Four years ago this week, Ted Kennedy changed history with the sheer force of his will.
Senate Democrats, battling with the Bush administration, were one vote short of the total they needed to maintain a key provision of Medicare.
Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, then used a lifeline: He called Kennedy, who was in Boston receiving chemotherapy for brain cancer, and pleaded for the liberal giant to return to Washington to provide the clinching vote.
When Kennedy walked onto the floor on July 9, 2008, senators on both sides erupted in cheers, and some wept. The Medicare bill passed — with nine Republican senators switching their previous votes to be on Kennedy’s side.
Among those cheering the loudest that day was Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, Kennedy’s longtime legislative partner, who wrote a song for Kennedy upon learning of his friend’s illness and eulogized him at his memorial.
I was reminded of this moment when talking in recent days with senators and veteran Capitol Hill correspondents about what has gone wrong in the Senate. A leading theory: There are no giants in the chamber today, no figure with the stature of a Kennedy who could carry votes with his mere presence. There is no longer a revered figure — a Byrd, a Dole, a Moynihan, a Chafee, a Nunn, a John Warner — whose authority could transcend party and the usual arithmetic of vote counting. Some have died. Some have retired. Others, such as Hatch and John McCain, have been lost to the exigencies of survival in a hyperpartisan political system.
Hatch could have been one of today’s giants. First elected in 1976, he is in line, as the longest-serving Republican, to be Senate president pro tempore if the GOP reclaims the majority in November. He has a long record of legislative success and a moral authority that is beyond question.
But to keep his job, he had to fight off a primary challenge from the tea party — and to prevail last month, the would-be giant diminished himself, tacking sharply to the right.
When Hatch gave a speech on Obamacare on Monday — four years to the day since he cheered Kennedy’s brief return — he sounded like just another petty partisan. “The difficulty that we will face in undoing ‘Obamacare’ does not mitigate the necessity of repealing this law in its entirety,” he said at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “And should the Republicans take back the Senate, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, repeal of ‘Obamacare’ will be my first, second and third priority.”
Really? A higher priority for the Senate Finance Committee chairman than balancing the budget, reducing the debt and reforming the tax code?
In stooping to join the legislature’s Lilliputians, Hatch is just following the pack. Research by The Washington Post’s Paul Kane turned up an extraordinary finding: 43 of the Senate’s 100 members are in their freshman term, the most since the post-Watergate cleanout. By comparison, after the 2004 election, there were only 30 first-term senators.
In many cases, the voters didn’t trade up: Scott Brown for Kennedy in Massachusetts, Mark Begich for Alaska’s Ted Stevens, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin for Robert Byrd. One cycle earlier, the venerable South Carolinian Fritz Hollings, of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-balancing fame, was replaced by Jim DeMint, of tea-party fame.
Walk into the reception room off the Senate floor, and frescoes of the chamber’s giants gaze at you from all directions: Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun from the 19th century; Robert La Follette, Robert A. Taft, Arthur Vandenberg and Robert F. Wagner from the 20th century.
A few steps away, their 21st-century successors were out on the floor on Tuesday, engaged in their usual smallness, debating tax credits that have no chance of surviving the legislative process. Reid led off the debate, accusing Republicans of helping “megarich celebrities like Donald Trump” and “fabulously rich so-called small-business owners like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.”
Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, responded by blaming President Obama for the “slowest recovery ever” and for championing a “complete and total absurdity” of a tax policy.
You don’t have to go back to Daniel Webster to appreciate the current plague of legislative dwarfism. When Hatch came to the Senate in 1977, he was surrounded by contemporaneous and future giants: Jackson, Javits, Muskie, McGovern, Baker, Goldwater — and a 44-year-old Ted Kennedy.
Their bloodlines have all run dry.
Dana Milbank is a columnist for The Washington Post. His email address is danamilbank@washpost.com.
Milbank, It’s this days giants that hold to principle and do not cave to tyranny.
Even if the “principles” are misguided and even fallacious? And for tyranny, how about the would be tyranny of ALEC, Koch Bros., Nordquist, the Tea party, etc.?
I expect you wouldn’t recognize tyranny if it sat up and bit ya’.
It does not first appear as a knock on the door in the night.
It appears first in a government that knows what is your best interest better than you do.
It appears second in people who don’t recognize that has happened.
And third as a bunch of people who come out and try to scare the whole of the Country into retreating into a past that is little better than moral and political cowardice simply because the supposedly ‘right people’ have a better idea. I’m more than willing to admit when thing’s aren’t going right. But when someone comes to me and try’s to tell me that I have to follow ‘their way’ in order for the Country ‘to be saved’, well, then these same ‘right people’ had better have, written and in hand, their plan to save the Country. To date all I’ve seen outta these same self-serving’ right people’ is nothing more than press release’s, double talk evasion’s, supposed policy speech’s that are ONE very short step from calling for a racial and political revolution and the abandonment of the principles of The Constitution set forth when it said that ALL MEN are equal and have inherent right’s.
The recent NAACP speech that Romney gave, added to the comment’s made by LePage, have pretty much tied the GOP’s hand’s to the right-wing position’s of ‘A Pure America that only those of us who are pure of spirit deserve to live in’, be it either thru design or lack of focus of political backbone. Given The Constitution’s Amendment’s, and the supposedly ‘Open Society’ that we all live in, all of this ‘Pure American’ crap needs to be seen and called exactly what it is. It’s just too bad that the BDN guideline’s won’t let me. But the rest of you can, and I am sure, will when you step back and think about it.
I made no mention of “right” people or “wrong” people. Challenge my point or don’t. I don’t care.
Harry Reid certainly is no senate giant. The House of Representatives has sent countless jobs & budget bills to the Senate and Reid is too cowardly to even allow them to be voted upon.
Oh Please. Milbanks have a long weekend at the beach..little sand in his shorts? This piece is absolute fluffnutter. Paragraph 15 is the only one that comes close to reality, and he leaves out the fact Reid and crew have voted down all the presidents budgets. Reid, the Mormon, bemoans otherside of the isle as some celebrities are benefiting from tax policy while the president is begging hollywood for money, allowing them to play jester at his court.
Shocking that Milbank didn’t list both Collins and Snowe as the Senate’s greatest members today. More shocking is that the Bangor Daily allowed this omission to be published. Shameful.