Ah, those crazy Senators

Ezra Klein: IS THE PROBLAM SENATE DEMOCRATS OR THE SENATE?

I'm very much in agreement with the spirit of Jon Chait's latest article. Kent Conrad's insistence on farm subsidies and tax breaks stands in mocking contradiction to his emphasis on deficit reduction. Ben Nelson's affection for the Nebraska-based middlemen in the student loans program will cost taxpayers $4 billion even as Nelson cries over the debt. The rules of the Senate and the incentives of obstruction render decent governance a touching impossibility.

But Chait uses these examples to argue that "Democrats are especially susceptible to the dysfunction of the Senate." This is something of a familiar argument. Republicans, we're frequently told, are a well-oiled congressional machine. They put party before person. They show due deference to their elected leader. They deal viciously with strays and traitors. They merrily ram legislation through the reconciliation process and strong-arm their members to ensure cooperation. And that may all be true. But my sense is that Democrats are more certain of Republican unity than Republicans are.

Chait casts the Bush record as a fairly clear procession of legislative victories. "Bush managed to enact several rounds of tax cuts that substantially exceeded those in his campaign platform, along with two war resolutions, a Medicare prescription drug benefit designed to maximize profits for the health care industry, energy legislation, education reform, and sundry other items," he writes. "Whatever the substantive merits of this agenda, its passage represented an impressive feat of political leverage, accomplished through near-total partisan discipline." It's hard, of course, to match Obama's few months against Bush's eight years. But even so, I'm not sure Bush's eight years lend themselves to such a clean history.

The original tax cuts, for instance, traveled through a Democratic Senate and found their key partisans on the opposite side of the aisle. Max Baucus stood behind President George W. Bush at the signing ceremony. The second round, which came after the 2002 midterms, ran through a Republican-chamber, but here told a story more familiar to stimulus-watchers: A group of moderate Senate Republicans, led by the then-heterodox John McCain, partnered with centrist Democrats and halved the size of Bush's tax cuts.

Other Bush accomplishments followed similar paths. No Child Left Behind was a compromise bill built with the cooperation of Ted Kennedy and George Miller. George Voinovich and Bob Bennett opposed the legislation. Medicare Part D began as a bipartisan effort (again with Kennedy) and only became a war after Bill Thomas and the House Republicans warped it in conference committee -- which they did because they could barely pass it through the partisans in the lower chamber. In the Senate, Orrin Hatch, Trent Lott, John Sununu, Judd Gregg, and a handful of other Republicans voted against the final bill.

In all these cases, Republicans evinced the exact same frustrations with their moderates, and the compromises they forced, that you hear from today's Democrats.

Similarly, Chait is right that Republicans routinely took to the reconciliation process to pass legislation. But it's not clear, as of yet, that Democrats won't do much the same. And in any case, Republicans never passed anything of the size of health care or cap and trade through the process. Early on, they wanted to use the reconciliation process to pass Medicare Part D. Those plans were eventually scrapped. And because of that, the bill, at the end of the day, is a massive entitlement that is much more substantively offensive to conservatives than liberals.

Which isn't really to argue with the substance of Jon's article: The Senate is a broken branch. If we don't properly respond to the financial crisis or avert the crushing blow of rising health costs or slow the advance of catastrophic climate change, it will be because the institution is no longer capable of governance. But that is not, as Chait would have it, a purely Democratic problem. It's an institutional issue. The local obsessions that Chait attaches to Conrad and Nelson are similarly prevalent among Republican Senators. The tremendous power of swing senators is as undeniable and capricious when Republicans rule as when Democrats hold power. The allure of obstruction is an compelling to minority Democrats as minority Republicans (the early Bush accomplishments were actually more bipartisan than Obama's, though that was because Democrats controlled the chamber rather than because Bush was the gracious and cooperative type).

I don't argue this point to be churlish. You can understand the problems of the Senate in two ways. The first is that it's a problem of party discipline. The second is that it's a problem of rules. If you think it's the first, the answer is to put resources and effort into mounting a primary challenge against Ben Nelson. If you think it's the second, then the answer may be to put time and energy into repealing the Byrd Rule, or lowering the filibuster limit, or making it easier to replace chairman, or otherwise transforming the structural incentives that makes legislative success such a delicate and unlikely outcome and thus allows individual Senators to exert so much control over it. Moreover, if you think it's the second, you can actually make something of a bipartisan argument, rather than a purely partisan one. The Senate, as currently composed, doesn't work for Republicans any better than it works for Democrats. And it really doesn't work for the country. And that's probably an easier argument than trying to convince Nebraskans that Ben Nelson's incredible power isn't good for them.

• Atrios adds: Living in the mirror universe of a place like Indiana, I get what the "moderates" might be trying to do. It isn't really about reaching voters directly, it's about reaching the elite intermediaries - local press and similar - and getting them to sell this storyline. Here in PA, Arlen Specter doesn't need to be a moderate Republican in any meaningful way, he just has to provide a plausible storyline to the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board so they can sell him to voters as one. Whether they're in on the con or just too stupid to notice I don't know.
• Matthew Yglesias adds:

  It’s often said that Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter “failed” in efforts to achieve major progressive structural reforms during their moments of opportunity in 1993-94 and 1977-78. But as Jonathan Chait persuasively argues this is more a situation where the opportunity for progressive change was deliberately squandered by congressional Democrats; especially Senate Democrats who work with the perverse structure of the world’s worst legislature to stifle change. Depressingly, Chait is able to mount a great deal of evidence that some of the same stuff is happening today to Barack Obama’s agenda.

  On a related note, people sometimes have a model in their head whereby the typical moderate congressional Democrat is a solid-gold progressive who really wants to do great things for America but feels constrained by politics. That’s probably true of some of them. But one really shouldn’t assume that it’s uniformly true. After all, a Senator who wants to do the right thing on, say, climate change but worries that a strong cap-and-trade bill would be a tough political sell in his state ought to be eager to see cap-and-trade done through reconciliation. That way you can vote “no” like you think you have to, without the “no” vote killing the bill. And that’s hardly the only example. There’s tons of below-the-radar procedural stuff that a legislator whose “real” views are further-left than he thinks he can get away with could be doing. And I don’t actually see a ton of Senate Democrats trying to push those envelopes. But that’s something to think about when you’re eying a particular legislator and wondering where he or she really stands.