In the fall of 2000, Joseph Lieberman, the U.S. Senator from Connecticut and Democratic candidate for the Vice-Presidency, sat in a hotel room in Arkansas with his advisers, killing time before a campaign rally. The TV was tuned to a cable-news show, on which three of Lieberman’s Senate colleagues were arguing about something or other. Lieberman, one of his aides later told me, stared at the screen for a while, then shook his head sadly. “God,” he said quietly, to no one in particular. “I hope I don’t have to go back there.”
For the most recent crop of senators, that feeling—weariness with the institution and its members—is taking hold a lot more quickly than it did for Lieberman, who, by 2000, had spent more than a decade in the Senate. Not one of the Senate Republicans contending for the Presidency—the hard-rock trio of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio—has served longer than three years; their collective experience barely exceeds a single term. Each seems to regard the Senate as, more than anything, a launching pad to the White House. That may be because, in recent years, the Senate hasn’t been good for much else.
This week in the Senate, which featured an all-night Democratic talkathon about climate change, followed by yet another all-day session of doing nothing about it, provided only the latest indication that our legislators can no longer legislate. The Senate sadly is not, as the Founders conceived of it, the place where public passions go to cool. It is, instead, where national priorities go to die (although the House has a hand in this, too). According to the Pew Research Center, Congress, in 2013, passed fewer “substantive measures” than at any point in the past twenty years. When the Senate does pass a bill, it feels like an anomaly—maybe an accident. The Senate is testing its own corollary of the “infinite monkey theorem”: if you give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time, he will eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare; and if you give a hundred senators each a staff and a vote, eventually they’re going to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. (The hypothesis, regarding that bill at least, remains unproven.)
The reasons for this have been well documented: the weakening of the parties and their old systems of rewards, punishments, and blandishments; the rise of the Republican nihilists; the disempowerment of committee chairmen; the highly charged media environment and the posturing it provokes; the inherently anti-democratic structure of the Senate; and the narcotic effect of money—all that money. There is, of course, more to it than all that. But the simple sum of it is that the position of U.S. senator, once thought to be a pretty good gig, has come to seem a dead-end job.
It certainly must appear that way to the new arrivals. Does Cory Booker look at Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, and think, if I play my cards right for the next quarter century, maybe I can be that guy? Or do he and other ambitious newcomers (like Kirsten Gillibrand) look at President Obama, who barely alighted in the chamber before running for President, and see a Senate seat as its own exit strategy?
The pull of the White House has always been felt at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. (Has there ever been a senator who wouldn’t really rather be President?) It was John Kennedy, in 1960, who challenged the notion (embodied, at the time, by Lyndon Johnson) that a senator, if he runs for President, runs on his accomplishments as a senator. Obama took that several steps further, turning the slightness of his Senate experience into an irrelevancy—or even an advantage. In late 2006, as Obama weighed whether to run for President, a former Clinton White House colleague told me that Obama only stood to lose by sticking around—that every year he stayed in the Senate, he would sacrifice more and more of his ability to be bold, talk like a normal person, and connect with people outside Washington. The title “Senator” becomes, over time, less an honorific than an epithet. Obama understood that. Cruz, Paul, and Rubio are making the same calculations. Gillibrand and Booker might be, too, if Hillary Clinton weren’t already their party’s presumptive nominee.
Others, almost certainly, will follow their lead—if not in 2016, then in future elections. Few, if any, of these senators will win the White House—historically and mathematically, the odds are against it—but the Senate, either way, stands to lose. Cruz and Paul may have nothing on their senatorial agenda but noise, narcissism, and dissension. If so, then the chamber (and the nation) will be far better off if they go. On the whole, however, the more members who come to see the Senate as a platform—more distinguished, maybe, than a cable talk show, if less useful, on balance, than a Twitter account—the harder it will be for the Senate to get down to business. When passing bills is beside the point, the work of the nation stalls, the public seethes, and the cynics win. The futility—and abject misery—of life in the twenty-first-century Senate has got to increase the appeal of jumping out, or never going in at all. (Booker, it was plain, would rather have been New Jersey’s governor than its junior senator.)
What the Senate really needs is not more prospective Presidents but serious structural reform—including the end of the filibuster and other forms of parliamentary perniciousness, as well as the reinvention, or reinvigoration, of the committee structure. This will not come without a critical mass of senators who see some merit in staying—who invest themselves in building expertise and relationships and, if it’s not too much to ask, have some respect for the institution itself. The Senate has at least a few such members—Michael Bennet and Mark Udall among them—but they need allies and a lot of patience. Without that, Mr. President, we might as well adjourn the whole enterprise, and yield the balance of our time to the monkeys.
Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, is the author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court” and is a partner at West Wing Writers. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffShesol.
Photograph by T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty.
