After health care, we need Senate reform

Image by scecon via Flickr

By Ezra Klein
Sunday, December 27, 2009; B01

On Dec. 8, 1964, Mike Manatos wrote a letter that explains what's wrong with the Senate in 2009. This wasn't, of course, the subject of his letter. Manatos was no futurist; he was Lyndon Johnson's liaison to the Senate, and he was writing to update his bosses on Medicare's chances in the aftermath of the 1964 election. Surveying the incoming crop of senators, Manatos counted a solid majority in favor of the president's effort. "If all our supporters are present and voting we would win by a vote of 55 to 45," he predicted.

That letter would never be written now. In today's Senate, 55 votes isn't enough to "win," or anything close to it; it's enough to get you five votes away from the 60 votes you need to shut down a filibuster. Only then, in most cases, can a law be passed. The modern Senate is a radically different institution than the Senate of the 1960s, and the dysfunction exhibited in its debate over health care -- the absence of bipartisanship, the use of the filibuster to obstruct progress rather than protect debate, the ability of any given senator to hold the bill hostage to his or her demands -- has convinced many, both inside and outside the chamber, that it needs to be fixed.

This might seem an odd moment to argue that the Senate is fundamentally broken and repairs should top our list of priorities. After all, the Senate passed a $900 billion health-care bill Thursday morning. But consider the context: Arlen Specter's defection from the Republican Party earlier this year gave Democrats 60 votes in the Senate -- a larger majority than either party has had since the '70s. Democrats also controlled the House and the presidency, and were working in the aftermath of a financial crisis that occurred on a Republican president's watch. This was a test of whether a party could govern when everything was stacked in its favor.

The answer seems to be, well, not really. The Democrats ended up focusing on health-care reform's low-hanging fruit: the bill the Senate ultimately passed does much more to increase coverage than it does to address the considerably harder problem of cost control, it strengthens the existing private insurance system and it does not include a public insurance option. And Democrats still could not find a single Republican vote, which meant they had to give Nebraska a coupon entitling it to a free Medicaid expansion and hand Joe Lieberman a voucher that's good for anything he wants. If the Senate cannot govern effectively even when history conspires to free its hand, then it cannot govern.

To understand why the modern legislative process is so bad, why every Senator seems able to demand a king's ransom in return for his or her vote and no bill ever seems to be truly bipartisan, you need to understand one basic fact: The government can function if the minority party has either the incentive to make the majority fail or the power to make the majority fail. It cannot function if it has both.

In decades past, the parties did not feel they had both. Cooperation was the Senate's custom, if not its rule. But in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich, then the minority whip of the House, and Bob Dole, then the minority leader of the Senate, realized they did have both. A strategy of relentless obstruction brought then-president Bill Clinton to his knees, as the minority party discovered it had the tools to make the majority party fail.

Unfortunately, both parties have followed Gingrich's playbook ever since. According to UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, about 8 percent of major bills faced a filibuster in the 1960s. This decade, that jumped to 70 percent. The problem with the minority party continually making the majority party fail, of course, is that it means neither party can ever successfully govern the country.

Jeff Merkley, a freshman Democratic Senator from Oregon and former speaker of Oregon's House of Representatives, spoke to this issue in an interview last week. "When you use the word filibuster," he said, "most of us in America envision it as the ability to speak at length and even delay progress by taking hours. I count myself among those Americans." He sighed. "But it's not a filibuster anymore. It's a supermajority requirement. And when that becomes commonly used, it's a recipe for paralysis."

Tom Harkin, the veteran Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate's influential Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was even more dismayed by recent events. His efforts to curb the filibuster began in the 1990s, when he was in the minority. "People say I only worry about this because I'm in the majority," he said Tuesday. "But I come at this with clean hands!" Back then, his partner in the effort to reform the filibuster was Lieberman. "The filibuster," Lieberman said at the time, "has become not only an obstacle to accomplishment here, but also a symbol of a lot that ails Washington today." Lieberman has since stopped worrying and learned to love obstructionism. But Harkin hasn't.

This isn't just a Democratic concern, though Democrats, being in the majority, are the ones raising it now. In 2005, Senate majority leader Bill Frist nearly shut the chamber down over the Democratic habit of filibustering George W. Bush's judicial nominees. "This filibuster is nothing less than a formula for tyranny by the minority," he said at the time.

Potential solutions abound. Harkin would eliminate the filibuster while still protecting the minority's right to debate. Under his proposal, bills would initially require 60 votes to pass. Three days later, that threshold would fall to 57. Three days after that, 54. And three days after that, 51. Merkley has some other ideas. One is to attract Republicans to the project by phasing the filibuster out six or eight years in the future, when we can't predict which party will initially benefit.

There is real promise in Merkley's approach. The danger of reforming the Senate is that, like health-care reform before it, it comes to seem a partisan issue. It isn't. Members of both parties often take the fact that neither Democrats nor Republicans can govern effectively to mean they benefit from the filibuster half the time. In reality, the country loses the benefits of a working legislature all the time.

But members of both parties have become attached to this idea that they can block objectionable legislation even when they're relatively powerless. This is evidence, perhaps, that both parties are so used to the victories of obstruction that they have forgotten their purpose is to amass victories through governance. Either way, a world in which the majority can pass its agenda is a better one, a place where the majority party is held accountable for its ideas and not for the gridlock and inaction furnished by the Senate's rules.

Law professor Lawrence Lessig often compares the dysfunctions of the Congress to the woes of an alcoholic. An alcoholic, he says, might be facing cirrhosis of the liver, the loss of his family and terrible debt. Amidst all that, the fact that he drinks before bed at night might not seem his worst problem. But it is the first problem, the one that must be solved before he can solve any of the others. America, too, is facing more dramatic problems than the Senate rules: A coming budget crisis, catastrophic climate change and an archaic and inefficient tax system, to name a few. But none will be solved until we fix the dysfunctions of the Senate.

Ezra Klein reports on domestic and economic policy for The Washington Post and blogs at washingtonpost.com/ezraklein. The full interviews with Sen. Jeff Merkley, Sen. Tom Harkin and political scientist Barbara Sinclair can be found there. Klein will be online to chat with readers on Monday at 12 p.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.

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Iranian Targeted by Onetime Associates

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 3, 2009

In the early days of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saeed Hajjarian advised the hostage-takers at the U.S. Embassy. During the Iran-Iraq war, he helped establish the much-feared Ministry of Intelligence. Then he turned in a democratic direction, running reformist newspapers and serving as a political adviser to President Mohammad Khatami. In 2000 a gunman aligned with a hard-line government faction shot him in the face, leaving him partially paralyzed and dependent on medication.

And for the past six weeks, Hajjarian, 55, has languished in prison, a key target of the apparatus he helped create.

"He is a great symbol of what the Islamic republic does to its own," said Farideh Farhi, an Iran specialist at the University of Hawaii who first met Hajjarian in the 1990s. "Obviously, today, some in the Intelligence Ministry think he was the brain behind [opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein] Mousavi's campaign." Hajjarian's arrest, she added, "suggests his continued significance as a reflection of what the hard-liners most fear."

Hajjarian was arrested three days after the disputed June 12 presidential election, along with thousands of other people. Family members said his medications for problems such as seizures and motor control have been administered erratically, which could lead to brain damage or death. After a visit last week, his wife, a doctor, described him as depressed and tearful, and said he has been interrogated in direct sunlight in temperatures of more than 100 degrees and doused with ice water, affecting his heart rate dangerously.

On Thursday, two days after a Human Rights Watch report described his "deteriorating" condition, officials said Hajjarian had been moved to a "state-owned house" with "suitable" medical facilities. His wife, in an interview, said she had not seen the house or been told anything about it.

Iran on Saturday put 100 political activists and others on trial for conspiring to topple the government, and added 10 defendants on Sunday. The opposition's Mousavi alleged that the government had used "medieval torture" to force confessions from the accused.

Hajjarian, who has not yet been tried, had not been particularly active in the lead-up to the election, though he supported Mousavi. But recent articles in the press aligned with the government have listed him as leading a push for democratic reform.

"In the viewpoint of the Iranian government, transition to democracy is a crime, and democracy is equal to evil, and it is a Western term," said Mohsen Kadivar, a reformist cleric who worked with Hajjarian in Iran and is now a visiting professor at Duke University. "So all those figures that try to democratize their country, they have committed a big crime."

Hajjarian, who grew up in a poor section of Tehran, is described by friends as having a dour face but a sharp sense of humor. Like the revolution itself, he seemed to mature from strident youthful ideology into a middle-aged complexity and thoughtfulness. His transformation echoes that of many revolutionaries who coalesced around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1980s but later moved toward reform.

The end of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war came as a shock to many who had believed in Khomeini's vows to bring down Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein at any cost, said Ahmad Sadri, chair of Islamic world studies at Lake Forest College, who first met Hajjarian in 1992.

"The mentality of the revolutionaries was that this was the dawn of a new age, that this revolution . . . is steadfast, it is non-compromising," he said. When the war ended with no clear victory for either side, "a light went off in their minds and they realized they had been wrong all along about a lot of things, including mixing religion and politics, and that the world of politics is a world of compromise."

After Khomeini's death, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ascended to power as Iran's supreme leader, leftists such as Hajjarian and Mohammad Khatami were sidelined. That, analysts said, gave them time to lick their wounds and turn to studying, many moving in more secular directions.

They formed intellectual circles. They started journals. Hajjarian, working on a PhD in political science at Tehran University, pursued the idea of a transition to democracy and advocated pressuring the government from below while striking bargains at the top.

"He's a thinker," said Bill Berkeley, a former New York Times editorial writer who has interviewed Hajjarian for an upcoming book about the hostage-takers. "He had the feeling the revolution had lost its way and gone off the track. He told me war was a bad way to build democratic institutions; he attributes the authoritarian direction that the revolution ended up taking to the Iran-Iraq war."

Hajjarian espoused a democratic interpretation of Islam, said Kadivar, who during Khatami's tenure was Islamic deputy of the Center for Strategic Studies, an Iranian think tank, while Hajjarian was its political deputy. "I remember he said the leader and president is like the employee of the citizen, and the citizen is like the owner of the land. And they rent out to the president or the supreme leader as their workers, so the workers should do as they tell them."

Such ideas, in a system where the word of the supreme leader is considered divine, can be deadly. Analysts say Hajjarian may have been targeted for assassination because he used his insider knowledge to accuse the Intelligence Ministry of a string of killings of intellectuals in the late 1990s.

After recovering from a coma, Hajjarian was physically disabled, but his mental capacities were unharmed. Analysts said the government has targeted him now not for any particular activity but because of his symbolic importance. They said some in the government hope to force a confession of conspiring against the state, an accusation also leveled against other arrested reformists.

"I think it's kind of a terror tactic, to scare people, by showing that even a guy like Hajjarian could be forced to confess," Berkeley said. "If he died [in prison], it would be a debacle for the regime. But if he survives and confesses, that might be something that would be considered an asset."

It could also backfire.

"They have overused this tactic," Farhi said. "Now people will just say that he was forced to do it and further turn their anger against the government."

Special correspondent Kay Armin Serjoie contributed to this report.

Ideological Diversity Among Democrats Means No Free Pass for Obama

By Shailagh Murray and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

After a series of early and relatively easy victories on Capitol Hill, the White House appears certain to face a more difficult road when Congress returns to work next week.

Not content to task lawmakers with passing an ambitious agenda of record new spending, sweeping health-care reform and other major initiatives, President Obama yesterday nudged the Senate to move ahead with its version of a landmark energy bill the House passed on Friday. In recent weeks, he has also revived the idea of pursuing broad changes in immigration law.

Obama and his aides have proved adept at navigating the politics and eccentricities of the legislative branch. But as lawmakers attempt to navigate much trickier and more contentious issues in the second half of the year, the narrow margin of Friday's energy vote served as a warning: The higher the stakes, the tougher the challenge in finding consensus within what has become a diverse Democratic majority.

The legislation represented the first big test for one of Obama's biggest and most controversial domestic priorities, stemming climate change. Democrats who voted against the bill came from all over the map, from coal country to Midwestern factory towns to rural swaths of the Great Plains. Each of the regions helped swell the party's ranks in the 2006 and 2008 elections, and Democrats think they represent the linchpin to an enduring congressional majority.

But an energy bill that to a California Democrat represents a historic first step in slowing climate change appears to a Rust Belt colleague to be a redux of the 1993 energy-consumption tax that the House approved by a nearly identical 219 to 213 vote -- only to be brushed off by the Senate and resurrected by Republican candidates on the 1994 campaign trail.

"It's like you have a big umbrella and you're trying to fit 10 people under it, but if you move it in one direction, you're going to leave some people out," said Rep. Dan Maffei, a member of the class of '08 and the first Democrat to represent his Upstate New York district in nearly 30 years.

The energy bill will face an even stiffer challenge in the Senate, where the Democratic caucus is an array of conservatives, liberals, and just about everything in between, and these lawmakers are making very different calculations about the big items on Obama's legislative wish list.

At its core, Obama's domestic agenda is a liberal wish list of health care for all, tough new environmental regulations and government solutions to crises ranging from failing schools to faltering auto companies. But as the party's ranks expanded in 2006 and 2008, its center of gravity shifted to the middle. And the key to a durable majority, White House officials and party leaders agree, is adapting old policy goals to new political realities.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), a member of the Democratic leadership, said the party is coalescing as an amalgam of "activist centrists" who think government has a role in solving problems but are more pragmatic than ideological. "I think that's where the president is, and that's where we are," he said. "When you win red states, strange things happen."

The battle for energy votes isn't the only sign that despite Democrats' margins in the House and Senate, unity isn't a foregone conclusion. In recent weeks, lawmakers have ignored a veto threat to save a stealth fighter jet, rejected Obama's request to delay action on a costly highway bill and balked at the administration's request for funding to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Hoping to succeed where other presidents have struggled in implementing their agenda, the Obama White House has attempted to work Capitol Hill with a blend of agenda-setting and deference. Obama outlines ambitious objectives, then leaves lawmakers largely in charge of their final shape.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) enlisted two senior committee members to help assemble the House energy bill: liberal Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and conservative Rep. Rick Boucher, from coal-producing southwestern Virginia. The authors' bottom line was a cap that would gradually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ultimately achieving 80 percent reductions from 1990 levels by 2050. Everything else was negotiable. When Obama entered the fray on May 5, summoning all 36 committee Democrats to the White House, he didn't make a single demand. Rather, participants say, he pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and said, "He had a chance to affect history. You, too, have a chance to affect history."

The House bill rejects Obama's proposal to auction 100 percent of emissions allowances, and instead calls for distributing 85 percent of allowances free of charge. The concession effectively defers the additional costs that polluters would incur, but the bill wouldn't have passed the chamber without it.

"We were given broad encouragement to report a bill in a timely manner," Boucher said. But Obama "made it clear he was expecting us to work out the details."

At the same time, Obama and a team of top White House officials -- many of them Hill veterans -- have been extraordinarily attentive to individual lawmakers, showering them with invitations and responding quickly to requests, concerns and criticisms.

"There has been a very, very high level of contact and dialogue. They've covered the ground," said Steve Richetti, who ran the congressional liaison office in the Clinton White House. And he noted the deference paid to the legislative branch, adding that, on health care and climate change, "they have tried to allow the process to work without intervening beyond what would be acceptable on the Hill."

Maintaining a sense of common interest across the party is a paramount goal. Early on, administration officials and Democratic leaders agreed they would steer clear of controversial social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. And to the discontent of many liberal Democrats, Congress intends to remain generally silent on those fronts.

"They know the consequences of '94. It looms," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said of the legislative debacles in President Bill Clinton's early tenure that produced the 1994 Republican landslide. "That division led to failure. . . . Our chances for success only come about by unity. That, as a culture up there, has been enforced by enough people that enough members believe."

For the White House, the trick is to keep a firm grip without appearing overly meddlesome.

Along with House and Senate leaders, Emanuel and his team are sharply focused on new lawmakers most likely to become Republican targets. Rep. Jason Altmire, elected in 2006, was invited to a breakfast in March with Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki to discuss issues related to the large population of veterans in Altmire's western Pennsylvania district. Altmire's office and the VA now communicate regularly. Maffei was given a leading role in pressing two popular bills, to curb credit card practices deemed harmful to consumers and to protect auto dealers.

Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.), a member of the class of '06, said he has had extensive discussions with top administration officials on financial regulatory reform, another Obama priority. When he expressed to a White House official his interest in talking with Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan about a piece of legislation, he got a call the next day setting the meeting for three days later. He has met with three other Cabinet officials to discuss bills.

"We're supposed to legislate. They're supposed to execute," he said of the relationship between Congress and the White House. "When you give people a chance to participate, you get people moving in the same direction."

At least some Republicans are also a focus of the outreach effort. Democrats are seeking support on health-care reform from Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee. But GOP leaders complain that the phone calls and White House invitations have slacked off -- perhaps because Obama's early efforts to woo Republicans yielded few votes.

"I think that in the beginning they seemed a lot more willing to go in and engage with us," said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

So far, the major votes have broken along party lines, forcing Obama to rely almost entirely on his own diverse body of Democrats. Pressure built on them as last week's final energy vote drew near. Even Boucher was targeted when House Republicans circulated a letter from MeadWestvaco, a major employer in western Virginia, warning that 1,500 packaging jobs in Covington, Va., could be at risk.

Boucher, a 14-term incumbent, was unwavering, but others were unmoved. Altmire had bad news for Emanuel when his 2006 campaign mentor called Wednesday about the impending vote.

"I'm a firm no," Altmire replied. "I wouldn't waste any more time talking to me."