In Courtly Senate, Partisanship Becomes a Major Trial for Conflicted Lawmakers

The U.S. war on drugs in South America is flagging. A minimum-wage increase that looked like a slam dunk last year remains in legislative limbo. Federal court chambers around the country are echoing because of vacant judgeships.

Those are some of the casualties of an unusually bitter battle gripping the U.S. Senate, a protracted clash that has slowed legislation, stalled appointments and poisoned the atmosphere so badly that Republicans and Democrats can barely agree on a quorum call.

The level of hostility is unusual for the courtly and clubbish Senate, which at times seems to have been turned from the nation’s most elite debating society into the world’s greatest deliberative sandbox.

The strife has its roots in a volatile mix of personal, institutional and political forces. The personality at the center of it all is Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), a fastidious man whose love of order often seems at war with the Senate’s freewheeling nature. His aggressive efforts to block Democratic initiatives has infuriated Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who has few official powers beyond his ability to drive Lott crazy by gumming up the works.

‘Playing Political Games’

“It’s obvious [Democrats] are playing political games,” an exasperated Lott said last week. “Everything has been very hard this year.” Signs emerged in recent days that the two parties are trying to declare a cease-fire. But any rapprochement will be severely tested as the Senate struggles in coming weeks to finish the most pressing business on Congress’ summer agenda: the appropriations bills needed to keep the government running.

The recent fusillade of political sniping presents a striking contrast to the heady mood of bipartisanship that prevailed in the Senate as this session of Congress began in early 1999. Members of both parties reveled in backslapping self-congratulation over the way they had handled President Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Now, however, Republican and Democratic senators are at war--both over policy and over the broader question of who sets the agenda in this intensely competitive election year. For months, Democrats have been trying to advance their main legislative goals--prescription drug benefits for Medicare beneficiaries, managed health care regulation, campaign finance reform and more--by using senators’ trademark powers to talk forever and offer amendments on just about anything. Their latest effort came Thursday, when Democrats forced a vote on a long-stalled bill to regulate managed care.

The proposal, more far-reaching than GOP leaders would like, narrowly lost. One Republican senator, Phil Gramm of Texas, accused the Democrats of a “cynical political act” in forcing the vote.

Other looming sources of conflict include GOP hopes to eliminate inheritance taxes. Although a bill to do so passed the House with strong Democratic support Friday, Daschle has pledged to block it in the Senate, arguing that in its current form the measure would give a huge tax break “to the richest of the rich.”

Beyond such rhetoric, the insider power struggle is having real-world consequences outside the Capitol dome. President Clinton sought to underscore the impact last week, calling a news conference to complain that Senate delays in handling an emergency budget request were undermining the U.S. effort to help Colombia combat drug trafficking.

The House in March overwhelmingly approved funneling $1.7 billion to Colombia for helicopters and other anti-drug technology, as well as military advisors. Lott supports such spending but has blocked action on the measure because of concerns about procedural maneuverings by Democrats.

Clinton scolded the Senate over the delay, saying that it occurs “at a time when cocaine production is increasing in Colombia, where more than 80% of the cocaine on the United States’ streets comes from.”

The shenanigans in the Senate stem in part from the high stakes of this election year, when control of the White House and the closely divided House are up for grabs. The Senate, which the GOP controls by five seats, is less likely to fall out of Republican hands. But Democrats hope to make at least some gains that will position them to win the majority in 2002.

The collapse of comity in the Senate also reflects a generational change that has seen it increasingly dominated by former House members steeped in the lower chamber’s harsher brand of partisan politics. These House graduates include Lott himself, who has brought a more aggressive, confrontational style to Senate leadership than many of his predecessors.

A Partisan Atmosphere

“The Senate is becoming much more like the House,” said Eric Uslaner, a University of Maryland political science professor. “Lott should be trying to contain the worst impulses of the Senate. Instead, he’s playing along with them and even lighting a few fires.”

Daschle, by week’s end, was predicting that some of those fires may start to cool. He was encouraged that Lott allowed Democrats to offer their HMO amendment to an unrelated spending bill. But he did not promise to stop his obstructionist tactics. “I’m going to take this a step at a time,” he said.

The Senate’s increasingly partisan atmosphere has contributed mightily to the lengthy backlog in filling federal judgeships and other executive branch posts. For instance, when U.S. Judge Richard A. Paez of Los Angeles finally won confirmation earlier this year, the vote came 1,506 days after he had been nominated.

Republicans say it is not uncommon for the Senate to slow the nomination process in a presidential election year, if the White House is held by one party and the Senate by the other. But in most recent election years, the Senate has confirmed significantly more judges than the 23 it has approved so far this year.

Sixteen of those were confirmed just two weeks ago. Even after that vote, the Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles and is the most populous in the country, still had four long-standing vacancies.

On the legislative front, the intransigence and mistrust have snagged even bills with support as broad as the Mississippi River. Virtually every senator seems to support eliminating the so-called marriage tax penalty, but the proposal to fix the legal quirk that causes some couples to pay more when they file jointly than if they filed as single taxpayers has languished. And even though Republicans conceded long ago that a minimum-wage increase was inevitable in this Congress, the bill has been stalled for months.

A Great Divide

The issue dividing Republicans and Democrats is not the amount of the increase: Both sides want to hike it by $1, up to $6.15. But they differ over whether the increase should be phased in over two years or three and whether it should be linked to tax cuts for small businesses. Comparable differences have been bridged in the past, but they may sink the whole bill in this year’s climate.

Members of both parties have been frustrated by the logjam blocking action on Clinton’s request for emergency funding for the Colombia drug war, as well as other items contained in the bill, such as replenishing Pentagon accounts depleted by the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo.

The House approved the spending on an expedited legislative schedule. But Lott has opposed voting on the spending as a separate bill, fearing that such a measure would be a magnet for extraneous, costly amendments on the Senate floor. Instead, he folded the emergency money into several other regular appropriations bills, even though action on those bills typically stretches deep into the fall.

Indeed, those bills have moved at a snail’s pace, in part because of Democrats’ delaying tactics. Daschle has slowed the debate on the measures to protest Lott’s efforts to restrict Democratic amendments on other bills.

The Senate’s failure to act so far on the emergency spending has caused the Defense Department to warn that it may have to start canceling training exercises and take other economy measures.

The delay also has held up aid to victims of Hurricane Floyd, the September 1999 storm that battered North Carolina and other nearby states. And it has left an emergency energy assistance program depleted because of the unexpectedly high demand for home heating subsidies last winter.

The administration requested $600 million more for the program to provide cooling assistance to the poor this summer.