It is impossible for him to be so much of a hero to them that they wouldn't toss him to the sharks tomorrow, if that's what was needed for them to maintain or add to their razor-thin majority. If it comes down to it in 2006, they'll give him about five minutes to either end the charade and sign on for real, or else have a bullseye painted on his back. (Any promise they may have made, as gyc hypothesized, won't mean a thing.) Perhaps the angry Democrat-on-the-street is worshipping this guy, but to the Democratic leadership in Congress, he's merely a useful idiot.
I hope being a senator is not about the size of your office, the size of your staff, or how much "stuff" you get...
I'm doubt it's the main reason most of them are there. But it does count. Say you went into partnership with some guy, started a business. It gets pretty successful, but then one morning your partner walks in the door, announces he's decided he'd rather join up with the guy across the street, and leaves, taking half the assets of your business with him. You're forced to drastically downsize, you lose a lot of your clients, you have to move into smaller digs and fire some of the employees that have worked so hard for you, etc. After all that, would you still want to hang out with this person?
And if it is, they need to give everyone the same size office, the same size staff, and the same amount of "stuff" and let them deal with it.
This is impossible. To give everyone the same size office, they'd have to tear down the Capitol and rebuild it from scratch; the internal layout of the place is insane. And it's just a fact that some Senators need more employees than others; depending on where they are in the hierarchy, what committee assignments they have, etc, some have a lot more work than others. A senator from California, for example, has to deal with ~70 to 75 TIMES as many constituents as a senator from Wyoming.
Since when did being an elected representative, or working for an elected representative, give you the presumption of job security?
Well geez, holgate, you're one of the last people I'd expect to have to point out the blatantly obivous to here, but senators are elected for six-year terms. The Founding Fathers decided they should have such lengthy terms precisely so they would have some job security and not have to always feel the breath of the angry mob of voters on the back of their necks like members of the House do. (And "Dicky Ticker Dick"? Are you sure you're feeling all right? That's beneath you.) Anyway, the fact remains that never before has a senator made a party switch that altered the balance of power. It's not the way the Senate is designed to operate, so the Senate GOP Leadership has every right to be pissed off about it. (The GOP in general doesn't mind that much, since the reality is that in the Senate, being the majority party largely is more about perks than power. What matters is the number of votes, so a switch of 1 isn't that big of a deal, other than the slimyness of it all.)
As for the "holy war" thing, that's happening on both sides of the isle in large numbers. Washington in general has been getting nastier and nastier over the last 15 years or so, starting at the point when Reaganism started actually cutting into the Democratic stranglehold on Congress. They'd pretty much owned the joint for decades, and they didn't like it one bit when they started losing. Once Tip O'Neill quit, that was the beginning of the end for civility, and it's been eye-for-an-eye ever since. "You screw me, I'll screw you back, oh yeah well then I'll screw you a third time!..." ad infinitum.
posted by aaron at 9:40 PM on June 27, 2001
Lott apparently feels much the same. He is on record accusing Jeffords of staging a "coup of one that subverted the will of American voters who elected a Republican majority."I didn't think we'd see a Republican talking like that before '04.
Well, no offense, but it's quite possible, since I can't recall the last time I saw anyone call the Post "very conservative." Besides...
and nobody holds a grudge like the GOP...
...this shows you're just as biased as you're claiming the Post to be, so which side are we supposed to believe?
The fantasy that Jeffords is going to pay a price for his defection...
I never claimed that Jeffords is unquestionably bound to get what's coming to him. I'd like to see it, I think it's entirely possible (especially given that this is the only party switch that ever shifted the balance of power, meaning this is far less likely to be easily forgiven), but I don't think it's anywhere near inevitable. All I said is that he's going to be despised by half the Senate for the rest of his career, and the other half will think nothing of eating him alive if it proves necessary at some point in the future to obtain or maintain a true majority.
posted by aaron at 9:39 AM on June 28, 2001
How can I forget? And I think it's important to note that the Conservative Party has been paying for that little minicoup ever since. The fact that it was technically legal doesn't mean it was ethical, and if they'd never done it they'd probably be far better off today, both in terms of power and in terms of the public's opinion of them.
"whipping" (the UK term, dunno the US equiv)
Yes, we have whips too, that operate in roughly similar fashion. They just don't get noticed much by the media, for some reason.)
but that's no reason to presume an eternal continuation of your privileges within the Senate.
Technically (extremely technically), no, but the reality is this has never happened before. The understanding of the Senate, the design of the Senate, is that one party is elected to a majority, and one to a minority, and that's the way it is until the next election two years later. Considering the uniqueness of the 50-50 split, both sides agreed to a power-sharaing structure that reflected the will of the electorate (which is NOT something the GOP had to do, by the way; more technicalities in the Senate rules would have allowed them to be hardasses and remain the full-fledged leaders of the Senate if they'd wanted to do so). Jim Jeffords blatantly threw all that out the window, and allowed one party to fully take over without the public having any say in it. Yes, he's allowed to, but it's absoutely unethical. (The old saying "violating the spirit of the law/rules, if not the letter" comes to mind here.) The Democrats made an agreement, "organizing themselves as they saw fit" as you put it, and then ripped the agreement to shreds.
Um, I don't see anything in the design brief that says anything about majority parties or control of the legislative timetable.
That's not the design brief; it's the initial work order. This is the design brief.
but you have to admit that the complacency of the GOP leadership was frankly staggering.
Oh, I do. I think Trent Lott's reign has been a disaster (as I said, he didn't have to agree to the power-sharing thing, and the Jeffords affair proves unquestionably that he never should have done so, because he set the entire party up to be screwed over by the Dems, as most of us they would do at the first opportunity), and I'd love to see someone else challenge him for the leadership and win.
after decades of two-party division
Centuries, really. The legislative branch pretty much fell into a permanent two-party system by the early 1800s, because that's the system under which that the Constitutional framework naturally works best, whether the Founders originally wanted it that way or not (and I would argue their feelings on the matter weren't that clear-cut, but this is a busy enough argument as it is).
I'm fine, by the way; are you feeling better after name-calling John McCain?
Oh, I was better minutes after I said that, since it was an intentional action to see if my suspicions were correct, which they proved to be: MeFites by the dozens can refer to any conservative by whatever nicknames they wish, ranging from the merely stupid-cutesy to the truly vile, and nobody bats an eye, but if a conservative tries the same thing one single time, that instance will be immediately filed away and be hypocritically brought back up every time a complaint is made about the overwhelming name-calling of the liberal side.
posted by aaron at 11:51 AM on June 28, 2001
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"It still is hard to understand how the senator could be comfortable in the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan and comfortable when Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans were trying to shut down the Department of Education, and now he's uncomfortable when George W. Bush wants to increase funding for the Department of Education?"
Wait...did Ari just admit that Reagan was a right-wing nut and that so were the House Republicans during Gingrich?
(Actually, Ari: "In 1981, [Jeffords] was the only House Republican to vote against the Reagan tax cut plan, en route to compiling one of the most liberal voting records a Republican member of Congress has had over the past three decades.")
posted by jennak at 12:52 PM on June 27, 2001