Congress Stalls As Campaign Rolls

By David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer

As Democrats hold onto the slim possibility of regaining the Senate, Frist has done away with tradition and campaigned in South Dakota for Daschle's Republican opponent, former Rep. John Thune.

"I think it is probably unprecedented, certainly highly unusual, that the majority leader is campaigning against the minority leader," said John Fortier, an elections expert at the American Enterprise Institute. "It is a divided Congress."

While Frist and Daschle maintain a cordial working relationship, it is a sign of the ingrained nature of the partisanship that it is not seen as impolitic for Frist to fight to unseat Daschle.

"Typically, the Senate is this cooling-off chamber, but it has become as partisan as the House. Yet the Senate doesn't have the rules of the game to let the majority take advantage of the partisanship," explained Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University whose expertise is congressional history and procedures.

"The House majority party decides to do what they want and in the Senate they have to get the minority party somewhat. And that's what makes it so ugly in that chamber," added Binder, who recently wrote a book as a fellow with the Brookings Institution called 'Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock.'

The victim of all the partisanship has been legislation. From the raising of the minimum wage, to capping medical malpractice lawsuits, to corporate tax cuts, a pox of partisanship is on both houses of Congress.

Yet because legislation can pass through the House relatively easily without the minority signing off, it is the closely divided Senate that made this particular Congress especially split along party lines.

"It has spread across the chamber, to procedural issues, to partisan issues," Binder said. "There is really no political center left in that chamber and it makes it a highly partisan Senate, but it's been on track this way for the last couple years now. Things were pretty ugly in the mid- to late-1990s, as well."

The 1990s did see a Congress severely split over the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton as well as over the federal budget. But the general agreement among Congressional analysts is that the current party split has become nearly untenable.

"We have come to a head over the last 20 or 30 years where we are very closely divided," Fortier said. "More or less, most important things in the Senate have to be done with a 60 vote margin. Even in the Reagan years you could count on enough Democrats to be there from the start."

Democrats' minority position in both houses of Congress left them politically limp during the Medicare reform debate last year. The legislation, which added a measure of prescription drug coverage as well as subsidies for the drug industry, passed with little influence by Democratic leaders.

Infuriated over being left out in the cold, Democrats responded by blocking the conference committees that are formed after legislation has passed both houses of Congress. Both on a highly charged highway bill and another bill to grant tax breaks for charitable giving, Democrats have succeeded in stalling the legislation.

"Republicans need to attract eight or nine Democrats in the Senate. And if there are no moderates on the Democratic side, then you have to reach way over to the left and that is very tough to do given the stakes in the game here being a presidential election," Binder said. "But sometimes presidential elections makes the two parties patch up the differences and bring something home to the voters.

"So 1996 in fact was an effective Congress, although pretty ugly," Binder added. "In the end they passed welfare reform, environmental reform, telecommunications reform."

Most controversial this term, Democrats have given Republicans some of their own medicine on blocking the White House appointment of judges to the federal bench. Although Republicans did the same to President Clinton, Democrats have taken it to new heights or lows, depending on whom you ask, by utilizing the filibuster to stall appointments.

"Other than Zell Miller the most conservative Democrat is left of the most liberal Republican. There used to be considerable overlap and you don't have opportunities to form coalitions this way," Fortier explained.

"There is an incentive in any election year to say, 'Hey we are not going to budge on anything.' But this year even more, as Congress is exceptionally partisan."