U.S. Senate

Baucus, Clinton, Montana, U.S. Senate

Montana’s Mansfield

Posted on by christian

manA Model of the Modern Majority Leader

Next to operating from the Oval Office, the front row desk on the majority side of the aisle in the United States Senate is arguably the most difficult perch in politics. That seat is where the Majority Leader sits – or stands – and attempts to move forward the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Mike Mansfield, by general agreement, did the job better than anyone ever has. Not bad for a one-time mucker from the copper mines of Butte, Montana.

During this holiday season, as the Senate rancorously flails its way to a conclusion on health insurance reform legislation, ol’ Mike is looking better than ever.

Current leader Harry Reid of Nevada will get – and deserve – any credit (or blame) due if Congress does complete the legislation, as is looking likely. But Reid has gotten to the finish line with a much different style than Mansfield would have used and, as a result, he presides over a much different Senate.

As Reid pushes for a bill, difficulties and tempers flare around the leader. His home state situation is troubling, too. Reid trails in the polls in Nevada and his unfortunate comments equating GOP opposition to the health insurance bill to support for slavery riled the Senate.

Mansfield was from a different era, for sure, but his was also a time – like ours – of great divide in the country. Somehow he made the Senate work a lot better than the current model. It is worth pausing for a moment to remember the truly incredible Mansfield and his style in the Senate.

Mike, as his Montana constituents knew him, held the Senate’s top job longer than anyone in history – from 1961 to 1977. His memory is revered in Montana and deserves to be long remembered in the history of American politics in the 20th Century.

Through civil rights legislation, through Vietnam, LBJ’s Great Society, Watergate and investigations of the CIA, Mansfield cultivated an approach to leading the Senate that involved less of him and more of everyone else. He insisted on fair play and dignity. Mansfield once stopped proceedings on the Senate floor in the middle of a roll call vote to demand that an amendment be considered that then-rookie Republican Ted Stevens felt had been given short shrift. Another Senator had given Stevens his word that the amendment would be considered, but then reneged on the pledge. Mansfield made it right. Stevens never forgot the moment and he told me years later that he considered Mansfield the Senate’s greatest leader and an even greater person. No faint praise coming from a highly partisan Republican.

Very late in his life, I had a fascinating few minutes with Mansfield in his Washington, D.C. office. He was long out of the Senate, had been U.S. Ambassador to Japan under both a Democratic and Republican president and was, just shy of 100 years old, still working almost every day as an advisor to Goldman Sachs. He came out of his tidy office in the old Washington Star building to greet me, ushered me to a comfortable chair and proceeded to make me a cup of coffee.

I realized at that moment some of the secret to his success. He was practicing the “servant as leader” approach to personal relationships. He had no need to see me, nothing to gain from offering 45 minutes of his time, and had no doubt answered the same questions that I would put to him a thousand times. Still he displayed for me the same qualities he used so successfully and for so long in the Senate – civility, respect, kindness, attention to detail and candor.

We spoke that day of Montana political history and I remember asking him his assessment of the great Montana political figures. He mentioned Senators Lee Metcalf, Thomas Walsh, Jim Murray and Burton K. Wheeler before allowing that he would rank below all of them in all-time accomplishment. I questioned his ranking and he firmly pointed out that I had asked him for his assessment. “And that is my assessment,” he said.

There is no institution of our government remotely like the United States Senate. It was designed by the founders to be slow. Tradition says that every Senator, no matter how junior or powerful, can bring the place to a grinding halt with two words – “I object.”

The last few weeks have often shown the Senate at its worst, locked in endless parliamentary combat with Democrats seemingly more focused on gathering up the magic 60 votes to stop a filibuster than in producing understandable reform. Republicans have played the obstruction card full tilt, which Senate rules allow if not encourage. The civility and respect that a Mike Mansfield brought to the leadership seems totally lacking on both sides of the aisle these days. It seems like Reid and his GOP counterpart Mitch McConnell are so locked in blind partisanship that they can’t see what the rest of the country sees – legislative chaos and incredibly unproductive gamesmanship.

Contrast that with Mike’s approach to incredibly contentious civil rights legislation in the 1960’s. As Don Oberdorfer writes in his masterful biography of Mansfield, the Majority Leader knew, as he prepared for what turned out to be the longest Senate debate in history, that he first had to deal with southern Democrats opposed to any civil rights legislation. The southerners, like today’s Republicans, were determined to slow and, if possible, kill any bill with the filibuster. In those days, it required even more votes – 67 – to cut off the talking and start the voting.

With great dignity and deference, Mansfield called the cagey leader of the southerners, Georgia’s Richard Russell, to his office and explained in detail the approach he would be taking to the legislation. Oberdorfer writes, “Russell was astounded by Mansfield’s candor and wondered if it were a prelude to some unpleasant surprise – perhaps a discovery of an obscure provision in the rules that had somehow eluded the master parliamentary experts from Dixie.”

Oberdorfer goes on to quote Mansfield: “I kept Russell informed of every move that we made on the civil rights bill. I don’t think he took me too seriously at first, but he did with the passage of time. [There were] no back strokes, no hidden areas.”

Next, Mansfield invited the Republican leader, Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, into the strategy development – Dirksen produced 40 amendments – and Mansfield insisted that his staff work to get the GOP leader the press attention he coveted and that ultimately lead to Dirksen receiving much of the credit for passing the landmark legislation. When Senators gathered after the historic vote to congratulate each other and claim credit, Mansfield avoided being in any of the photographs. He conspicuously gave away the credit to others.

Still, most Senators knew who had created the atmosphere for progress. Florida’s George Smathers summed up the feeling. “Much of the credit for the fact that [the bill] was disposed of without leaving large schisms was due to the good, calm, patient, magnanimous, long suffering and much admired Mike Mansfield.”

My favorite Mansfield story is told by former Montana Congressman Pat Williams, another wonderful and talented Butte Irishman. Pat had tried and failed, while Mansfield was serving as U.S. Ambassador to Japan, to lure the former leader to Capitol Hill so that he could be feted appropriately for his years of statesmanship. Finally, on a pretext, Mansfield had to come to a reception and be part of a receiving line where he quickly became the star attraction amid much praise of his work in the Senate and the Far East. When Williams reached out to shake hands with the former Senator, Mansfield pulled him in close and whispered, “Pat, what are we going to do about the Berkeley Pit?”

Never one to stand on any kind of ceremony, Mansfield was thinking, even at that moment and far away from Montana, about the massive Superfund site in his hometown.

The U.S. Senate may never see another leader like Mike Mansfield and that is a real shame for the Senate and the nation.

Baucus, Campaign Finance, Health Care, U.S. Senate

A Montanan at the Gates of Reform – Again

Posted on by christian
WheelerMBaucusax Baucus and B.K. Wheeler

Max Baucus (right), the current chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, is on the verge of making history by writing (and perhaps passing) a sweeping reform of the nation’s health care system.

The Montana Senator – he was elected to the Senate in 1978 – is walking a path that one of his progressive Montana political forefathers – Burton K. Wheeler (on the left, above) -blazed nearly 75 years ago.

Baucus has been catching some grief in Montana – the Great Falls Tribune rounded up some of the opposition – and from those farther to the left on the political spectrum for not pushing harder for the so called “public option” provision in his health care bill. Baucus says, with some political logic, that he is trying to produce a bill that will actually pass the Senate.

 

Reforming Utility Law in 1935

 

Wheeler, a New Deal-era Senator, faced some of the same criticism in 1935 when he was attempting to push a sweeping piece of regulatory reform legislation – the Public Utilities Holding Company Act – through the Senate. The legislation was designed to address a variety of abuses by the handful of major utility holding companies that dominated the industry at the time.

Wheeler’s major decision was whether to include in the bill – also know as the Wheeler-Rayburn Act (future House Speaker Sam Rayburn was the House sponsor) – a so called “death sentence” provision that would mandate the dissolution of most of the nation’s powerful utility holding companies. Wheeler chaired what was then called the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee.

No doubt, like Max Baucus dealing with health care, Wheeler received thousands of letters, hundreds from Montana, opposed to his utility legislation. Montana Power Co. organized a letter writing campaign among its shareholders to press the case that Wheeler’s proposed legislation would “destroy” utility company investors.

At the height of the debate, Wheeler went on nationwide radio to defend the legislation and attack the lobbying effort. He began his half hour talk by saying that as the Senate sponsor of the holding company legislation he had received more mail from Philadelphia in the last month than he had received from Montana in the last two years.

“Nice chummy letters, too,” Wheeler said. “They call me everything from such high-class terms as ‘rogue’ and ‘rascal’ on down the scale. Most of them show the fine hand of the United Gas Improvement Company. The best of them must have come from Gertrude Stein. It consists of this: ‘It makes me sick to think how sick I get when I think about you.'”

Like Barack Obama’s support for health care reform, Wheeler knew that Franklin Roosevelt supported the broad sweep of utility reform, but on the core issue of the “death sentence” (or in Baucus’ case, the “public option”) no one knew for sure how far the president would go to fight for the provision.

Wheeler eventually succeeding a getting a letter from FDR voicing his support for the “death sentence” provision and the Montanan waited for exactly the right moment to make the letter public.

The president wrote that “while clarifying or minor amendments to section 11 [the death sentence] cannot be objected to nevertheless any amendment which goes to the heart of major objective of section 11 would strike at the bill itself and is wholly contrary” to what he would support.

To wavering Senate Democrats, the President’s message was blunt: Burt Wheeler is doing the White House’s bidding in pushing hard for the “death sentence.” A vote against the provision would be vote against Roosevelt. Wheeler added his own reminder that the real advocates of deleting the death sentence from the holding company legislation where the holding companies themselves, who had fought so hard from the beginning to weaken his bill.

“When they vote for this amendment [to eliminate the ‘death sentence’] they vote to kill the bill,” Wheeler said. “When they vote for this amendment they are voting as the lobbyist up in the galleries; representing the Power Trust, want them to vote, because the lobbyists want them to vote to kill the bill.”

The amendment to strike the “death sentence” from the Public Utilities Holding Company Act failed – by a single vote. For a moment it looked as though the vote would end in a 44-44 tie, but then Senator Peter Norbeck, a once-in-a-while progressive Republican from South Dakota, broke the tie and voted with Wheeler to keep the “death sentence” in the bill.

Wheeler had won, but the bitter fight highlighted the deep fractures among Senate Democrats. The holding company legislation passed the House – “death sentence” in place – and was signed into law by Roosevelt. In different times and under different circumstances, the Congress in 2005 repealed the remaining elements of the law that Wheeler (and FDR) fought to put in place nearly 75 years ago, but in the 1940’s and beyond the Public Utilities Holding Company Act remade an American industry.

 

Legislative Parallels – and Now

 

The historic parallels in these two reform efforts are numerous. Beyond the fact that Baucus and Wheeler share some obvious political history – Montanans, self styled independent Democrats, not infrequently at odds with their national party leadership – the two pieces of legislation have interesting similarities.

In 1935, Wheeler, like Baucus today, was dealing with a president who wanted legislation passed, but until pretty late in the game declined to be completely engaged or say exactly what he would settle for. Democrats in both cases were divided with conservative to moderate Democrats being slow to embrace reform. In 1935, presidential action pushed enough of the wavering Democrats to get a sweeping bill passed.

The charges and counter-charges flew then as now. Proponents were accused – you guessed it – of wanting to usher in socialism. The utilities were labeled as greedy, with no regard for the little guy. The lobbying – then as now – was fierce. (The 1935 lobbying practices actually prompted a congressional inquiry chaired by Alabama Senator – later Supreme Court Justice – Hugo Black.)

One thing that was very different in Wheeler’s day. Several progressive Senate Republicans – Norbeck, George Norris of Nebraska and William Borah of Idaho, among others – supported the utility reforms. Baucus, by contrast, appears to have a chance to get Maine Senator Olympia Snowe’s support for a Senate bill, but additional GOP votes appear mighty hard to come by.

Reforming utility practices in the 1930’s was a huge undertaking that reshaped a major piece of the American economy. A tough Montanan pulled it off. Another Senator from Big Sky County, three-quarters of a century later, is knocking at the gate of health care reform.

Stay tuned. If the utility regulation battle of 1935 is any historic guide, we will see many more twists and turns before any health care legislation is on the president’s desk. Then as now, a Montana Senator is calling many of the plays.

Baucus, U.S. Senate

I’ll Take That Seat

Posted on by christian

Erickson GossettGovernors Who Appointed Themselves

Continuing the theme of how certain Senators came to be Senators.

Two Northwest governors exercised what just might be the height of political power – appointing themselves to the United States Senate. In both cases, the voters took, well, a dim view of that particular path to power.

Charles Gossett (on the left above) and John Erickson both had relatively successful careers before being accused of crafting the backroom “deals” that got them to the senate.

Erickson served as a judge and is the only Montana governor elected three times. Charlie Gossett was a member of the Idaho House of Representatives, was elected twice as Lt. Governor, and in 1944 won the governorship. Both Erickson and Gossett were Democrats.

Erickson, a fairly conservative Democrat, was first elected in 1925. In an era when the Anaconda Mining Company dominated Montana, Erickson made peace with powerful economic interests, built a generally progressive record and cultivated an image as “Honest John.” When the great Montana Senator Tom Walsh died in 1933, Erickson was besieged by Democrats who wanted appointment to Walsh’s Senate seat. Erickson finally settled the controversy by resigning as governor with the assurance that Lt. Governor Frank Cooney would then appoint him to the senate.

There was an 11 minute interval between the signing of Erickson’s resignation as governor and his appointment to the federal position. Critics immediately alleged that a “crooked deal” had been engineered.

Erickson tried to hold on to the Senate seat, but lost the Democratic primary in 1934 to Jim Murray who went on to a long and distinguished career. It didn’t help Erickson’s political career that TIME magazine reported that he had nodded off while presiding over a senate session. Governor Cooney died in office in 1935 before having to again face Montana voters.

In Idaho, Gossett was also a relatively conservative Democrat. He championed fiscal responsibility and harmony with the legislature.

As historian Bob Sims has written, “by far the most controversial event of Gossett’s tenure as governor was the ending of it, which came in November 1945, ten and a half months after it began. When Senator John Thomas died, Gossett resigned and the new Governor, former Lt. Governor Arnold Williams, appointed Gossett to fill the Senate seat. Cries of outrage attended those events.”

Gossett went on to lose the Democratic primary in 1946 and never regained elective office. Williams served out the remainder of Gossett’s term and lost a bid to retain the office.

Gossett, by the way, is one of only two Idahoans, current Senator Jim Risch being the other, who served as Lt. Governor, Governor and U.S. Senator.

There is a lesson here. When a political deal looks like a political deal, the voters generally smell a very big rat and they use the first opportunity to punish the deal makers.

Memo to Governors: In event of a vacancy, don’t even think about finding a way to appoint yourself to the U.S. Senate. It is a sure path to political oblivion.

Baucus, U.S. Senate

All In The Family

Posted on by christian

GravesOf Course, Dear, Whatever You Want

The old joke asks: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Answer: “Practice, practice, practice.”

How do you get to the United States Senate? Twice in history it helped to be the First Lady, married to a southern Governor.

Consider the case of Dixie Bibb Graves (pictured here).

Senator Graves represented Alabama in the Senate for less than five months in 1937 and 1938. Dixie could thank her husband for that distinction. David Bibb Graves was Governor of Alabama (also Dixie’s first cousin) and when Franklin Roosevelt tapped Senator Hugo Black for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Governor tapped his roommate to fill the Senate vacancy.

Governor Graves said he appointed his politically active wife to avoid giving an advantage to any of the other Alabama Democrats who aspired to run for the seat in a special election. Not everyone was convinced that his motives were so fair minded. As the Encyclopedia of Alabama points out, some “denounced the appointment as a political move by the governor to control events not only in the capitol building and the state legislature, but also the U.S. Senate.”

Thirty-five years later, another southern governor, Edwin Edwards of Louisiana, appointed his wife to fill a Senate seat that fell vacant as the result of Senator Allen Ellender’s death. Elaine Edwards served only three and a half months, a lot less time than her husband has served in jail.

Former Governor Edwards – he famously said the only way he would ever lose an election in Cajun County was “to be caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy” – continues to serve out a ten year sentence for a host of corruption charges.

Governor Edwards and Senator Edwards divorced in 1989.

Tomorrow, a final post in this series will feature two Northwest Governors who appointed themselves to the Senate. You can guess how well that turned out.

Baucus, U.S. Senate

A Long Tradition

Posted on by christian

Kennedy Filling the Vacancy with the Spouse

It didn’t take long for the suggestion to surface that Ted Kennedy’s widow – Victoria Reggie Kennedy – would be a suitable replacement for her husband in the United States Senate. There is a long and rich tradition of just that kind of political move.

Among the more celebrated examples of “wife replaces husband in the Senate” were Hattie Caraway of Arkansas (widow of Senator Thaddeus) and Rose McConnell Long of Louisiana (widow of the assassinated Kingfish – Huey Long).

Hattie Caraway went on to become the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate in 1932. Huey Long brought his campaign smarts north to Arkansas and barnstormed the state with the diminutive Senator Caraway to help her secure a full term in the Senate. Their rollicking, nine-day tour of Arkansas spawned a good little political book by David Malone called Hattie and Huey: An Arkansas Tour.

Huey Long’s widow replaced him in 1936, and then Rose Long won her own special election and served until 1938 when she did not seek re-election.

Senator Caraway won re-election again in 1938, but lost the Democratic primary in 1944 to the young J. William Fulbright who, of course, went on to fame as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where he became outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Muriel Humphrey served less than a year in 1978 after the death of Minnesota Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Maryon Allen of Alabama also served for a few months in 1978 after her husband Senator James B. Allen died. Vera Bushfield (now there’s a household name) replaced her South Dakota Senator husband Harlan following his death in 1948 and Joceyln Burdick served a few months in 1992 after the death of her husband, long-time North Dakota Senator Quentin Burdick.

My favorite Senate wife who became a Senator is Oregon’s impressive Maurine Neuberger. She was elected in a special election in 1960 to replace her husband, Richard Neuberger, who had died. Senator Neuberger also won election to her own term and served until 1967.

Most speculation has Mrs. Kennedy passing on any chance to replace her famous husband, but if it were to come to pass she would be in some good and interesting historical company.

Tomorrow: Two Governors actually appointed their wives to fill Senate vacancies. Talk about keeping it all in the family.

Baucus, U.S. Senate

The Famous Five

Posted on by christian

TaftWhen the Senate Selected the Greatest Senators

The U.S. Senate has been graced over more than 220 years by many greats. The passing of Ted Kennedy – a great senator of the last fifty years – seems an appropriate moment to recall some of those senators of history who deserve remembering.

The Pacific Northwest has been blessed by many great ones. Jackson and Magnuson from Washington. McNary, Hatfield and Morse from Oregon. Borah, Church and McClure from Idaho. Walsh, Wheeler and Mansfield from Montana, to name but a few. Every student of the Senate has a candidate for greatness, which makes it even more impressive (or curious) that more than fifty years ago, the Senate undertook it own effort to honor the greatest who had ever served.

The Senate Reception Room is one of the spectacular spaces in the U.S. Capitol. Visit if you ever have the opportunity. In 1955, the Senate authorized an effort to select five outstanding former members whose portraits would adorn the magnificent room.

Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio (pictured here) was one of the five chosen, as were Henry Clay of Kentucky, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin.

Young Sen. John F. Kennedy, 38 years old and fresh off winning a Pulitzer for Profiles in Courage (the book profiled eight courageous Senators) lead the committee to select the “famous five.” The other committee members were Mike Mansfield of Montana, Richard Russell of Georgia (both great Senators), Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and John Bricker of Ohio.

In a forward to a book about the famous five, Kennedy wrote:

“The life of each of these Senators is a drama in itself. Each made a distinct historic impression during the period of his public service, and each has become a part of America’s broad constitutional heritage. Clay, Webster, Calhoun, La Follette, Taft were all men who knew the value and limits of constructive partisanship, yet each also made solitary pilgrimages at times when they differed with the prevailing mood of opinion in Congress and the country.”

The selections of Kennedy’s committee were not without controversy. A panel of 160 historians recommended the inclusion of Nebraska’s great progressive George Norris, the father of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the inventor of Nebraska’s unicameral legislature. Kennedy had included Norris in Profiles in Courage. But Bridges, a tough, New England conservative, had often clashed with the liberal Norris and he, along with Nebraska’s two Senators at the time, blackballed the Nebraskan.

Petty, personal politics, to be sure, is nothing new in the U.S. Senate, even when it comes to identifying greatness.

In 2000, another Senate committee recommended the addition of Reception Room portraits of two other greats – Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and Robert Wagner of New York.

One suspects the U.S. Senate will soon be finding a place for Edward Moore Kennedy’s portrait.

The rich and fascinating history of the “world’s greatest deliberative body” is extremely well presented at the Senate history website. Among other things, you’ll find a page for everyone who ever served in the Senate – all the scoundrels, as well as the heroes.

The book about the original greatest Senators, by the way, is by Holmes Alexander and is called The Famous Five.

There are few institutions more American than the U.S. Senate – ennobling, frustrating, essential, constant. The next time you get frustrated with the pace of the place or the petty politics, just remember that giants have walked there and will again.

Baucus, U.S. Senate

Remembering Kennedy

Posted on by christian

Teddy KennedyMy One (Brief) Encounter With Teddy

I have Bethine Church, the wife and political partner of the late Idaho senator, to thank for my one brush with the senator from Massachusetts who died last night.

It was the summer of 1979, and President Jimmy Carter had just returned from Vienna and the signing of the controversial SALT II nuclear weapons reduction treaty with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

The President was reporting to a joint session of the Congress and this wide-eyed, young TV reporter from Idaho was going to the speech as the guest of the wife of the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I remember sitting in the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives with Bethine to one side and Helen Jackson, the wife of the great Washington Senator Henry Jackson, to the other. (Church supported SALT II, Jackson did not and the powerful Senate wives mirrored those positions.)

After Carter’s speech, of which I confess I don’t remember much, Bethine said matter of factly, “We’ll go up to the radio/TV gallery and listen into the reaction.” OK, I thought, that is a good idea.

As we entered the very cramped gallery, high up in the U.S. Capitol, it was immediately obvious that everyone – everyone – knew and liked Bethine. She graciously introduced me, “as a friend from Idaho,” to John Tower of Texas, John Glenn of Ohio and then to Kennedy.

I’ll never forget the introduction. “Ted, you know Marc Johnson from Idaho?” Of course, he didn’t know me from a bale of fresh hay, but we stood in the noise and confusion of the Senate radio/TV gallery and talked about Sun Valley, Senator Church, the president’s speech and the treaty, which Kennedy praised as an important opening to the Soviet Union.

The next year, Kennedy challenged Carter for the Democratic nomination and lost badly even though he, somewhat surprisingly, enjoyed a good deal of support in Idaho. That support existed even though being labeled “a Kennedy-style liberal” is always a liability for any Idaho Democrat.

President Obama today praised Kennedy as “one of the greatest senators of our time.” There seems little debate about that.

Tomorrow, the story of how the Senate – lead by then-Sen. John Kennedy – selected the “famous five” – the greatest senators (up to 1957) who had ever graced the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”