After them, the deluge – in moderation

The Medicare and energy bills that stand between Congress and its Thanksgiving recess are the best examples yet of Washington leading the nation into ever-more divisive camps that communicate mostly through the shared law firm of Tantrum & Accusation. Both are major bills – reforming the nation’s primary access to health care for seniors and setting its energy policy for the next decade – yet were written overwhelmingly from one side with barely a thought that half the nation is likely to disagree with the outcome.

This is, in a sense, leadership. Congress became especially divided and badly tempered beginning a decade ago; a Pew Research poll this month concluded the nation in the last four years has become “evenly divided politically – yet further apart than ever in its political values.” Certainly Congress deserves partial credit for this. The result – and it’s a majority Republican result now; Democrats will get their chance some day – is highly partisan legislation that does not so much guide as shove ideologically. It is at times like these that one looks for moderating influences in the nation’s leading deliberative body, the Senate, which leads one to look north, to Maine.

Maine’s two senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, are, of course, Republican moderates, devoutly so. This sometimes annoys their party leadership and can infuriate the far right, which views them as Democrats on an exchange program. Democrats themselves sometimes sob late into the night because Maine’s senators almost, nearly, perhaps, could have supported their latest legislation, as they had just the week before, but, no, not this time. Tears and anguish. Sens. Snowe and Collins are not alone in their moderation, but they could meet at a restaurant with all like-minded senators without having to push together a bunch of tables. They would, I suppose, dine in moderation.

The Medicare and energy bills were not the work of moderates. With the exception of letting a couple of Democratic leaders sneak a peek, Republicans kept the bills to themselves and they didn’t include anyone who might offer compromise between their ideas and those of the opposition. The only calculation toward opponents was a recognition that a majority was needed to pass the bills. It shows in the legislation, both of which are fairly terrible, the energy bill especially so, which looks as if it was created by the Association for the Fans of Soot, many of whom emit upwind of the Northeast. The Medicare bill has a similar lean toward industry, but instead of rewarding coal and oil, it seeks to pleasure the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

After every election since 1994, when Republicans took both the House and Senate, someone wonders whether moderates are effective bridges between the political parties, forging compromises and creating an atmosphere of mutual respect or whether they are just spineless. A couple of years ago Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, apparently after a teary night, called moderate Republicanism a process of “[i]neffectual protest, abject surrender and denial.” (After the election of George Bush, then-Republican Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont felt compelled to speak for all moderates and reassure the White House that, “We understand the responsibility we have. … We don’t have anyone who’s a mischief maker.” Maybe just one.)

There is a tendency of the public, which includes journalists, to disdain Congress generally while admiring their own delegation, and it is fair to say that having two moderates in the Senate limits Maine’s influence in some ways. Sen. Snowe, for instance, by seniority and committee assignment, should have been part of the conference producing a final Medicare bill, but her seat went to a more conservative member. Sen. Collins’ staff reports that she had sent at least 10 letters to the energy conference committee urging it to drop some of its worst provisions while including more conservation. The committee was unmoved.

A majority party especially needs moderates to draw on the good ideas of the other side and threaten to withhold their votes unless those provisions are considered. Sen. Snowe, using this means, added crucial child-care funding to welfare reform, for which she did not receive enough credit; neither did Sen. Collins for her insistence on including state Medicaid relief during the last round of tax cuts. Beating down that last federal tax cut and shifting more of it toward more taxpayers was more work of Senate moderates.

But there are fewer and fewer of them – where a third of the Senate 15 years ago might have qualified as moderate by today’s standards perhaps 10 members do today – and for all the energy and valuable ideas brought by the political extremes, without the center, the edges cannot hold.

Shortly before his death in 1999, Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island, perhaps the most effective of all Senate moderates, was called upon to discuss the growing divisions in Congress. He was, as usual, optimistic. He said he saw political movements as waves and that the “tide is going out on this one. The people won’t accept it for much longer.” He couldn’t have anticipated the 2000 Florida recount, the administration’s tax-cut fever or the war in Iraq; the people, it turns out, will accept a fair amount of low tide under these conditions.

Or perhaps Sen. Chafee saw beyond these events to a larger trend. The energy bill, as of yesterday, was in big trouble. It seems the Republican leadership was a couple of votes short to cut off debate, with Sens. Snowe and Collins siding with those opposing the bill.

About those letters Sen. Collins sent to the energy conference – they may have deserved a closer look.

Todd Benoit is the BDN editorial page editor.