Making Sausage

By Charlie Cook
© National Journal Group Inc.

January 4, 2005

This column was originally featured on CongressDaily/AM on January 4, 2005.

For as long as I can remember, excitement and freshness have nearly always been in the air when a new Congress is about to be sworn-in (and I have seen 16 of these since moving to Washington). The one exception was in 1997, after President Clinton was re-elected and the Congress remained in Republican hands. That year there was a sense that instead of something new and different, it was simply going to be more of the same. For the other congressional swearing-in days, battles, even recent ones, were temporarily forgotten and the focus was on new committee assignments, office spaces and legislative opportunities.

Today, while there certainly will be an air of excitement for the new members of Congress and their staffs, the mood around Washington is one of foreboding, with both parties girding for very tough fights. Democrats are understandably depressed over their disappointing election showing. And Republicans, while having much to celebrate with gains in both the House and the Senate, face challenges in the coming months that are enough to quickly sober any politician and dampen any party atmosphere.

For starters, Senate Republicans soon will decide whether to have Apocalypse Now -- or later: fighting Democrats over limiting filibusters of judicial appointments at the beginning of the new Congress, or waiting until the first Supreme Court vacancy occurs. As soon as that Supreme Court filibuster fight takes place, any veneer of bipartisan cooperation will be gone, replaced by the ugliness that has become all too commonplace on Capitol Hill. On this issue, I remember thinking how wrong it was for the Senate Republican majority to refuse to hold hearings on over five dozen of President Clinton's judicial nominees, and similarly felt it wrong for Democrats to filibuster President Bush's choices for the bench.

In a different era, presidents tended to nominate, particularly to appellate courts and the Supreme Court, some of the top legal minds of the country, people who tended to be significantly less ideological and controversial than many Republican and Democratic nominees in recent years have been. Then the Judiciary Committee and Senate as a whole allowed up or down votes on these nominees, as they and the president deserve. If a president's nominees are defeated, so be it. If a president were to put on the bench judges that the American people found abhorrent, then that president's party would very likely pay the price at the next election, and maybe even beyond that.

Meanwhile, only the most naive or eternally optimistic can look at either Social Security or any meaningful tax change and think that those fights will be easy. The announcement over the holidays that AARP, the nation's largest senior citizen advocacy group, would soon begin a multimillion dollar advertising campaign against personal or privatized accounts underscored that fact. Indeed, Republicans can recall that it was AARP that enabled them to get their Medicare prescription drug benefit through Congress two years ago. While the argument for allowing individuals to put some portion of Social Security retirement funds into the markets is, to me, a compelling one, it appears that Democrats and the AARP are drawing a line in the sand, and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate might not be sufficient enough to get any meaningful proposal onto the president's desk.

Opposition to any real tax overhaul won't start until some kind of package begins to be developed. This won't be any prettier, only more complicated, than the Social Security fight. Every item in the tax code got there for a reason and has a special interest determined to protect it. And, as anyone who has been around Washington for more than a month knows, it's a whole lot harder to kill a program than to enact one.

The gloomy forecast does come with one potential silver lining, though: House Republicans on Monday backed away from earlier plans to soften ethics rules. That move, if it had gone ahead, would have come at a political and public relations cost. And it would have forced them to swallow some of their reform statements from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it was an arrogant Democratic majority in control and an indignant -- and quite justified -- Republican minority crying for reform. I remember being extremely sympathetic to Republican cries for change and efforts to shame the House Democratic majority a dozen or more years ago. That made it harder for me to accept both lame Republican explanations of changes they wanted to make to ethics rules as well as Democratic outrage at the cavalier manner of the GOP majority.

Still, that's one crisis avoided, but plenty more on tap. Perhaps it is the widespread sense that the upcoming battles are likely to be so bloody and divisive, and concern that the end result might be little or nothing, that puts such a damper on things. This next Congress will prove to be interesting, but certainly not pretty.