Larry Sabato: Why One Vote Matters in the Senate: No Deviations Allowed
[Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics and University Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, is the author of “The Year of Obama.”]
A bit too much is being made of the “Olympia Snowe factor.” Does her vote for the Baucus health care reform bill ease passage of some kind of bill on the Senate floor? Probably. But my bet is that the Democrats would have found a way to pass health care even if Senator Snowe had voted nay. They remember the G.O.P. landslide of 1994, which happened partly because the Democratic base was disillusioned after the defeat of Clinton-care and didn’t turn out in the ‘94 midterm election. It can happen again in 2010, but only if Democrats repeat their earlier mistakes.
Still, it is revealing that Senator Snowe is quite possibly the only Republican vote (or one of a very few) to be found for the Democratic bill in the entire Congress. This is because of a purification ritual that has taken place in both parties over a half-century, especially among the Republicans.
When Lyndon Johnson needed extra votes for his civil rights bills in the 1960s, he turned to liberal Republicans, primarily from the Northeast and Midwest. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 received the votes of 27 Senate Republicans and 136 House Republicans, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 got 30 G.O.P. votes in the Senate and 111 G.O.P. votes in the House. And let’s not forget Medicare, the public policy predecessor to today’s reform efforts. Johnson was able to find 13 Senate and 70 House Republicans to back Medicare in 1965. Compare this to a universe of perhaps a dozen Republicans in both houses of Congress who are even theoretically available to support Obama’s reform approach this year...
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A bit too much is being made of the “Olympia Snowe factor.” Does her vote for the Baucus health care reform bill ease passage of some kind of bill on the Senate floor? Probably. But my bet is that the Democrats would have found a way to pass health care even if Senator Snowe had voted nay. They remember the G.O.P. landslide of 1994, which happened partly because the Democratic base was disillusioned after the defeat of Clinton-care and didn’t turn out in the ‘94 midterm election. It can happen again in 2010, but only if Democrats repeat their earlier mistakes.
Still, it is revealing that Senator Snowe is quite possibly the only Republican vote (or one of a very few) to be found for the Democratic bill in the entire Congress. This is because of a purification ritual that has taken place in both parties over a half-century, especially among the Republicans.
When Lyndon Johnson needed extra votes for his civil rights bills in the 1960s, he turned to liberal Republicans, primarily from the Northeast and Midwest. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 received the votes of 27 Senate Republicans and 136 House Republicans, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 got 30 G.O.P. votes in the Senate and 111 G.O.P. votes in the House. And let’s not forget Medicare, the public policy predecessor to today’s reform efforts. Johnson was able to find 13 Senate and 70 House Republicans to back Medicare in 1965. Compare this to a universe of perhaps a dozen Republicans in both houses of Congress who are even theoretically available to support Obama’s reform approach this year...