Polarization? I guess that's one word for it

People (including me) have been speaking regretfully about the polarization of politics over the last few years. Liberals (like me) tend to lay a preponderance of the blame for this on the Republican party, which, during the first year of the second Bush administration, imagined that they had established a Republican majority in the United States, including both houses of Congress, that was destined to last a generation. Tom DeLay didn't need a single Democratic vote to get even the most complicated or controversial legislation passed, so no compromise was needed on any issue, and because all Republican House members were beholden to Tom, there was no deviation from the party line, even on the most divisive of issues. Republican leaders got so accustomed to getting their way that they forgot how to react when something didn't go their way. One example: when pitiful, brain-dead Terri Schiavo's husband elected to terminate life-support and let the poor woman die in peace, true believer Tom DeLay and pandering toady Bill Frist ram-rodded legislation through both houses of Congress that would have allowed a judge to intervene between Ms. Schiavo's family and her doctors to compel the doctors to continue life support. When both Florida state court judges and Federal court judges at trial and appellate levels refused to intervene in this extremely difficult decision-making process, DeLay had a temper tantrum in front of the television cameras, a melt-down of epic proportions in which he fumed about "activist judges." Activist judges? All judges of all political persuasion who had been asked to do so had declined to take any action at all. DeLay was the activist, and for a politician, losing your temper in front of the cameras is a bad sign. But the fact that he could get that legislation passed was an impressive display of legislative clout.

If DeLay's attempts to intervene in the Schiavo matter and his success at forcing an unenthusiastic legislature to take a stand on an issue for which it had no palate was a good example of how a powerful man can polarize the House of Representatives yet be successful in imposing his will despite opposition by enforcing party discipline, the last chapter also contained the seeds of the collapse of DeLay's career and of Republican dominance in Washington. Keeping Congress in line is one thing, and DeLay was good at it. Getting the individual Representatives re-elected is something else entirely, and the Schiavo mess demonstrated that DeLay had lost his moorings as a politician. The electorate was against his attempts to interfere in that regrettable mess by more than two to one (poll figures here) but he paid the electorate no heed.

There were other signs, too. In that same term no less sophisticated a politician than Trent Lott, senior senator from Mississippi and Majority Leader of the Senate, made the same kind of error--thinking that the only people who matter are people just like you. In Lott's case, the one that cost him his leadership position was a brief speech he gave at Republican Senator Strom Thurmond's hundredth birthday party. He said he and others like him had voted for Thurmond when he ran for president in 1948 and were proud of it, and that if Thurmond had won, our country could have avoided many of the problems we subsequently faced. Since Turmond ran as a Dixiecrat on a one-issue platform of maintaining segregation and the Jim Crow laws that institutionalized it, Lott's protests that he'd been misunderstood were difficult to credit.

Although Lott was smoother than DeLay, there were a lot of parallels between the two men. DeLay had been Majority Whip of the House before he became Speaker, as Lott had been Majority Whip in the Senate. Both were southern strong-arm enforcers who used divisive issues like abortion and gun control and gay rights to polarize the electorate, embrace the self-righteous, and encourage partisanship. Both treated dissent or disagreement as unpatriotic appeasement. Neither showed any inclination to reach across the aisle. Both were impervious to criticism and appeared invincible in 2004, but then both were gone by 2007, resigning in the midst of (in the case of DeLay) or one step ahead of (in the case of Lott) scandals involving money.

Yesterday there was a small indication that liberals (like me) who like to blame the Republican party and the current administration for Washington's current uncivil, polarized environment got some useful demonstrative evidence. In their minority status, and in the absence of enforcement-minded ideologues like DeLay and Lott, the Republicans can't even be civil to each other. Up until now, it's been liberals (like me) and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats (like me) that have been polarized. Now the polarization is between Republicans in the executive branch and Republicans in the legislative branch.

Yesterday when the administration's national intelligence director, Mike McConnell, brought new rules governing the interactions between intelligence agencies to the congressional oversight committee on intelligence, the Republicans on the committee all walked out in protest, about as uncivil a treatment for a high-level witness one can imagine. The rules had been drawn up, revised, adopted, and signed into law in secret, and McConnell showed up to brief the committee on the rules, which Congress clearly understood it could not affect in any way. "The president is making it impossible for Congress to do oversight of the intelligence community," said the senior Republican on the committee, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. "The only effective oversight that can be done is out of the executive branch. And this is the fox watching the chicken coop."

I know this isn't the point in our nation's history when our politicians are the most polarized and the least civil. In 1865 Sen. Charles Sumner, Republican of Massachusetts, gave a particularly pointed anti-slavery speech, and Rep. Preston Brooks, Democrat (like me) of South Carolina responded by beating him senseless with a cane in the Senate cloakroom. The issue of slavery polarized our nation like it would never be again. But even if things could be worse than they are today, there's another way to go about this, too. Politicians like Republican Everett Dirksen and Democrat Lyndon Johnson bargained and wheedled and compromised and worked things out, and had immense respect for each other. Tip O'Niell and Gerald Ford were friends. They listened to what each other had to say. They had drinks together. They told jokes. Somehow we've lost that in the last twenty years.

The presidential race is close and it's by no means certain who will win, but both candidates come from the relatively collegial confines of the Senate, both are experienced legislators who should understand the importance of consensus and compromise. Obama has consistently stressed the need for consensus and collaboration. One beef that Republicans voice about McCain is that he didn't always stand with his party on ideological issues, but chafing at Trent Lott's leadership is a hopeful sign of a less ideologically polarized era to come. McCain also got burned early in his career by taking campaign donations from Charles Keating, and from that point forward was very careful about whose money he took, a lesson that would have helped keep Republicans Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and Ted Stevens in office, or at least out of jail, and avoid the shadow over Abramoff friends John Dolittle and Conrad Burns.

So. Whichever way this goes, we have a decent shot at increasing the level of civility and decreasing the polarization in Washington, and that would be welcome.

In the words of Beck, "Things are going to get better. I can feel it."