Daschle’s Constitution, Ctd.
Blaming the Founders.

By Ramesh Ponnuru
March 26, 2002 12:25 p.m.

om Daschle has gotten into the habit of shifting the blame for his controversial decisions — all the way back to the Founding Fathers. As previous bulletins have noted, Daschle has made the spurious argument that he is somehow constitutionally required to deep-six the president's nominees and policies when they can't clear 60 votes in the Senate. (See the second item in the February 11 bulletin.)

Now he's claiming that to let the full Senate vote on a nomination after a committee has voted him down would "break a 200-year-old precedent." The nomination in question is that of Judge Charles Pickering for a position on a circuit court of appeals. The judiciary committee defeated him on a party-line vote, and President Bush requested that Daschle have a floor vote anyway. Daschle's line about precedents was his explanation for his refusal of the request.

Steve Chabot, the Ohio Republican who chairs the House subcommittee on the Constitution, wrote a letter to Daschle calling him on his earlier misrepresentations of the Founders. He's written again to debunk Daschle's latest claim. "The precedent to which you refer is unclear," Chabot writes. "The Constitution, however, is not."

Chabot quotes Federalist No. 76, in which Alexander Hamilton notes that the president is "bound to submit the propriety of his choice to the discussion and determination of a different and independent body, and that body an entire branch of the legislature." Hamilton makes a number of similar references.

Chabot also notes that the Senate in 1789 adopted a resolution requiring a vote of the full Senate on judicial nominations. As his clincher, Chabot invokes the words of Laurence Tribe: "what matters most is that one hundred Senators, of diverse backgrounds and philosophies" vote on nominees.

Whether or not Daschle is right to block a floor vote for Judge Pickering, his claim that he is forced to do it is dubious.

1995
In a posting on The Corner the other day, I asserted that it was Medicare reform that derailed the "Republican revolution" following 1994. The assertion has been disputed. Instapundit say she's "not so sure" it was Medicare, inclining instead to the view that the Republicans began to lose support "when the 1994 class started acting (by about late 1995) like plain old members of Congress rather than anti-incumbent revolutionaries." RiShawn Biddle offers me a "history lesson" in which Republicans' betrayal of the term-limits movement in March 1995 plays the crucial role. (Biddle, by the way, wrongly implies that Henry Hyde "decided to break ranks" at this time; his opposition to term limits had been well known for several years.)

The poll numbers for congressional Republicans, and specifically for Newt Gingrich, declined through most of 1995, and a number of plausible candidates could be put forward as explanations: the school-lunch fiasco in the spring; the term-limits vote; the Oklahoma City bombing in April, which was taken by some to discredit anti-statist rhetoric; and the budget battles of the fall.

The major point of contention in those battles was Medicare; the most dramatic events of them were two government shutdowns. The Republican position on Medicare, at least as it got through to the public, was highly unpopular. Democrats stood for something concrete (Medicare benefits) while Republicans stood for something abstract (a balanced budget). The shutdowns were also unpopular, and blamed on Republicans.

Gingrich did not help matters by saying that one reason he was moved toward brinkmanship on the government shutdown was that President Clinton had dissed him when they flew together on Air Force One for Yitzhak Rabin's funeral. (Gingrich alleged, falsely, that Clinton had not said hi to him during the long flight home and had forced him to take the rear exit.) Indeed, while that incident is little-remembered today, it's hard to overstate how damaging it was for Republicans.

I think that the Medicare/budget fight was the most important factor in the undoing of Republicans, for three principal reasons. First, more people care about Medicare, which affects families directly in a big way, than care about school lunches or term limits. A lot of the "angry white males" who voted for Republicans in 1994 wanted their Medicare benefits, or their parents, protected.

Second, Bill Clinton saw that fight — and not the term-limits vote or even the school-lunch controversy — as his principal opportunity. With Dick Morris's help, Clinton bought a big barrage of ads clobbering Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich in the fall of 1995, mostly on Medicare and budget issues. Dole never recovered.

Third, Republicans saw it as a turning point themselves. They saw the budget battles as their major political defeat, and they never really recovered their nerve in taking on Bill Clinton on policy issues. And small-government conservatism has been in retreat ever since.

Lamar Alexander on Abortion
What his spokesman old me.