All Intensive Purposes

'Stina says,

I heard an interview with former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson on NPR's Morning Edition this morning. Simpson was a pro-choice Republican from a fairly conservative state, and he used to buck the party platform all the time. It's sad, I think, that these Senators can't really talk about how they really feel until after they've left the political eye. Dole, Kerrey, Simpson. It'd be awesome if they could actually say what they think while they're still in office.

Hell, the Constitution gives Senators six years before they need to run for re-election, and the Senate's traditions and rules have always given individual Senators plenty of clout, particularly relative to their peers in the House, where the leadership gets to run things. Sen. Frist's problems getting to critical mass last week are the most recent example. But things have changed quite a bit in the last few years. Josh Marshall has called this, somewhat awkwardly, "the parliamentarization of the American government," and it perhaps is the Bush Administration's most profound gift to the domestic political scene. Says Marshall, "the key feature of the Bush presidency is an extremely powerful executive that to a great degree coopts and controls his own congressional majorities."

There is a remarkable solidarity within the conservative movement. Part of its glue was, during Bush's first term, the need to get him re-elected. With that hurdle passed, and Democrats providing very little in the way of effective opposition, the battles now are between moderate and conservative Republicans. With Senator Voinovich's opposition to the nomination of John Bolton, and the deal struck by the fourteen moderate Senators to avoid the "nuclear option," we see stirrings of the centrifugal forces one would naturally expect to pull at party discipline.

The mystery to me is how the executive branch has prevailed upon the legislative branch to surrender its autonomy and power. Someone surely threatened Arlen Specter with the loss of the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but would did the other Republican Senators go along with this, at the cost of their own perogatives? Apparently they cared more for naming a few more true believers to the federal bench than for their own prospects of chairing a committee. Is it that they identify so strongly as conservatives? Do they need the party's help to get re-elected, much moreso than in years past? Or does the party have some sort of big stick to whack the wayward with?