Centrists to till common ground Snowe co-chairs Senate coalition

WASHINGTON – On Tuesday, the first day of the post-election lame-duck session, a small group of senators met behind closed doors to talk about legislating from a shrinking piece of real estate: the political middle in Congress.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, the co-chairwoman of the group that calls itself the Senate Centrist Coalition, convened the meeting to identify issues on which Republicans and Democrats might find common ground and how best to reach it.

“The American people should know that there is an organization that’s willing to govern by consensus on some key matters” that affect the country, Snowe said.

Though the group’s agenda is just now being discussed, topics raised during the 45-minute meeting Tuesday evening included fiscal discipline, tax reform and litigation reform. Social issues, which tend to be more divisive, were not raised.

In the U.S. Senate, where 60 votes are needed to close debate and vote on legislation, the 15 to 20 moderates the coalition hopes to recruit could potentially play an influential role.

Sandy Maisel, director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, said the moderates’ power doesn’t lie necessarily in the influence they have over the Senate leadership. Rather, he said, the Republican leadership will depend on them to produce the votes to overcome filibusters. In the new Senate, the Republicans, with 55 seats, will be five votes short.

“They’re outside of the normal leadership structure,” Maisel said of the Senate centrists.

Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who is the coalition’s new Democratic co-chairman now that Sen. John Breaux, D-Louisiana, is leaving office, said the group would try to reach beyond the margins.

“We’ve got the ability to affect what happens,” he said. “More to the point, we don’t want to use our numbers to stop things from happening; we want to use our numbers to get some things done.”

“The goal is to facilitate, not frustrate,” said Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Florida, who is a vice-chairman of the group along with Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

Lieberman said the next step was to continue talking up the coalition among senators of both parties and that leadership from both parties would be invited to a future meeting.

“We’re going to survey our members. We’re going to choose a couple of big, national needs and concerns and focus on those over the course of the 109th session,” he said.

Breaux and fellow moderate Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina are both retiring from the Senate. Their seats have been won by conservative Republicans.

Roughly 13 senators from both parties attended the coalition meeting Tuesday, though Snowe contended that scheduling commitments kept others away. She estimated that the number could grow to 20 or more. In the past, the numbers have fluctuated depending on the issue at hand. The coalition is extending an open invitation to all senators.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who was busy with what she characterized as “intense negotiations” over the fate of the intelligence reform legislation in Congress, expressed her strong support for the coalition through a written statement and said she would remain involved.

The late-Sen. John Chafee, R-Rhode Island, founded the group with Breaux in 1995 in the aftermath of the government shutdown that year.

His son, Lincoln Chafee, R-Rhode Island, who was at Tuesday’s meeting and has at times publicly considered leaving the Republican Party, will continue to work in the coalition as a Republican.

“I’m solid,” he said on the steps of the Capitol after the meeting about whether he would eventually switch. “I’m up in ’06, same as Olympia,” he said about Maine’s senior senator. If he were going to make a switch, he said, “I’d have made it.”