How do we move toward a Congress that accomplishes more and isn’t reeling so often from one potential government shutdown to another?
Published Aug. 16
Over my time working in the Senate as a staffer, running for Congress, serving as the U.S. trade ambassador and writing three books about the Senate, I have undoubtedly given more thought to Congress than any reasonable person should. The presidential race has become electric in the last few weeks, and I worry that congressional elections are likely to get even less attention than they usually do. This is unfortunate, because despite our focus on the presidency, America cannot have a functioning government without the legislative branch. And it is in dire shape.
While Congress has always been the butt of jokes — Will Rogers once called it “the only American criminal class” — the truth is that we had a capable Congress doing the hard work of governing from the 1950s through the 1980s, with Gallup polls showing a respectable level of public support. Things changed dramatically 30 years ago, when Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House. Gingrich viewed bipartisan cooperation with contempt; he saw politics as war; and he rode the rise of 24/7 cable news to transform the discourse of American politics to a harsher, hateful tone.
IRA SHAPIRO, Special to the Post-Gazette, October 18, 2024
As a Senate staffer of an earlier generation who later wrote three books about the Senate, I have plainly spent more time thinking about the Senate than any reasonable person should. But even as public attention focuses on the extraordinarily high stakes race for the presidency, it is important not to overlook the importance of the Senate.
The truth is both that Bob Casey has been a fine senator and that at a different time, David McCormick could also be. But control of the Senate hangs by a thread, and that reality presents Pennsylvania voters with a choice as stark as night and day.
The Biden-Harris administration has the right ideas about reforming the out-of-control jurists. Whoever wins the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago should go even further.
It’s time. In February 2017, shortly after Trump took office, The Washington Post, which first reported the Biden-Harris looming reforms, adopted its slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness.” But democracy can die in broad daylight. Witness Federal District Court Judge Aileen Cannon casting aside long-standing precedents this week to rule that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith is unconstitutional in the Mar-a-Lago documents case over which she’s presiding in Florida. Then there’s the Supreme Court’s stunning decision this month finding the president virtually immune from prosecution. The opinion, authored by Roberts, may scuttle the remaining federal and state cases against Trump, even if Trump loses the election. In New York State, where Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts related to his hush money and election interference scheme, sentencing has been delayed because of the Court’s ruling and may never be carried out.
It has been 40 years since Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican, at the peak of his career, retired from the Senate at the age of 59 after serving three terms, including four years as Minority Leader and four as Majority Leader. Baker reached for the presidency and was defeated; he is not a household name like Ted Kennedy or John McCain, and there are no buildings in Washington. D.C., named for him. He is virtually unknown to those under 50, and even older Americans recall him only for his famous question during the Watergate hearings: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
And yet, Howard Baker may have been the most universally admired political leader of the past 50 years. It was often said that if the senators could vote for president in a secret ballot, Baker would have won. Given the public’s deep and abiding distrust of politicians and anger about the failure of our institutions, Baker’s career teaches lessons in leadership that are more relevant today than ever before.
For Howard Baker, politics was the family business. His father, Howard Henry Baker, Sr., was a Tennessee congressman who died in office, and his stepmother, Irene Baker, succeeded him. In 1951, Baker married Joy Dirksen, the daughter of the legendary Republican Everett Dirksen, who would go on to become Senate Minority Leader and the namesake of the Senate office building. Dirksen played an essential part in Baker’s rise after an early stumble. He lost his first bid for the Senate in 1964, as the Republicans led by Barry Goldwater were crushed nationally. But he ran again two years later, won handily, and reached the Senate at 41.
It has been 40 years since Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican, at the peak of his career, retired from the Senate at the age of 59 after serving three terms, including four years as Minority Leader and four as Majority Leader. Baker reached for the presidency and was defeated; he is not a household name like Ted Kennedy or John McCain, and there are no buildings in Washington. D.C., named for him. He is virtually unknown to those under 50, and even older Americans recall him only for his famous question during the Watergate hearings: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
And yet, Howard Baker may have been the most universally admired political leader of the past 50 years. It was often said that if the senators could vote for president in a secret ballot, Baker would have won. Given the public’s deep and abiding distrust of politicians and anger about the failure of our institutions, Baker’s career teaches lessons in leadership that are more relevant today than ever before…
Editor’s Notes: The author of this editorial, Ira Shapiro, is a former Senate staffer who has written three books about the Senate: The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis (2012); Broken: Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country? (2018); and The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America (2022). This essay includes some text included in Mr. Shapiro’s books, with the permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers’ Inc. Mr. Shapiro’s speeches and articles about the Senate can be found on his website, www.irashapiroauthor.com.
In the American constitutional system, no one person should be able to undermine our institutions and jeopardize our democracy. The framers of the Constitution wanted a strong central government because the weakness of the Articles of Confederation had revealed the limits of what the states could accomplish on their own. But, having fought the American Revolution to free the colonies from Great Britain and its monarch, our founders feared the possibility of an overreaching executive who would seek to become a king or an autocrat. They also feared a president who might be corrupt, pursuing personal gain instead of the national interest, and that he could be susceptible to powerful foreign influences.
Consequently, the founders designed a system of checks and balances, the most distinctive feature of which was the Senate. They made it the strongest upper house in the world, with the power to “advise and consent” on executive and judicial nominations, to ratify treaties, and to hold impeachment trials.
Robert C. Byrd, the longest-serving senator and its most dedicated historian, who understood the Senate’s potential and hated when it failed to reach that mark, wrote that “the American Senate was the premier spark of brilliance that emerged from the collective intellect of the Constitution’s framers.”
James Madison, characteristically, cut to the heart of things in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1787. He called the Senate “the great anchor of the government…Such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.”
The Senate would be assigned many functions, but it had one fundamental, overriding responsibility: to be a bulwark against any leader who would abuse the powers of the presidency in ways that threatened our democracy. Some 230 years later, when just such a president finally reached the White House, the Senate should have been democracy’s strongest line of defense.
Instead, a nightmare scenario played out: the Senate, weakened from a long period of accelerating decline, riven by hyper-partisanship, and led by a paper-thin Republican majority, proved incapable of checking Trump’s authoritarian desires. Sometimes, the Senate aided and abetted Trump; other times, it simply stood by and allowed him to rampage unchecked. Any fair historical assessment will blame the Senate for its dereliction of duty – a failure to prevent President Trump’s assault on our democracy as he worked to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
It is impossible to understand the decay of our politics and the breakdown of our government, even before Trump’s presidency, without recognizing that the Senate was ground zero for America’s political dysfunction; it is the political institution that failed the country the longest and the worst. The Senate’s failure was particularly crippling because it was supposed to be not only a check on a rogue president, but the balance wheel and moderating force in our political system – the place where the two parties come together to find common ground through vigorous debate and principled compromise to advance the national interest.
As the 118th Congress convened, public attention understandably focused on the spectacle in the House of Representatives, as Kevin McCarthystruggled through four days and 15 rounds of voting before winning the votes to succeed Nancy Pelosi, the iconic Democratic speaker. But across the Capitol, Mitch McConnell quietly celebrated a historic accomplishment: becoming the longest-serving Senate leader in history, surpassing the record of 16 years held by Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana. Mansfield will never match the fame of his predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert A. Caro’s “master of the Senate.” But McConnell, a keen student of Senate history, called Mansfield the Senate leader he most admired, “for restoring the Senate to a place of greater cooperation and freedom.”
Unfortunately, McConnell has ignored every lesson from Mansfield’s leadership. Mike Mansfield took the helm of a struggling Senate trying to overcome the reactionary power of the Southern bloc and led it to its greatest period of accomplishment ever in the 1960s and 1970s. Mitch McConnell took a struggling Senate trying to overcome the centrifugal forces of our increasingly divided politics and drove it into an accelerating downward spiral, culminating in 2020 and early 2021 in the Senate’s most catastrophic failure, when it failed to convict Donald J. Trump in his second impeachment trial even after he incited the January 6 insurrection. In every respect, McConnell has been the anti-Mansfield.
Mansfield, born in 1900, a professor of Asian history and a World War I veteran who served in all three branches of the military, was an unlikely politician: laconic, intellectual, and averse to self-promotion. He didn’t seek to be a Senate leader, accepting the job very reluctantly at the request of his close friend, President-elect John F. Kennedy. He failed to inspire confidence initially, to the point that he offered the Senate his resignation near the end of his third year if it was unsatisfied with his light-touch approach to leadership. “It is unlikely that [Mansfield] twisted one arm in his sixteen years in charge,” Tom Daschle and Trent Lott, Senate leaders between 1996 and 2004, would later write in admiration and amazement. Yet after the assassination of President Kennedy, Mansfield built a Senate based on trust and mutual respect, enabling the body to meet the challenges of a turbulent period in a bipartisan way.
Universally admired for his wisdom, honesty, and fairness, Mansfield worked with President Johnson and the Senate led by Hubert Humphrey and Everett Dirksen to break the Southern filibuster to pass the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Asia, Mansfield presciently warned Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon that the U.S. engagement in Vietnam was disastrous. Under his leadership, the Senate became the forum for challenging, and ultimately ending, the war.
In October 1972, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the abuses of Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, Mansfield immediately promised a full and fair Senate investigation. When the Senate convened in January 1973, it unanimously voted to create a select committee to investigate the abuses, by then known as “Watergate,” even though Nixon had won reelection in a 49-state landslide. The bombshell revelations of the committee’s memorable hearings in the summer of 1973, led by Democrat Sam Ervin and Republican Howard Baker, paved the way inexorably to Nixon’s resignation a year later.
In contrast, McConnell has been far and away the most partisan Senate leader in the modern era. Passing up virtually every opportunity to turn down the heat and bring people together in a bitterly divided nation, McConnell labeled his opponents “thugs” and “the mob”; blasted “blue state bailouts” during the pandemic; silenced Elizabeth Warren with an unprecedented misuse of the Senate rules; accused Democrats of “treating religious Americans like strange animals in a menagerie”; admitted openly that “the single most important thing” he and Republicans could do was to make Barack Obama a one-term president; and opposed the nomination of Judge Ketanji Jackson to the Supreme Court, calling her “the favored choice of left-wing, dark money groups.”
Early in his Senate career, McConnell set his sights on being the leader; with great patience and political skill, he achieved that after 22 years in the Senate. Yet despite his supposed love of the institution, McConnell has routinely trashed the customs and norms essential for the Senate to serve as what Walter Mondale called “the nation’s mediator.” There is no precedent for McConnell’s relentless efforts in 2017 to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement—and without hearings, committee markup, consultation with affected interests, or any trace of bipartisanship. Nor was there any precedent for his refusal to give Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, a confirmation hearing for nine months before the 2016 election.
In stark contrast to Mansfield, McConnell failed America in crisis times. He did not use his power to stop Donald Trump’s assault on our democracy. He was AWOL when Trump’s unhinged leadership during the pandemic caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to die needlessly. He did not counter Trump’s claims that the presidential election was stolen for five long weeks after the Associated Press and networks called the election for Biden, allowing the “Big Lie” to spread like wildfire and to be embraced by 50 million Americans. McConnell could not bring himself to vote to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial, even after the January 6 insurrection, despite his powerful denunciation of the former president.
Interestingly, McConnell has forged an impressive record in the past year: steadfastly supporting President Biden’s strong position on sending arms to Ukraine, breaking with the NRA and the gun manufacturers to support the first gun safety legislation since 1994, and joining with Democrats and Republicans to pass the Electoral Count Act and fund the government through September 30, 2023. Politicians operate at the intersection of conviction, calculation, and conscience, and perhaps in McConnell’s case, some degree of regret and guilt. As long as he still holds power, McConnell can airbrush his record by doing some good for America.
Ultimately, however, McConnell’s page in the history books is likely to focus less on his failure to stop Trump and more on how an iron-willed leader orchestrated a corrupted confirmation process for four years to produce a radical, lawless Supreme Court. When the Republican Senate finished the job in October 2020 by ramming through the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg eight days before Election Day, McConnell congratulated himself on “the single most important accomplishment of my career.… A lot of what we have done in the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election. They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”
By “they,” McConnell meant future presidents, Congresses, and American voters—an appalling statement for a political leader in a democracy. McConnell’s legacy is assured; now 80, he will be recalled every time his illegitimate, extremist court diminishes the constitutional rights of Americans or usurps the authority of other branches of government.
BY IRA SHAPIRO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR – 01/04/23 1:30 PM — The Hill
As the House Republicans made extraordinary history battling each other in an acrimonious and chaotic effort to pick the next Speaker, the Senate quietly convened, swore in seven new members, and generally seemed to enjoy being the “adults in the room,” far from the turmoil on other side of the Capitol.
But the stark contrast masked a more complex reality, reflected by several senators, retiring after long careers, who expressed fears about the future of the Senate.
As reported by Emily Cochrane in the New York Times, Sen.Richard Burr (R-N.C.) “ticked through his frustrations that had piled up in recent year: party leaders devaluing committee work, an institution reluctant to embrace new ideas, and unnamed colleagues unwilling to collaborate or brush up on the details of legislating.”
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) decried the centralization of power in the leaders; “we have an incredible amount of wasted talent,” he stated in his farewell speech.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the longest-serving senator, grimly observed: “If we don’t start working together more, if we don’t know and respect each other, the world’s greatest deliberative body will sink slowly into irrelevance.”
Without in any way questioning the depth of these concerns, it is important to recognize that the decline of Congress — particularly the Senate — is the longest-playing story in American politics, matched only by the endless movement of the Republican Party, starting with the rise of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), from conservatism to MAGA radicalism and nihilism.
Congressional scholars Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann analyzed the decline of Congress in their classic, “The Broken Branch” in 2006. Ten years earlier, in 1996, the Senate experienced a record number of retirements — 14 — by some of the most respected legislative deal makers of their time, including Democrats Sam Nunn (Ga.), Bill Bradley (N.J.), Howell Heflin (Ala.) and David Pryor (Ark.) and Republicans Alan Simpson (Wyo.), Nancy Landon Kassebaum (Kan.) and William Cohen (Maine).
The common thread that ran through many of their farewellspeeches was a deep dismay about the condition and direction of American politics.
James Exon, who served 25 years as Nebraska’s senator and governor, put it forcefully in terms that the other departing senators could relate to:
“Our political process must be ‘re-civilized. … The ever-increasing vicious polarization of the electorate, the us-against-them mentality, has all but swept aside the former preponderance of reasonable discussion of the pros and cons of many legitimate issues. Unfortunately, the traditional art of workable compromise for the ultimate good of the nation, the essence of democracy, is demonstrated eroded.”
Those speeches came more than a quarter of a century ago, in a period of peace and prosperity. From that point, the Senate spiraled downward, hitting rock bottom with its catastrophic failure to protect Americans and our democracy from Donald Trump in the crisis year of 2020 and in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
In contrast, as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne observed, “the congressional session that just ended was remarkably productive. Major investments in infrastructure, clean energy and technology showed that our government has the capacity to think ahead, not just react to political pressures and short-term problems.”
Moreover, the Senate was able to come together on a bipartisan basis to enact the first gun safety legislation since 1994, safeguard marriage equality, revise the flawed electoral count system and fund the government through Sept. 30. Repeatedly, a significant group of Senate Republicans — ranging from 12 to 19 — joined the Democrats, led by President Biden, Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in making these legislative accomplishments possible. This impressive record compels several conclusions.
First, while we can respect the dedication and service of retiring senators like Burr, Blunt, Leahy, Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), their experience didn’t save the Senate from decline and failure. Legislating requires skill and some experience; it does not require 30 or 40 years on the Hill. Over the years, countless senators from both parties, such as Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) had a powerful impact within a short time after arriving.
Several of you have asked for my summer reading recommendations. I know this is a bit late, (whatever happened to June and July?), but all of these are worth the wait (and the weight — these aren’t exactly light books).
Dirt Road Revival, by Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward. This is the most thoughtful and uplifting book I’ve read in a long time. It’s written by two young political organizers in Maine (one of whom is now a major force in the state legislature) about how grassroots progressives can regain the trust of America’s Trumpers. Riveting and important.
The Overstory, by Richard Powers. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. It’s a moving and trenchant novel whose major character, it turns out, is our planet.
Dignity in a Digital Age, by Ro Khanna. The progressive and talented congressman from Silicon Valley provides a convincing blueprint for a society in which prosperity is widely shared.
Only the Rich Can Play, by David Wessel. Wessel knows Washington as well if not better than anyone reporting on it, and in this books provides a clear-eyed look at how wealth and power have distorted and corrupted our nation’s capital.
The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, by Lily Geismer. An important object lesson in how means became confused with ends when Democrats tried to gain and hold power by giving the oligarchy what it wanted. I have lived much of what she reports.
The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America, by Ira Shapiro. McConnell comes off even worse than you know in this trenchant and disturbing account of the man who brought us the most reactionary Supreme Court in ninety years.
Going Big, by Robert Kuttner. An important argument about how progressives and Democrats could do far better politically if they were more ambitious.
The Ministry of the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. A taut and powerfully-written novel about what the future may hold.
Guest Column Saving American Democracy: Focus on the Senate Elections, Corporate Leaders Need to Include Impact on Democracy in Company Political Spending Decisions
By Ira Shapiro
There was a time, in early 2021, to believe that our nation coming out of Covid, having elected Joe Biden president, and responding to the shocking January 6 attack on the Capitol, could begin to heal its divisions. Of course, that hopeful moment was fleeting. America is by all measures even more bitterly divided than at any time since the Civil War. That was true even before the shattering Supreme Court decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, eliminating, for the first time in history, a constitutional right on which millions of Americans relied, fundamental to women’s equality and freedom. Now, buoyed by their victory, opponents of abortion push for further restrictions and outright bans in states across the country. On the other side, abortion rights advocates will “harness rage over the decision to take to the streets, fight back in the courts, and push the Biden administration to do more to protect abortion rights,” reported Kate Zernike in the New York Times.
Amidst this frenetic activity, Democrats should not lose sight of the one thing that can most dramatically change our politics in the short term: winning Senate elections. Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans gave America this radical Supreme Court through a corrupted confirmation process that blocked Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Court in 2016; abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court justices in 2017; confirmed Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 even after the National Council of Churches opposed his nomination; and rammed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett eight days before election day in 2020 after fifty million people had already voted. Of course, McConnell and his Republican caucus also stayed silent while Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen poisoned the nation and triggered the attack on the Capitol, and then refused to convict Trump even after he was impeached for inciting the January 6 insurrection.
Off year elections are notoriously difficult for the party in power; with inflation surging and Biden’s approval rating tanking, the political environment has rightly been described as “brutal” for the Democrats. But the Senate map is favorable: the Republicans are defending twenty seats, the Democrats only fourteen; five Republicans retirements have produced open seat opportunities for Democrats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina, where strong Democratic candidates will be running against extreme Republican nominees. Several Republican incumbents—Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, and Chuck Grassley—are potentially beatable. Democrats need to channel their despair and anger into focused political action. A Senate with 54-56 Democrats, instead of 50, would make it possible to change the filibuster rules, continue confirming progressive judges, and put major pieces of the Democratic agenda before the country in advance of the 2024 presidential election.
Seeking to regain the Republican Senate majority, McConnell has supported the infrastructure legislation, aid to Ukraine, and most recently, the bipartisan legislation which represents the first modest Congressional action to reduce gun violence. Democrats and independents should not be deluded by his effort to avoid the Senate Republicans being tagged as complete obstructionists. It is time to hold McConnell and the Senate Republicans accountable: for the radical Supreme Court they have given us; for their failure to protect America from Trump’s assault on our democracy and his unhinged leadership during the pandemic; and for constantly blocking action to address our most urgent problems. We have been living, and dying, in McConnell’s America far too long; the November elections are our chance to end his destructive reign.
With our democracy hanging by a fraying thread, each of us needs to assess whether he/she has done enough to preserve it. The corporate community bears particular responsibility; with a few notable exceptions, business leaders have continually underestimated how dire the threat to democracy is or found justifications to continue their usual pattern of political contributions. This can no longer be the case. Corporate leaders need to include the interest of their stakeholders and their company and the type of environment — a vibrant democracy — that benefits both as they weigh how to approach political spending.
Ira Shapiro, a former Senate staffer and Clinton administration trade ambassador, is the author of three books about the Senate, most recently The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America. He can be followed on Twitter @shapiroglobal. His website is www.irashapiroauthor.com.
CPA is a non-profit, non-partisan organization created in November 2003 to bring transparency and accountability to political spending. To learn more about the Center for Political Accountability visit www.politicalaccountability.net.
