
Clearly, those articulations don't square with Lieberman's principles of the moment. All that matters now, apparently, is that the majority Democrats bow and scrape, and craft health reform to his liking. The Medicare buy-in has been duly jettisoned. And yesterday, Lieberman finally sorta said that he is finally ready to like. From his lips fell these words: "I am getting to that position to where I can say what I wanted to say all along, that I'm ready to vote for health care reform."
Oh thank you thank you, creature of Senate dysfunction! Shall we wash your car now? Or shall we simply cue up "Hail to the Chief?"
Just out of curiosity, where does that talking point about "overhauling 1/6 of the economy" come from? By even the most outlandishly high estimate of the cost of the bill I can't get to 1/6 of the economy. And how is it "overhauling" when most of the health-care industry will not be affected?— liberal- The xi-BillyBoy dialog buried below somewhere really does raise an interesting question about modern manners. Why do so many political bloggers issue virulent ad-hominem attacks against opponents who are total strangers to them? It almost seems like a form of mental illness.— liberal
- I guess some bill will get passed. I think that is all Obama really wants. Just something to sign so he can save face and say a healthcare bill was passed. If the Democrats wanted an easier time of it they should have worked in the spirit of bipartisanship and implemented some of the conservative ideas. Such as tort reform, fostering competition by allowing anyone to sell insurance accross state lines, and eliminating coverage for elective surgury. But that isn't what they did, and now they are in a " pickle ". So the scapegoat for the far left ideologues that control our government is Joe Lieberman. But the real problem is this President and these leftists who have over taken the Senate. The bottom line on this bill is that at this point it appears to more of a tax bill than anything else. It increases spending by 1 trillion, insures no one for 5 years, will put doctors out of business, increase costs of healthcare for the 286 million who are insured, bestow massive tax increases on people with modest incomes, and will still leave 24 million uninsured. IT IS THE WOLDS LARGEST LEMON! The American people increasingly are not buying and the Senate shouldn't even be trying to sell it.
- It is rather amusing to hear Polman whine about the filibuster when the Democrats used it quite joyously to block conservative court nominees. I guess it all depends on who's ox is being gored.
- disappointedDem- You said" I think Ol’ Joe has seen the writing on the wall and has been paving the way out of the Senate and into a very lucrative healthcare lobbying job." .... Not to pick on you but do you liberals ever look at the campaign donations and lobbying money? Most of the those Senators get money from the healthcare lobby. Democrats have a 60/40 advantage in money from the healthcare lobby. They are all getting money from healthcare companys. Why do you think the healthcare company's are going to get millions of new customers? They are all in this together. Do not buy into this false narrative that Democrats are trying to sell you through the complicit media. They are as crooked as a question mark.
- "thanks to the extreme partisan polarization"- What extremists like Polman and Pelosi don't get, is that most of this country are centrists. Satisfy the centrists, and you won;t have to worry about Joe Lieberman. Craft an absurdly partisan and disengenous bill, and only the far left will support it. Its called Democracy.— tjm333126
- tjm- excellent post. You hit the nail on the head.
Comment removed.- TOM: Obama offered to hear what Conse 'Pubs had to offer, and Conse 'Pubs saw that as a weakness to be exploited. They didn't want an input in governing with their ideas; they wanted 50% of all power and decisions. Ergo, that's bi-governing, and it isn't bi-partisan. Listening is not governing, and fake co-operation is destructive, as opposed to constructive. They fake co-operation and brag about torpedoing the issue.— Talvenada
- I think it's amusing that Polman would choose this moment to whine about a filibuster also. The problem here isn't laws concerning filibusters. It's about about the corporate lobby being in control of our government. The reason we don't have major healthcare reform is because huge amounts of money have been used to buy off members of congress and the White House. Forget everything else.— p-diddy
- TJM: If Spin Boro Mike agrees with you, you must be an extremist. There are no extremist Conse 'Pubs? Cheney was a centrist? I remember asking a Conse 'Pub what it would take to make you guys happy, and he said give us everything we want. Does that sound centrist to you?— Talvenada
- Tom: Gee, you're a whiz with polling data. People want major reform, not meaningless band aids that don't even save us money. Lieberman doesn't want a public option, and he doesn't want Medicare expanded. He never even bothers to tell anyone what he wants, in case he needs to move the goalposts again. The public doesn't support Lieberman's position (whatever that is).— p-diddy
- PS: Lieberman is serving his last term; no way he gets reelected in heavily Democrat CT. He won last time because he was still able to carry a sizeable number of Democrats even though he was an Independent. He won't have that support next time around - if he even runs. He won't have access to DNC campaign money either. He knows running as a Republican is hopeless in CT. So where's his campaign money going to come from?— p-diddy
- swedesboromike - I completely agree with your post from 5:35 PM - I thought I had conveyed the same view in my post, but apparently not. BTW - I have been against any rushed effort to cram a HCR bill through congress - it's politial, through and through, and benefits only the ins co's and their bought & paid for Congress & WH. HCR is desperately needed, IMO, and must address costs, access, delivery and tort reform. It's a huge loss for everyone that it was "done" in this cynical way. This bill will be worse than no bill, from what I can tell. But I hope not. I know too many people that have inadequate insurance or have been denied needed procedures already.— DisappointedDem
- Comment removed.
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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