When U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss announced his retirement in January, the Georgia Republican lamented, as many outgoing senators before him, that the institution can’t get anything done.
Then a funny thing happened: The Senate started doing stuff.
In recent months, the Senate passed a water-resources bill that would help spur the Savannah Port expansion, a Farm Bill that reworks farm subsidies and authorizes food stamp spending, and a landmark overhaul of the nation’s immigration system. The House, with a filibuster-free, top-down system of governance, has not responded in kind except to pass a limited farm-subsidy bill.
With more than a year left on the job, Chambliss is not quite in legacy mode yet. But he thinks his Gang of Six deficit-reduction effort, even though it failed, might have provided a template for the immigration Gang of Eight.
“I still am frustrated with the process, but I think we’ve made some improvement,” Chambliss said.
Last week served as an inflection point. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid threatened to change the rules to allow administration nominees to be confirmed with only 51 votes, but a deal came together after a remarkable meeting in the Old Senate Chamber — a place now reserved for tour groups and ceremonial swearings-in of new senators.
“The meeting Monday night was a change of things around here,” said Georgia Republican U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson. “You had 98 members in the same room with no media, no reporters, no staff, who could talk candidly. And they did for three hours without a loud word being raised or accusations being made.”
To many, the very character of the place was at stake. Reid, frustrated over repeated Republican obstruction of nominees, was threatening what is known in hyperbolic Washington-speak as "the nuclear option." Senate rules typically can only be changed with 67 votes, but Reid could have used a loophole to do it with 51.
The proposed change was minor in the grand scheme of things, but it would have set a dangerous precedent. So the parties struck a deal. Even Chambliss said he did not know the details.
“It was getting more and more obvious to me that we were not going to get the changes we were insisting on,” said Chambliss, who voted for the Cordray nomination along with Isakson. “And if we were ultimately going to lose on the cloture vote we would be a lot better off from a consumer-protection standpoint to have Cordray in there than some individual who would not be reasonable.”
Isakson compared last week’s standoff to the 2005 tiff when Senate Republicans threatened to change the rules in the face of Democrats’ obstruction of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. A bipartisan gang – there’s that word again — of 14 senators stepped in to strike a deal, and the rules remained.
Isakson, who had just started on the job then, pointed out that more than half the current Senate was not in office at the time.
“So now we could wait another 10 years before something like this goes up — or it could flare up next week,” Isakson said. “The Senate is the Senate. And we preserved that, and that’s good.”
