Don’t Mourn (Yet) for the Senate : Congress: The institution where crass newcomers learn to grow into their togas will survive the exodus of 13 moderates.

A group of somber-faced physicians has gathered at the bedside of the U.S. Senate, issuing prognoses that grow grimmer by the day. It seems that the invalid’s already weakened condition took a turn for the worse with the announcement by Democrat Bill Cohen of Maine that he wouldn’t run for a fourth term in November.

Whispers of the Senate’s demise began last year when such popular and attractive members as New Jersey’s Bill Bradley and Georgia’s Sam Nunn decided to abandon the chamber. The vigil has now taken on the appearance of a deathwatch as journalists declaim in portentous tones an institution drained of its vital fluids of moderation and about to be consigned to the malign custody of Jesse Helms, Alfonse D’Amato and other putative extremists.

This past week saw such usually calm observers of Congress as CNN’s Bruce Morton and David E. Rosenbaum of the New York Times joining in the keening. Morton lamented that the Senate is becoming more partisan and less centrist, a place where moderates will be uncomfortable. Rosenbaum predicted that things will get even worse after the November elections, with the substitution of such sensible members as Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Nancy L. Kassebaum (R-Kan.) by gimlet-eyed ideologues who scorn compromise as a degraded form of political behavior. Rosenbaum conceded that no one knows yet who the replacements will be.

The overwrought diagnosis of the Senate as being on its last legs makes good copy for commentators. And the prospect of a Senate run by fatheads and zealots is a provocative one for political science classes, where professors will bemoan the passage of a Homeric Age when wise and moderate people held sway. One can only imagine the hysteria if Daniel Patrick Moynihan decides to hang up his toga.

Let’s get a grip on ourselves and not be so eager to write off the Senate on the strength of the comings and goings of individual senators. Let’s look instead at the impressive institutional strength of the Senate, which derives from its ability to empower political minorities and temper, if not frustrate, the will of even the most zealous majority.

The loss of the 13 incumbents who have announced their departure does not strip the Senate of Democrats and Republicans willing to compromise, even if every last one of them is replaced by a rigid ideologue. Continuing to pursue a moderate course will be such Republicans as John Chafee of Rhode Island, James Jeffords of Vermont and John McCain of Arizona and centrist Democrats such as Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and John Breaux of Louisiana.

There is more to the vitality of the Senate than the fact that the remaining moderates will be able to wield their considerable prerogatives under the chamber’s rules to confound the extremists, as they have so often done in the first session of the 104th Congress. There is also the Senate’s remarkable power of socialization. It should be recalled that when Hank Brown (R-Colo.) and Alan Simpson--now praised for their temperateness--first came to the Senate, neither was seen as a force for reason and moderation.

What is truly impressive about the Senate is its ability, over time, to persuade even some of its most dogmatic members that they have a constitutional warrant to view the world in subtler hues and broader scope than their House colleagues. This process of refinement does not work in every case--we are not awash in philosopher-kings--but it usually provides a solid core of levelheaded members. Coming to understand the vast personal influence that is available to each senator for good or for ill tends, more often than not, to ennoble rather than to corrupt. Add to this the fact that senators come to take seriously what journalists and scholars write about them and the legislative body in which they serve: that the Constitution encodes them with the genetics of statesmanship, which they can choose to nurture or not. A sufficient number will do so, not because they are a higher order of being, but because, quite pragmatically, they will soon understand that for them to thrive as individuals, the Senate as an institution cannot be sent to the intensive care ward.