U.S. Senate

Wisconsin’s Curious Senate History

At least three times in the last sixty-plus years Wisconsin voters have sent packing a respected national politician with a record of genuine accomplishment and replaced him with, well, to be generous, someone else.

In 1946 Joe McCarthy, whose name is forever linked with a bleak period in American political history, beat Sen. Robert M. La Follette, Jr. in the Wisconsin Republican primary. Young Bob La Follette had replaced his father, Fighting Bob La Follette, in the Senate when the elder icon of the famous Wisconsin political family died in 1925. Robert La Follette, Sr. was selected in 1955 as one of the five greatest U.S. Senators.

By all accounts Young Bob was a serious, studious legislator determined to carry on his father’s progressive political legacy. La Follette was also supremely independent. He broke ranks with the old-line Republican Party in 1932 to support Franklin Roosevelt, supported much of FDR’s New Deal legislation and was a champion of civil liberties when such things were not very popular. A measure of La Follette’s respect in the Senate is contained in the intriguing fact that, although elected as a Republican, Democrats gave him the chairmanship of an important labor investigations committee in the 1930’s. He also helped pass landmark federal government reorganization legislation near the end of his Senate career.

McCarthy’s career, despite regular efforts to rehabilitate the reputation of the bully from Appleton, is well documented. He was shameless as a self promoter, trampled on the very idea of civil liberties and was ultimately censured by the Senate in 1954. His death at 49 in 1957 was directly related to his years of heavy drinking.

After service in the Truman Administration, young Bob La Follette’s life also came to a tragic end. He committed suicide in 1953.

Nelson – Kasten

In 1980, Wisconsin voters turned out another remarkable Senator, Gaylord Nelson. First elected to the Senate in 1963, Nelson, a former Wisconsin Governor, became one of the foremost champions in the Congress of conservation legislation. Nelson supported trails legislation, sponsored or co-sponsored the Wilderness Act and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. It was Gaylord Nelson’s idea to have the very first Earth Day in 1970. The event was important because, as Nelson later said, the country needed “a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy and, finally, force this issue permanently onto the national political agenda.”

President Clinton presented Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, fifteen years after his defeat by Robert Kasten in the Reagan landslide of 1980.

Kasten went on to, charitably, a less-than-distinguished two terms in the Senate. Kasten now has his own consulting business. Defeated for re-election in 1992, Kasten was a part of the Class of 1980 that included Idaho’s Steve Symms, Indiana’s Dan Quayle, New York’s Al D’Amato and South Dakota’s James Abdnor. None of whom, history would say, made much of a lasting mark in the United States Senate.

Feingold – Johnson

It remains to be seen if the most recent Senate election in Wisconsin, where Sen. Russ Feingold lost re-election, continues the McCarthy – Kasten pattern of replacing an accomplished, national figure with a senator who doesn’t quite measure up.

Feingold, say what you will about his generally liberal politics, was widely seen as a serious legislator with one of the most independent records in the Senate. Republican John McCain got downright emotional in talking about Feingold’s Senate career. “I don’t think he is replaceable,” McCain said during a floor speech.

History will judge, but Feingold’s principled opposition to the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the Iraq War, not to mention his bipartisan work with McCain on campaign finance reform, mark him as someone who made a difference during three terms in the Senate.

Sen-elect Ron Johnson – he beat Feingold by 105,000 votes in November – came out of no where to do so. Johnson is a plastic manufacturer, a favorite of the Tea Party movement and has never held public office.

It has been said that we get the government we deserve. One wonders, with the perfect hindsight of history, if the great state of Wisconsin, proud of its cheese and Packers, might not like to replay at least a couple of its 20th Century U.S. Senate elections?

The judgment passing of history can be rather harsh on whether we voters always make the best choices. Put a different way, looking back on Wisconsin’s Senate history, another term for a Bob La Follette and a Gaylord Nelson might look pretty good right now.

The Once and Future John McCain

There once was a time when Arizona Sen. John McCain warmly embraced the label “maverick.” He seemed to delight in taking positions at odds with his party – or even his state’s – orthodoxy. He had established himself firmly in the tradition of some of the great Senate mavericks of the past – LaFollette, Borah, even Goldwater.

But just as BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” brand washed away in the Gulf oil spill, so has McCain’s maverick brand forever vanished thanks to his presidential election run and his ugly, but still decisive, victory yesterday in the GOP primary in Arizona. McCain, by all odds, will be back in the Senate post-November, but not as a maverick and likely not ever again as an interesting, important American political player.

I have always found the tough, opinionated McCain to be one of the more fascinating characters in American politics. His personal story, the POW experience, his once obvious regard for those on the other side of the aisle, his old school willingness to be an unpredictable independent couldn’t help, at one time, to make him an interesting, maybe even historic, player in the long history of the Senate. That brand is gone, I think, and with it much that made John McCain so interesting and important in the Senate.

As Politico noted in its story today about McCain, during the most recent primary, in addition to spending $21 million, he repudiated many of the positions – immigration, climate change, etc. – that once made his maverick brand genuine:

“Immigration wasn’t the only issue where McCain seemed to recalibrate his position in response to the primary challenge,” Politico said. “He also promised to filibuster any legislation that revoked the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy after pledging to support the repeal in 2006 and he distanced himself from an emissions capping measure he co-sponsored with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) as conservative anger over cap-and-trail boiled over.”

As one commentator noted, McCain rolled out a TV spot with six, tough looking Arizona sheriffs to attest to his new, tough stand on immigration. This is the guy who once teamed with Ted Kennedy to write an immigration reform bill, but during the campaign he walked away – ran away – from all that history.

“The votes are in,” Adam Hanft wrote at the CNN website. “The sheriffs spot — and an entire campaign apparatus that had to relegitimize the senator’s conservative acceptability, including an endorsement from Sarah Palin — did the job.

“But it’s a profound comment on where Republican politics stand in 2010 that John McCain had to run against a new challenger by also running against his old principles.”

The Senate was a more interesting place when McCain the Maverick roamed the floor. He may, who knows, prove to be a maverick again once safely re-elected, but he may also find that in politics once you are seen as running from your principles its pretty hard to ever again be taken seriously, as a maverick or anything else.

Remembering Ted Stevens

I wanted to feature this photo of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens for one reason. Stevens is smiling, something he seemed rarely to do – at least in public. A more common Stevens image captured him as a scowling, angry guy, given to instant fits that displayed his legendary temper. A D.C. magazine once voted him the “hottest” senator and not for his chiseled good looks.

Stevens, the longest serving Republican senator in the country’s history, died Monday night in a back country plane crash in Alaska, the state he represented in the Senate for 40 years. Stevens was 86 and scandal and controversy and temper aside he deserves to be remembered as one of the most influential senators of the second half of the 20th Century.

I can’t say I really knew the man, but did interview him on two occasions and both were memorable. In 1980, Republicans captured control of the Senate for the first time in memory in the election that saw a slew of western senators, Stevens included, elevated to committee chairmanships. Stevens went on to run the Appropriations and Commerce Committees with a loud voice and a fast gavel and, of course, with a slab of bacon for the Last Frontier always first in his mind.

I was producing public television programs in 1980 and some how was able to convince the boss to send me and a photographer (current Idaho Public Television General Manager Peter Morrill) to Washington to do an hour-long special on the newly powerful GOP. Stevens graciously sat for an interview and gave the yokels from Idaho plenty of his time.

Years later I was working on a piece for Montana Magazine on the late, great Montana Senator and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. I’d been told by a former Mansfield aide that I really needed to get to Stevens who, the aide assured me, would tell me a great story about his relationship with the famous Montanan.

Thanks for my old boss, Cecil Andrus, who had clashed many a time with Stevens over Alaska issues, but who nevertheless maintained a healthy respect for the senator, which Stevens reciprocated, I was able to connect with Stevens on the phone.

He told me a remarkable story of how, as a freshman senator, Mansfield has shown him an unprecedented degree of respect and courtesy and imbued Stevens with the notion that every single member of the Senate has a right to be taken seriously on every single issue. He ended by saying, in words I’ll never forget coming from a Republican about a Democrat, “Mike was the best leader the Senate has ever seen.”

Ted Stevens was tough on environmentalists and those who dared to cross him. He was a champion of the earmark back before speaking ill of federal appropriations became a litmus test for every politician. By one count, Stevens had a hand in nearly 1,500 earmarks over his Senate career worth more than $3.4 billion. Like his friend the late Robert Byrd, Stevens came to the Senate to take care of his state and that meant appropriating money for projects back home.

He was, as has been said of lesser men, not always right, but seldom in doubt. Stevens once proclaimed, while chairing the Appropriations Committee, “I’m a mean, miserable S.O.B.”

On another occasion, he said: “I didn’t lose my temper. I know right where it is.”

Ted Stevens was also part of a vanishing breed, a throw back to the Senate of Mansfield and Jackson, Church and Baker, Long and Dole. Theirs was a Senate were, once in a while, serious legislation got considered and past without the incredible partisanship displayed today by both parties.

Much will be made of the fact that Stevens’ death came in a plane crash, the same awful circumstance that claimed his first wife and nearly killed him in 1978. Considering his eventful life, including flying Army Air Force transports over “The Hump” in the Himalayas ferrying supplies from India to China in World War II, it seems like a eerily fateful ending to more than eight decades.

In his Senate farewell, Stevens summed up his career: “To hell with politics, just do what’s right for Alaska.” That’s pretty much how he’ll be remembered, I suspect.

With Byrd’s death earlier this year, we’ve now seen the passing of two old and tough Senate bulls, a type not around any more. They’ll both be remembered for a long time – and should be.

Governors Appointing Themselves

The recent death of Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia has many, many consequences. For example, until his replacement is decided, Byrd’s seat – the 60th Democratic seat in the Senate – deprives the majority of the vote needed to stop a filibuster. Also, depending on how things play in West Virginia, the “safe” Byrd seat could be a seat Democrats have to protect, particularly if there is a special election in the fall.

Nothing upsets a state’s politics quite like a Senate vacancy, which brings me to the fellow pictured nearby – Governor then Senator Charles Gossett of Idaho.

As I noted in a post a few months back, Gossett is one of two Northwesterners – Montana’s John Erickson being the other – who engineered their own appointments to the U.S. Senate. It is a horrible idea and nearly always fatal to the politician doing the engineering.

Perhaps this is why West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, who reportedly longs for Byrd’s Senate seat, has repeatedly ruled out appointing himself. Maybe that self awareness helps explain the governor’s 70% approval rating in the Mountaineer State. Still, the state’s AFL-CIO, among others, has publicly called for Manchin to reconsider. Bad idea, Governor.

Nine governors have tried the, “gee, I think I’ll appoint myself to the Senate” approach. Eight of them subsequently lost a primary or the very next opportunity to confront the voters, Gossett and Erickson included.

Only one governor has been able to pull off this political slight of hand, Kentucky’s Albert B. “Happy” Chandler in 1939. Chandler went on to win a special election and then a full term and then resigned his Senate seat in 1945 to become Commissioner of Baseball. It says all one needs to know about Chandler’s Senate career that he is best remembered for succeeding Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and approving Jackie Robinson’s major league contract in 1947, but that’s another story.

At least one very promising political career ended when a governor appointed himself to the Senate. In 1977, Minnesota Gov. Wendell Anderson, a rising star in national Democratic politics, decided he was the best choice to replace Walter Mondale who had left his Senate seat vacant when he was elected Vice President.

Anderson, handsome, well-spoken, known to Minnesotans as “Wendy”, had graced the cover of TIME magazine in 1973 while wearing a plaid shirt and holding a big ol’ northern pike. Anderson, it seemed, was a young man with a bright political future. It all ended with the “Minnesota Massacre” of 1978. The Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party – the DFL – suffered a shackling at the polls that year. Anderson lost the Senate election and his former Lt. Governor, Rudy Perpich, who had facilitated Wendy’s Senate aspirations, lost the Governor’s race. The voters took out their resentment on politicians who were seen as too smart by half. Generally speaking, voters hate an inside deal. In the Minnesota case, once they had punished him, voters did give Perpich a second chance. He came back to win and go on to become the state’s longest serving governor.

When a Senate vacancy occurs, it must be tempting for a governor having won a statewide race, having built a political organization, to look in the mirror and think: “there is no one better for this job.”

History says there are better choices – and they include anyone but the governor.

Joseph Taylor Robinson (1872-1937)

Much is being made today – as it should be – of the honors being afforded Robert C. Byrd, the longest serving member ever in the United States Senate. Senators will stop everything – Supreme Court confirmations, Wall Street regulatory reform, maybe even partisan bickering – to honor Byrd whose mortal remains will hold the Senate floor for a final time. It is a great honor and a fitting one.

In another July – 73 years ago – another powerful, beloved Senate leader, a Senator with many of the southern and political instincts that Byrd came to symbolize, received much the same honor Byrd receives today. Joseph Taylor Robinson, when he died of a heart attack during a blistering hot spell in Washington, D.C. on July 14, 1937, was the longest serving majority leader in history. His death shocked the nation’s political establishment and, like Bobby Byrd, it caused the institution to stop and reflect on how special and significant one person can be, even in the rarefied air of the United States Senate.

Robinson, a former Arkansas governor and Democratic Vice Presidential candidate in 1928, was widely admired in the Senate for his work ethic, his fairness and his ability to forge lasting personal relationships.

[Technically, Byrd is lying in repose today, while Robinson’s 1937 ceremony was called a memorial.]

Robinson’s biographer, Cecil Edward Weller, Jr., says he was the most important Arkansas politician in the first half of the 20th Century, and one of the most influential in the south. But even more than that, Robinson, like Byrd, was a creature of the Senate. Ironically, Robinson’s lifetime ambition was a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court and that seemed within his reach in 1937.

It was the worst kept secret in the Capitol that Franklin Roosevelt had promised the first open seat on the Court to Robinson, mostly out of respect for his party loyalty. Robinson had taken on the thankless job of running as the southern balance on the Democratic ticket in 1928 with New York Governor Al Smith. Smith was a Catholic, northeastern, urban, “wet,” while Robinson was a rural, Protestant, southern “dry.” The Smith-Robinson ticket got trounced.

When a Supreme Court opening materialized in the summer of 1937, FDR hesitated in naming Robinson because he was completely embroiled in his controversial plan to enlarge the Court; or “pack” it in the popular phrase of the day. Robinson had been FDR’s loyal lieutenant in advancing the Court plan – and the rest of the New Deal for that matter – even though he was personally skeptical that it was the right policy.

Still, when conservative Justice Willis Van Devanter retired, it looked like Robinson was destined to get his wish. His Senate friends took to calling him “Mr. Justice,” but still FDR withheld the formal offer of a Court appointment. The president wanted his Court plan to pass and knew he needed his majority leader on the job to get it done. As events turned, neither FDR’s bill passed nor did Robinson get to the Court. When Joe T. died on July 14, the Court plan died with him, as did his hope to end his long career on the nation’s high court.

Its all speculation, but had Robinson lived he might well have forced Roosevelt to compromise and accept two or three additional Supreme Court justices rather than the six FDR wanted. Without Robinson pushing and prodding the Senate, the president got nothing. By the same token, had FDR acted quickly to appoint Robinson to the Court, it might well have been the gesture the Senate was looking for – putting a popular Senate leader on the controversial Court – to move the president’s legislation. Proof that timing is often everything in politics.

FDR attended Robinson’s memorial ceremony in the Senate chamber and most members of the Senate and many House members boarded a special train to Little Rock for services prior to Robinson’s burial in Arkansas nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

Senate Rule 38: …the final question on every nomination shall be, “Will the Senate advise and consent to this nomination?…”

In Otto Preminger’s 1962 film of Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Advise and Consent, Walter Pidgeon – playing the Senate Majority Leader – tells the fictional president: “that’s a hell of an appointment.”

That must be every majority leader’s lament to every president: “you gave me this nomination to get through the Senate?”

I got to thinking, in light of Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court and the nasty, Internet-driven campaign to raise questions about her sexual orientation – if the old Drury novel, with the same subplot, holds up all these years later. Simple answer: absolutely.

The dust jacket of Advise and Consent – it was published in 1959 – talks about “driving ambition” and “ugly personal jealousies” and the always popular “vicious demagogues.” Sounds like this morning’s headlines. The Senate historian has a wonderful piece on the book that provides some guesses as to who Drury based his characters on and notes that the novel launched his fiction writing career.

How good was the book? Drury’s major competition for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1960 was Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King and, this is saying something, the inside account of a Washington, D.C. Senate confirmation fight won out. In literary competitions, as in politics, you are often defined by who you beat.

Writing in Policy Review Roger Kaplan said Advise and Consent is the only book of its genre – the political thriller – worthy of literary acclaim. And NPR’s Scott Simon noted on the 50th anniversary of the novel that he has read and re-read the book since first discovering it when he was 12 years old.

Thomas Mallon’s 50-year look back at the book in the New York Times noted that Drury’s senators in the late 1950’s were dealing with issues of pre-empetive war, the consequences of lying under oath and the notion that the cover up is always worse than the crime. Add the sexual orientation subplot now rearing its ugly head in the Kagan nomination and it is easy to conclude that not much changes in American politics.

I also agree with Peter Bogdanovich that Preminger’s movie, based on the book, just might be the best American political movie ever. It has a great cast, in addition to Pidgeon, that includes Henry Fonda, Don Murray, Peter Lawford, the great Charles Laughton and, brace yourself, Betty White. It is a great film.

Drury’s story, of course, involves a decades-old allegation about sexual orientation. Eventually all the principle characters know what’s going on, as do newspaper reporters, and in 1959 – at least in Advise and Consent – the mere hint of being outted as a homosexual was enough to prompt a suicide of a prominent senator. The whispering about Kagan has already moved to the mainstream with the Associated Press asking if her orientation is anyone’s business. Ultimately that question, and any other you can think of, is for the Senate to determine as part of its Constitutional duty to advise and consent. How the question is handled will say as much about the Senate as it will about the nominee.

Years after his celebrated book was published and after Drury, a Times reporter, had written several other not-so-well received books, he was asked what he made of the Senate that he had long covered and wrote about in fiction and non-fiction books. Drury said: “There’s nothing like it on God’s green earth.” That’s for sure.

Read the book and rent the movie. Think of it as research for the Kagan hearings.

Tea Partiers Want to Do Away With Direct Election of Senators? Come on…

The fellow to the left should be the poster boy for why repealing the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a really, really nutty idea.

William Andrews Clark was one of the original robber barons of the American West, a Montana Copper King, a genuine scoundrel and a United States Senator thanks to the money he spent buying a few state legislators and his ticket into the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Now – brace yourselves – the Tea Party movement is advocating, you can’t make this stuff up, doing away with direct election of U.S. Senators. Even more off the wall, the two top candidates for the GOP nomination for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional district have endorsed the idea as has Idaho’s governor. These folks must be drinking something stronger than tea.

William Edgar Borah, one of the greatest United States Senators, lead the charge in the early 1900’s to amend the Constitution to take away from state legislators the power to elect United States Senators. Borah was a progressive – that would be a dirty word for many Tea Partiers – who believed that the power to make Senators ought to reside with the people, not a tiny group of elected officials (legislators) subject to the influence and money of special interests, raw politics, deal making and close door decision making. He fought for the amendment for years before it was finally passed.

Now, apparently harboring the misguided notion that letting legislators elect U.S. Senators would somehow strengthen states rights, the Tea Party movement is all over repealing Borah’s historic handiwork.

Borah’s biographer Marian McKenna writes this about the Idahoan’s effort to put the American people in charge of deciding who serves in the U.S. Senate.

“The feeble and corrupt, he wrote,will always be found in personal government, but in a true democracy neither incompetence nor dishonesty will long remain unexposed. ‘What judgment is so swift, so sure and so remorseless as the judgment of the American people?'” Indeed.

The founders wrote the state legislature election process into the Constitution because they wanted to ensure one house of the national legislature would be dominated by an elite. The House of Representatives would be for the common people, the Senate for the new American nobility. The provision stayed in the Constitution for so long, in part, because southerners worried that African-Americans would influence the popular vote for members of the Senate.

Borah disliked the lack of direct election for the same reason William Andrews Clark loved the idea. Borah knew he could stand a chance getting elected if the people were passing judgment, if a bunch of small-time pols in the legislature did the selecting they would often be subject to deals, pressure and money. Clark used all three to seal – or steal – his election in Montana at the turn of the 20th Century.

Do candidates like those in Idaho who have endorsed this idea really think we ought to disenfranchise the people and let a simple majority of the 105 members of the Idaho Legislature elect our U.S. Senators? If they do, they haven’t read any history. They need to.

Can you imagine the wheeling and dealing in the state legislature around a U.S. Senate seat? I’ll vote for your guy if you support the appropriation for my community college? You want your bill to see the light of day, better support my guy for the Senate?

The state legislature – any state legislature – is capable of more than enough mischief, thank you, without trusting them to elect our U.S. Senators. I really hope the otherwise serious people who are supporting this idea are merely guilty of pandering to the movement of the moment. If they are serious, the tea they’re drinking has fermented.