Democrats are still the problem

I wrote yesterday about the insignificance of replacing Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana with his Republican challenger, Congressman Dennis Rehberg. This brought to mind one of the weapons that people in office use to keep their base in line: The voting record.

Here are the last ten recorded votes in the current Senate without regard to issue or party: 81-19, 42-58, 47-53, 96-0, 64-36, 57-43, 100-0, 50-50, 12-88, 7-93. In those ten votes there was one where the vote of one Senator could have changed the outcome. That vote was on Amendment No. 183, which would prohibit the EPA from doing anything related to climate change. The 50-50 vote means it failed. Important? Yes. Tester’s vote? To reject the amendment. One Republican joined with the Democrats in rejecting the amendment, and four Democrats joined the Republicans to favor passage.

Now, suppose that Dennis Rehberg held Jon Tester’s seat – it indeed appears that the final vote would have changed the outcome. But we don’t know that. Prior to a close vote being taken, is is usually known how it will come out. Prior to that, a practice known as “vote trading” takes place. Republicans were mostly obligated to support that amendment, as their base requires it, and the Republican base tends to remember stuff. But are all 50 of Republicans unreasonable? Not likely. Democrats, on the other hand, are not obligated to oppose the amendment, as their base doesn’t hold them to ideology. So four of them jumped ship.

Even so, it appears we have a victory. I won’t deny that.

However, it could be that in the vote trading scheme, one Republican (Collins, Maine) agreed to take the Democratic side to defeat the amendment, and both sides were agreeable to that. That is a win-win – everyone pleases the base, and the vote tallying agencies will ‘score’ the vote for use in coming election campaigns. In the meantime, the issue dies.

In 1994 the League of Conservation Voters released its voting score on Montana Senator Max Baucus, and he scored 80% “favorable” to the environmental community. A closer look revealed that three (going on memory here) of the votes were about changing the designation of the the Joshua Tree National Monument into a national park and expanding the old wilderness. Two of those votes were procedural. Important? Yes. But the votes were all lopsided. Baucus could vote for or against the issue without changing the outcome. It did not affect his home state. It was not a true test of his environmental credentials.

Did LCV shill for Baucus? I suspected so at the time. A better test of Baucus’s wilderness creds was his behavior regarding Montana wilderness. He opposed expansion of designated wilderness throughout his tenure in office. Whenever the issue would arise, Baucus would trot out a “rocks and ice” bill designed to thwart attempts to protect heavily forested areas from development. That’s behavior that has consequences. The LCV scorecard does not reflect it.

It is hard to know the mind of a Senator, and voting records are of little use. More important is the behavior behind the scenes, and we don’t get much reporting on that. Our impression of the worth of a legislator is based solely on the record of votes and the “scorecards” put out by interest groups, and public utterances. Those votes can be tailored as necessary to please the base. Public words of politicians are designed for impact, and carry no substance. Notice that 7 of 10 votes above were lopsided, and two were far enough apart to allow the luxury of switching a vote here and there without affecting outcome. On the one that was close, we may or may not have pegged Senator Tester. He may indeed be the right guy in the right place. But it is far from certain.

There’s a great swill of controversy now about having Rehberg in office instead of Tester. Democrats are, frankly, scared out of their panties of Rehberg. They needn’t be. Part of the beauty of our two-party system is the ability of politicians to focus their base on the other party as they do their business. The only way to have an impact on the system and the outcome of votes is to pressure the person in office. Democrats, who perpetually swear to support their party no matter the behavior of the office holders, do not offer meaningful pressure. They are the problem.