A procedural knife fight

Carl Hulse in today's New York Times: "...the clash between the two veteran senators is evidence of a larger breakdown in relations in the Senate, a deterioration in cooperation that is hobbling the Senate's ability to get things done. The situation is not likely to improve with a presidential election on the horizon.

...lawmakers of both parties said they had rarely seen the tone so poisonous and the willingness to work together on the floor at such a low ebb. "The last vestiges of courtesy seem to be going out the window," said Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., who has served as majority and minority leader during his almost 20 years in the Senate. "Every time I think the Senate — Republican or Democrat — has gone to a point where you can't go any lower, we go lower."

It is hardly startling that members of the two parties do not see eye to eye. And the spirit of bipartisanship in the Senate always rises and falls depending on the subject and the election calendar. But seven months into the new Democratic regime, the environment seems unusually hostile. Occasionally, senators do, too, as exhibited in a Sunday television exchange between Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that looked for a moment as if it might turn physical as the two men argued about the war in Iraq.

Hard feelings have consequences. Without agreements between the leaders of the opposing parties, the Senate has been plunged into a procedural knife fight, with Democrats forced to scramble to find 60 votes not just on contentious issues like an Iraq withdrawal plan, but on once-routine matters like motions to proceed to a spending bill...

Besides the narrow 51-49 majority Democrats enjoy, lawmakers and others attribute what senators decry as a lack of comity to various reasons, including the emotions surrounding the Iraq war debate, a Republican payback for Democratic stalling in recent years and pure political maneuvering in a hot-house environment.

Members of both the House and Senate have been contending for years that the sort of personal interaction that can lead lawmakers to overcome partisan differences has been on the decline, leaving Congress polarized.

But Kennedy, Specter and others say they find that committee leaders still tend to be able to work together and, indeed, Kennedy and Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., have cooperated on a major higher education measure the Senate was considering Thursday. And a bipartisan group of senior lawmakers put together the Senate's immigration proposal, though it went down in flames to the broader political divide in Congress.

It is on such big topics that the Senate is stumbling as neither party seems willing to give much ground, locked in a permanent political campaign although Senate terms were made longer than those of the House so that Senators would have a better opportunity to rise a bit above politics."

Though the article ends on a note of hopefulness, with Levin saying that rancorous debate is what the Senate is for, this "poisonous" atmosphere is bad for the country and bad for the planet. We owe it to ourselves and to the world to demonstrate what a healthy democracy is. Fighting to stasis is not strength, and it's not leadership. The filibuster is a failure, not a success.

Every month of this deepens the fissures that separate the red and blue sides of this country. I long for some leaders who can find a way out of this morass. I bet I'm not alone.