For One Evening, Ducking Debate

The night was mild, the wild duck was tender, and for a handful of senators from both parties Sunday, dinner at the Washington home of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) was a welcome respite from the tension over the anticipated fight about the filibuster of judicial nominees.

For a few hours, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) stepped away from the escalating rhetoric and the heat of the television cameras to socialize on the Frists’ back patio with senior Republican senators.

Most of the evening, Nelson said, was pure relaxation. He did huddle briefly with Frist and Reid, but only to coordinate their calendars for negotiating sessions Monday.

By Monday night, the two leaders had declared their compromise efforts at an end in the dispute over Republican efforts to ban the filibusters for judicial nominees.

Monday’s talks made Sunday’s dinner seem even more of an anomaly. Bipartisan socializing used to be routine on Capitol Hill, but it has become increasingly rare in these intensely partisan times -- and some predict that it is threatened with virtual extinction if the filibuster fight results in a change of Senate rules.

Frist and Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) planned the feast months ago, after the two bagged several ducks on a hunting trip to Maryland’s Eastern Shore on a frigid day in February, said Domenici’s chief of staff, Steve Bell.

It was coincidence, all involved said, that it happened to fall on the weekend before Frist was expected to bring the simmering conflict over the filibuster to a boil by opening debate on the confirmation of two conservative judges the Democrats had promised to block, including California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown.

Frist and Domenici began cooking Saturday in Frist’s kitchen. In addition to the duck, they stewed goose and roasted venison. They served the game with asparagus and rice, topping off the meal with ice cream sundaes.

Domenici used to throw bipartisan game feasts almost every year, Bell said, but stopped six years ago because fewer and fewer senators seemed to have the time or the interest in such gatherings.

But for a couple of hours, he said, political Washington seemed the way it used to be decades ago, when he and Domenici first came to Capitol Hill.

“I would call it a respite,” Bell said. “You do need that every so often.”

Bell said the participants -- there were 35 in all, including spouses and aides -- agreed to keep talk of filibusters, Social Security, gas prices and other issues off the table.

Instead, he said, they admired Domenici’s duck a l’orange and were serenaded by a country singer who is a friend of the Frists.

It didn’t even mar the evening, Bell said, when Reid got a bit of buckshot in a bite of duck.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), another guest, came to Washington in 1967 as an aide to then-Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. The biggest difference between then and now, Alexander said, “is that we spend most of our spare time in team meetings. It swallows up most of the time that we might be together, getting to know each other, finding mutual interests.”

The growth of outside interest groups and the transformation of media into a round-the-clock business, Alexander said, has done much to drive lawmakers further apart.

“When you have a fairly large number of senators interested in finding a way to avoid a train wreck over judicial nominations,” Alexander said, “the more we can find things like this, the better.”