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When bipartisanship was king

leaders100201 — Sens. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Tom Daschle, D-S.D., talk in the Senate Reception Room.

The Republicans always played hardball:

The GOP fired the Senate parliamentarian over reconciliation in a 50-50 Senate in 2001.

It was such a non-scandal that NYT’s reporting on the GOP replacement was a 57-word stub on the bottom of A22.

It was such a non-scandal that it appears never to have been mentioned on CSPAN, possibly the only TV outlet that could be counted on to cover such news.

https://www.c-span.org/search/?sdate=05%2F01%2F2001&edate=05%2F30%2F2001&congressSelect=&yearSelect=&searchtype=Mentions&sort=Newest&unidSpeakers=1&all%5B%5D=parliamentarian

It was such a non-scandal that @joshtpm, in writing about it shortly after, genuinely asked: ‘Is this a scandal?’

It was such a non-scandal that the fired parliamentarian, Robert Dove, noted in 2010 that ‘various parliamentarians have been replaced over the years…when the Majority Leader was unhappy.’

https://oneill.law.georgetown.edu/reconciling-reconciliation-an-interview-with-robert-dove/

Originally tweeted by Nico Pitney (@nicopitney) on February 26, 2021.

These were supposedly glory days of bipartisan comity before all this “polarization” ruined everything. But the fact is that there wasn’t much bipartisan comity then either. It’s just that the assumption was that the Democrats would roll over for the Republicans because everyone knew that the US was “a conservative country” and they knew what was best. And so they did. And each time they did it, the next set of policies was even further right than the previous ones.

It was this dynamic that created the original netroots in which liberal voters who had been watching this from afar with dismay started using the new technology to make their voices heard. It was that energy that fueled the Dean campaign in 2004, which was far less about policy than it was about ending this reflexive capitulation, particularly in the wake of the disastrous Iraq war decision.

As you can see, this is a problem that has not completely resolved almost 20 years later. The Democrats are treating a decision by the parliamentarian as a commandment from Mt Sinai. And if they were to fire her you can bet the news would treat it as if they’d well … stormed the capitol to overturn the vote or something, just as they would have back then. Hardball is expected of Republicans, admired even, and the subject of derision is Democrats try it.

And, of course, let’s face facts. If Joe Manchin won’t let Biden have his choice of OMB director because he wants to restore bipartisanship and unity in the US Senate, it’s easy to imagine that he (and other Democrats) would go apeshit if Schumer fired the parliamentarian. That’s just how they roll.

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