Rancor of the House Seeps Into the Senate

The rancorous Capitol debate over confirmation of federal judges is not just a power struggle between Republicans and Democrats. It also is a pivotal moment for the Senate as an institution.

If a showdown over President Bush’s nominees goes forward as planned next week, it would mark one more significant step in the Senate’s transformation from a clubby bastion of bipartisanship into a free-wheeling political arena as raucous as the House of Representatives.

But if a group of moderates manages to come up with a compromise to avert the showdown, they will reassert the Senate’s traditional role as one of the few institutions in Washington still capable of governing by consensus.

Regardless of the outcome, the bitter partisanship that has surrounded the dispute over judges is a reminder of how far the Senate has strayed from that role.

The old saw was that the Senate -- with its more cumbersome procedures and longer terms of office -- was like a saucer in which the passions of the House were cooled.

But in recent years, many analysts and lawmakers say, the Senate’s members have become more partisan, its rules have centralized more power in party leadership, and the six-year terms no longer seem to give senators much respite from the perpetual campaign.

In short, Congress today is starting to seem like it is all cup, no saucer.

“The Senate is getting to be just as loud and boisterous as the House,” with Republican leaders playing to their own base rather than to the country, said Eric Uslaner, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland.

Several senior senators who bemoan that change are part of the group that is trying to negotiate a compromise on the issue of judicial confirmations. They are uncomfortable with the plan of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to push what has become known as the “nuclear option” -- an effort to prevent the minority party from using the filibuster to block votes on judicial nominees.

Democrats have used the filibuster threat in the last two years to prevent final votes on 10 of Bush’s appellate court nominees, even though the judges were believed to be supported by a majority of senators.

Among the Republicans seeking to avoid resorting to the nuclear option are five committee chairmen, including Armed Services’ John W. Warner of Virginia, who has been in the Senate since 1979, and Judiciary’s Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who was elected in 1980.

They are part of a dwindling band of lawmakers who have served in both the majority and minority while in the Senate, think of themselves as “institutionalists,” and have loyalty to the traditions and powers of the chamber that rivals their loyalty to party.

Specter, in anguished comments this week, was one of the few senators willing to blame both parties for the firestorm over judicial nominations in recent years: Democrats for holding up nominations from Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and Republicans for responding in kind under President Clinton.

And though he criticized Democrats for blocking judicial nominees over the last two years, Specter said his own party’s effort to block the tactic “would be a serious blow to the rights of the minority that have always distinguished this body from the House of Representatives.”

Not all of the Senate’s senior power brokers see it that way. A group of five other committee chairmen held a news conference Thursday to underscore their support for Frist and his effort to require up-or-down votes on all judicial nominees.

They argued that it was not Frist but rather the Democrats who were undermining Senate tradition and rules by mounting filibusters against judicial nominations.

Whichever side is to blame, this divisive fight over confirmation rules is the culmination of a years-long trend toward increasing partisanship and polarization in the Senate -- a trend that Congressional Quarterly magazine has charted in its annual study of party-line voting. In 2004, the magazine found, 52.3% of Senate roll call votes split largely on party lines, up from 35.3% in 1989.

Meanwhile, the chamber’s traditions of courtesy and deference gradually have given way to the harsh rhetoric and cut-and-thrust politics long common in the House. It was a striking sign last year when Frist went to South Dakota to aid the successful GOP campaign to unseat then-Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) -- in open defiance of the Senate tradition of cooperation between party leaders.

The opening of debate over judicial nominations this week was emblematic of how coarse the Senate’s rhetoric has become: One Republican compared Democrats to Adolf Hitler; another accused them of “assassinating” nominees.

One Democrat compared Frist to an evildoer in the new “Star Wars” movie; another called Bush’s nominees “Neanderthals.”

It’s not surprising the Senate is coming to resemble the House: According to the Congressional Research Service, a record 52 former House members are now in the Senate.

Many served in the House in the 1980s and ‘90s, when partisan warfare scorched the chamber. Their formative political experiences included the toppling of House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) in 1989, the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, the polarizing reign of Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and the impeachment of Clinton. They were drilled in harsh partisan combat by leaders who demanded strict party discipline that had been alien to the Senate.

“So many House members, who were introduced to Congress as a highly partisan, majoritarian institution, have come over to the Senate, and they bring with them their expectations,” said Thomas Mann, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution. “It’s permeated the whole institution.”

A harbinger of these changes came in 1994, when then-Rep. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) was elected to the Senate.

As a freshman senator -- a species that once was seen but not heard for months after coming to the chamber -- Santorum quickly challenged the institution’s hallowed seniority system by calling for the removal of Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.) from his post as Appropriations Committee chairman because he had voted against a balanced-budget measure. Hatfield kept his job, but the controversy increased pressure on committee chairmen to toe the party line.

In 1996, Republicans installed term limits on committee chairmen, making it harder for them to build power centers independent of party leaders.

Four years after that, Senate Republicans catapulted Santorum to their No. 3 leadership post by electing him chairman of the Republican Conference. But even from that lofty perch, Santorum still brings a bit of the House bomb-throwing style to the Senate.

It was Santorum who drew criticism by invoking Hitler in his arguments against Democrats’ tactics in the judicial confirmation battle. In something of a throwback to Senate traditions, he later issued an apology for the statement.