Is Bipartisanship Dead?

A Report from the Senate

Ross K. Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317257332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Is Bipartisanship Dead? is a status report on the condition of bipartisanship in the U.S. Senate and includes material from candid, on-the-record interviews with a dozen Democrats and Republicans. The book explores the distinct differences in bipartisanship in Senate committees and on the floor of the chamber and highlights the role of party leaders in promoting or discouraging bipartisan efforts. The book also asks the important question--Is bipartisanship necessarily a good thing?--and provides examples of flawed bipartisan legislation along with the views of critics of bipartisanship. Finally, the book delivers a dispassionate analysis of the vital signs of bipartisanship in the U.S. Senate and examines the constraints on bipartisan action in an era of polarized politics.

1
BIPARTISANSHIP IN THE US SENATE

RECOVERY AND RELAPSE

One day in December 2012, the paradoxes of partisanship in the US Senate were on vivid display.

At 11:30 a.m., a press conference was held in the ornate anteroom of the old Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room on the first floor of the US Capitol Building for the purpose of raising support for the ratification by the Senate of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Treaties, under the US Constitution, if they are to be binding on the United States, must be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, or 67 senators.

Two of the American political world’s most recognizable figures were sponsors of the treaty: Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who had been the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004 and subsequently nominated by President Obama for the post of secretary of state, and Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican who had been his party’s unsuccessful presidential nominee in 2008.

Kerry and McCain shared a unique bond other than the fact that both had been nominated for the presidency and both had been defeated: both senators had served with distinction in the Vietnam War, although they emerged from it with clashing views about the rightness of the conflict. Kerry preceded McCain to the Senate by two years. For a time, the two new senators barely spoke a friendly word to each other. But as members of a congressional delegation on a fact-finding trip to the Middle East, the two men found themselves reminiscing about their wartime experiences on the lengthy plane trip and ended up leading the campaign to establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam.¹

Kerry, as a member of the majority party, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a co-sponsor with McCain of the treaty, spoke first. He was flanked by a dozen visibly disabled people, including a young former Army first lieutenant, Dan Berschinski, who stood behind Kerry, supported on his titanium prosthetic legs. Kerry (who, although nominated by President Obama as secretary of state, had yet to receive Senate confirmation) urged support of the treaty and yielded the lectern to McCain, who quipped facetiously, “Thank you, Mr. Secretary.” After McCain’s remarks, Kerry returned the wry compliment, saying “Thank you, Mr. President.” At this point, Kerry reached around McCain, hugged him, and said, “This is what happens when you get losers up here.”

The event was a pageant of bipartisan harmony. More than that, it was a display of one of the more notable relationships in the Senate and a signal to the nation and the world that, with the prestige of these two distinguished senators from different sides of the partisan aisle, the odds improved that the Senate would produce the votes required for ratification. Supporters of the treaty left little to chance. They reasoned that having a venerated Republican with some very special credentials speak on the subject of disability rights might swing some Republican senators toward support for ratification.

The Vote

The Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid, had confidence that all the Democrats in his often-fractious caucus would vote to ratify the treaty. As of the conclusion of the senior staff meeting in Reid’s office at 9:00 a.m. that morning, the count showed a solid 61 in favor of the treaty, including a handful of Republicans who were augmenting the 54 Democratic senators. What was in doubt was from where the other 6 votes would come.

The ratification vote, scheduled for noon, was preceded by the appearance in the chamber of one of the Senate’s immortals: former Senator Robert Dole, the 89-year-old former Republican leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee. A commanding figure in American politics for almost fifty years, Dole was now confined to a wheelchair and was pushed on to the Senate floor by an another Republican ex-senator, Dole’s wife Elizabeth, who had represented North Carolina. Dole not only suffered from the ravages of age but also from the horrific battle wounds he had received in the fighting in northern Italy during World War II.²

But senators on the floor of the chamber that day required no outside prompting from an ex-colleague to remind them of the disabled currently among them. They needed only to glance across the chamber to the empty left sleeve of Senator Daniel Inouye, then the most senior member of the Senate and hence its president pro tem. Inouye was likewise a wounded veteran of the Italian campaign. There was also South Dakota’s Tim Johnson, who moved in and out of the chamber in a motorized wheelchair as the result of a stroke, or even more conspicuously, John McCain, the cosponsor of the treaty, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and is still unable to raise his arms above the level of his shoulders.

As the alphabetical roll call of the senators began, Paul Kane, congressional correspondent for the Washington Post tracked the vote. The vote cast by Senator Daniel Akaka, a Democrat from Hawaii, was an unsurprising aye. The next response stunned him. The name of Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, was called by the clerk, and he answered, “Nay.” Kane turned to the reporter seated next to him and said, “This treaty is dead.”³

Kane concluded that if a senator known for his moderation and internationalism was opposing the treaty, those less disposed to think well of the United Nations or, indeed, of treaties in general, would never contribute the six Republican votes required for ratification.

Described by a home-state newspaper as “a pragmatist who wants to undo the operational gridlock he sees in Washington [and who] … resigned his post as Republican caucus chairman earlier this year to show himself independent of GOP leadership,” Alexander had also become concerned that his soft-spoken conservatism might earn him a primary election challenger. Further, he worried that he, like other Senate moderate Republicans such as Robert Bennett of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana, who had been vanquished by ultra-conservative challengers, might be a marked man.⁴

The final vote was 61 ayes and 38 nays. One senator, Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, was recovering from a stroke and was not present to vote.

One curious fact about the vote was that the treaty had been previously approved and referred to the entire Senate by a bipartisan vote of 13–6 in the Foreign Relations Committee. Three Republicans on the committee—the ranking minority member, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, plus Johnny Isakson of Georgia and John Barrasso of Wyoming—had supported reporting out the treaty, but on the ratification vote on December 4, 2012, one of the three, Senator Isakson, cast a vote against the treaty.

Senator Isakson’s reason to vote to reject the treaty was the same as that of many Republican senators who had opposed it all along. Isakson explained,

Basically, there were two schools of thought on opposition to the treaty. One was that we had no business doing it in a lame-duck session with twelve new members coming in in January; that it really ought to be done by the new Senate and not the old Senate. And the other was that you have certain senators who don’t like treaties at all—Rand Paul and some of those folks who, philosophically, are not internationalists by any stretch of the imagination—and the other fact was that we only had one hearing. It was a last-minute deal … and it just wasn’t the right way to handle something of that significance. And the third reason was in committee what we thought was an agreement to wait until next year and debate it when the new Senate was in place. I believe in keeping your commitment. My objection was to the way it was handled.⁵

Isakson based his vote against ratification squarely on the timing of the ratification vote, as did his Republican colleague, Mike Lee of Utah. But Lee, in a statement, provided additional reasons for voting down the treaty, which may have been at least as influential.

The first identified a clause in the treaty that created an independent committee within the UN to make recommendations on measures to help the disabled. “In the past,” Lee said, “similar independent committees have made demands of state parties that fall outside the legal, social, economic, and cultural traditions of state parties.”⁶ Simply put, Senator Lee regarded at least one provision of the treaty as an infringement on US sovereignty.

He followed that with a charge that a provision in the treaty posed a threat to parental rights, and that the treaty set “a precedent for treaties that would actually allow an international body to define its own domestic law.” Also, because of the treaty language that “provide[s] persons with disabilities with the same range, quality, and standard of free or affordable health care … in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based public health programs,”⁷ Senator Lee charged that “abortion itself falls under ‘sexual and reproductive health’ and therefore would fall under the requirements of this language.”⁸

Conservative religious groups had made known their opposition to the treaty on the same grounds as Senator Lee, although they usually made no mention of the propriety of ratification during a lame-duck session. The Baptist Press, for example, noted that an “article in the treaty making ‘the best interests of the child’ a ‘primary consideration’ could, in the words of the Home School Legal Defense Association, ‘usurp the traditional fundamental right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of a special needs child.’”⁹

John Kerry, according to his own account, stayed up late the night before the floor debate on the treaty, searching Twitter for comments on the treaty, and “spent some time reading the tweets of folks who [didn’t] yet agree we should approve the treaty.” Point by point Kerry attempted to refute the objections. He first denied that the UN commission that was empowered by the treaty to make recommendations was an infringement on US sovereignty by pointing out that its recommendations were non-binding on the signatory nations. He then challenged the argument that the lame-duck session was not the occasion for a treaty vote by pointing out that since 1970, the Senate had approved nineteen treaties in lame-duck sessions. He did not specifically refute the charges that the rights of home-schoolers would be infringed upon nor that the treaty promoted abortion.¹⁰

Kerry was well aware of the nature of opposition to the treaty before his evening of sifting through tweets. Five of the six members of the Foreign Relations Committee who had voted against reporting out the bill to the full Senate on July 31, 2012, had gone on record opposing the treaty and set their opinions forth in the portion of the committee report devoted to minority views. These were Republicans James E. Risch of Idaho, Marco Rubio of Florida, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, and Mike Lee of Utah. The vote to report out the measure, however, was bipartisan, with ranking member Richard G. Lugar along with Georgia’s Johnny Isakson and John Barrasso of Wyoming voting in favor. Curiously, one Republican senator seemed to lie low. Tennessee’s Bob Corker did not join his colleagues in their minority views and voted against reporting out the treaty.¹¹

Bipartisanship after Defeat

The deep disappointment of treaty supporters was mitigated, to a degree, by two features of the treaty vote. The first is that it was bipartisan and came breathtakingly close to passing. The other was the gender composition of the vote: with one exception, every female senator of both parties supported the treaty. There was also the speech delivered by John McCain on the day after the failed ratification vote at the annual summit of the Human Rights First organization in Washington, DC.

After laying the lash on President Obama for the shortcomings of his human rights policy in such places as Libya and Syria, McCain, barely restraining his anger, berated his Republican colleagues:

I wish I could say that my own party was offering a better alternative to these and other policies. I wish I could say that Republicans were providing moral leadership in the world where the Administration is not. But sadly, in so many instances we are not.… Yesterday was an instructive example. As you know, Senate Republicans voted down the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I understand and respect my colleagues’ concerns for American sovereignty and the primacy of our laws. But if ever there were a treaty tailor-made for the advocates of American sovereignty, it was the Disabilities Convention. The treaty would not constrain American sovereignty; it would expand it. It would extend the protection of human rights on which America has proudly led the world for decades. It would demand that the world be more like America. And yet, on the basis of outright falsehoods and fear-mongering, the treaty was voted down.¹²

Democrats, who unanimously supported the treaty, were obviously disappointed by its defeat, but it cannot be claimed that the votes—both in committee and on the Senate floor—were starkly polarized. The Republicans, in fact, would have a better argument that polarization was at work due to the fact that no Democrat broke ranks to oppose the treaty.

The treaty, on its face, might seem unexceptionable, and voting against it would appear to be a slap in the face of the handicapped, but in practical terms it would have accomplished little. Other than making the United States a party to an international convention and presenting the Americans with Disabilities Act as a standard to which the nations of the world were urged to aspire, it contained no appropriation of money for curb-cuts in Cambodia or ramps in Rwanda. It could be characterized as well intentioned but toothless. Republicans might also view it as “message” legislation designed to show their party up as uncaring and callous. Even a Republican who did not buy into the warnings that the treaty promoted abortion or interfered with the homeschooling of special-needs children might have wondered whether it w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Bipartisanship in the US Senate: Recovery and Relapse
• 2 Comity Clubs: Senate Committees
• 3 Big-Box Bipartisanship and Boutique Bipartisanship
• 4 Tensions over Bipartisanship: Leaders versus Committees
• 5 Cosmetic Bipartisanship?
• 6 Is Bipartisanship Dead?
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author