CONGRESS' minority parties have suffered indignities for decades, but few could top the insult that Republicans dealt to Democrats this fall. When House-Senate negotiators began a series of closed-door sessions to craft an ambitious Medicare overhaul, GOP Rep. Bill Thomas summarily announced that he would allow not a single House Democrat -- and only two Senate Democrats -- in. His edict was a jaw- dropper, given Congress' long history of letting each party appoint its own representatives to these all-important "conference committees." To add injury to insult, the banned lawmakers included the Senate's Democratic leader, Tom Daschle.
Whether it amounted to cool Republican efficiency or an assault on fairness and democracy, politicians and the American public had better get used to it. Thomas and his GOP colleagues brushed aside Daschle's complaints and enacted their bill -- aided by a now- infamous three-hour House roll call -- with less minority party involvement than on any major issue in recent times. Congressional Republicans and the Bush administration now appear poised to press other initiatives with barely a pretense of seeking Democratic input. The strategy could go on for years if Republicans keep their House and Senate majorities in 2004 and Bush wins reelection.
What's taking place is more than bare-knuckled partisanship, though there's plenty of that. A potent confluence of events and personalities is changing Congress. Will that matter beyond Capitol Hill? Republicans say the Medicare bill would have come out the same even with a semblance of greater Democratic input. But some congressional scholars see tactics that, while perhaps ruthlessly expedient in the short run, seem destined to generate future animosity and retribution.
"I honestly believe that policy suffers when enacted in this way," says Thomas Mann, who monitors Congress for the Brookings Institution. "There really is something to be said for a more open, deliberative process where you give full airing to issues and you try to build a larger majority. I don't believe major social changes are sustainable with margins like this."
Congress' majority parties have always dominated legislative action, but they typically have given the minority some voice -- even if it amounted to little more than a floor vote on a sure-to-lose alternative bill, or conference committee recommendations destined to be rejected along party lines. Often, majority party leaders have made enough concessions to attract a few votes from across the aisle, withstand some intra-party defections and tout a piece of legislation as "bipartisan." (The 1965 conference on the original Medicare bill, when Democrats controlled the White House and Congress, included Republicans. Roughly half of all House and Senate Republicans voted for the final legislation.)
Recently, however, GOP leaders have largely dispensed with such niceties. Senate Republicans rewrote a massive (and still pending) energy bill with zero Democratic participation. And top House and Senate Republicans negotiated the complex Medicare bill with only two conciliation-minded Democrats -- Sens. John Breaux, La., and Max Baucus, Mont. -- in the room. (When some House Democrats barged in one day, Thomas, the Ways and Means chairman, halted the meeting until they left.)
Defenders of House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay say Republicans are simply repaying Democrats for wounds inflicted during four decades of Democratic House control. It's not hard to find congressional scholars who disagree.
"Under Democratic rule, certainly you had a kind of marginalization of the minority, but not to the degree that it's being pursued now," says Ross Baker of Rutgers University. Jim Thurber, director of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies observes, "You have to go back to 'Iron Joe' Cannon to find that kind of behavior," referring to the legendarily strong-willed Republican speaker from the early 20th century.
These hardball techniques underscore a paradox of current U.S. politics: The electorate is almost evenly divided, but federal policymaking is increasingly one-sided. With only the narrowest of House and Senate margins, Republican leaders are deploying scorched- earth, compromise-be-damned tactics, as if they ruled the nation 80- 20, not 51-49. Rather than building broader consensus, they've decided they can't afford centrist compromises that might attract Democratic support but lose even more votes from the GOP conservative wing.
Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says that House Republicans, in particular, "have been gradually using, on a regular basis, techniques that violate all the norms of conduct and behavior. And they've gotten away with it."
Nearly half the electorate -- people who chose Democrats to represent them in Congress -- are increasingly disenfranchised. Their representatives aren't simply outvoted on the House and Senate floors, they're not even present when key legislation is discussed and refined. The pendulum always swings back eventually, though, and should the White House and Congress shift hands, this year's brutal and partisan practices may ensure a retaliatory cycle in which each aggrieved party feels compelled to wreak vengeance.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20040104/ai_n9721627
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