Claremont Independent

Last Updated: 12/19/06 Section: Opinion

Pages own the Capitol

President Bush likes a youthful presence on the Hill

By a unanimous vote, House Democrats have chosen former Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to become the first female speaker of the House when Congress convenes in January. She will lead a small majority of Democrats that is more divided than most realize. Pelosi will also have to deal with a slim Democratic majority in the Senate that will rarely have the 60 members needed for cloture. A large group of senators with their eye on the White House will be voting - and attending votes - with electoral math in mind. Pelosi will also have to work with President Bush, who may be politically weak but still has a veto and wishes to maintain a conservative legacy. Will Pelosi overcome these problems and get anything done in the 110th Congress? Will she even keep the thin Democratic majority from imploding in two years? It is not likely.

The legislative success that Republicans have enjoyed in the last few Congresses can be attributed to a dominant majority leadership that influenced other House members. The team of Speaker Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and Minority Whip Roy Blunt held the tightest grip over the House since Sam Rayburn's throughout the 1940s and '50s.

Pelosi will not have such a team, and will face a much harsher political reality than Hastert, who reigned during Republican control of the House, Senate, and White House. Democrats rejected Jack Murtha, Pelosi's choice for House majority leader, by a vote of 149 to 86 to elect former minority whip Steny Hoyer. Pelosi had hoped to oust Hoyer from leadership partially because of a longstanding feud that dates back to the nasty battle between the two for the minority whip position in 2001, which Pelosi won. Hoyer's election represents a defeat in Pelosi's first fight as speaker. Murtha has publicly demanded immediate troop withdrawal, which has rubbed many moderate and conservative Democrats the wrong way. Hoyer had strong support from the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of roughly 40 conservative Democrats, which was enough to sway the election against Murtha and Pelosi.

Pelosi was able to avoid a nasty fight for majority whip by cutting a deal with Rahm Emanuel, who currently chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and is often credited for the winning midterm strategy, and Jim Clyburn. Emanuel agreed to drop his bid for the whip spot for the beefed-up position of caucus chairman. The Congressional Black Caucus, which Pelosi hopes to bring more prominently into the fold after much infighting between the CBC and party leadership, pushed the deal. Clyburn will become the second black majority whip.

Hastert overcame divisions within the Republican Party partly because of his insistence on unity for the good of the Party - though being so unified is one of the reasons many members lost their seats. Unlike Republicans under Hastert, trying to direct House Democrats will be like herding cats for Pelosi. A wide variety of issues split Democrats, but the real split among Democrats is between members who have been in Congress since long before the 1994 Republican takeover and those who have spent most of their career in the minority, working to form a more electable Democratic Party.

Many of the Democrats in line to chair House committees have been around since the Great Society and have a very different idea of what the Democratic Party stands for than congressmen like Emanuel, who was senior advisor to the president when President Clinton announced, "The era of big government is over."

Ninety-year-old John Dingell, who has been in the House since 1955, was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee from 1981 to 1995 and has since been the ranking minority member on the committee. As chairman, Dingell led a very active oversight subcommittee that often probed the executive branch, famously exposing inefficiency and corruption during the Reagan administration. Dingell recently told Newsweek, "We'll probably have lots of hearings" on issues ranging from Medicare Part D to Vice President Dick Cheney's secret energy task force meetings.

Other House Democrats plan to go after the administration, such as Henry Waxman, who plans to investigate alleged Halliburton war profiteering as chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, and John Conyers, who as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee wants to subpoena Bush administration officials and hold hearings on the Patriot Act and domestic wiretapping. Pelosi has made it clear that she does not want a vengeful House, fearing that this Democratic Congress will make the same mistakes as the Republican Congress that went after Clinton in his last two years in office.

With divisions already arising between House leadership and committee chairmen, Pelosi will reign over a dysfunctional majority that will need to reach across the aisle to pass anything. Given that Pelosi does not have a good working relationship with Republicans (she and Hastert went months without speaking during 109th Congress), the bipartisanship she and Bush have recently been touting seems unlikely. Pelosi's term as speaker will be plagued by Democrats arguing over the direction of the Party while still having to deal with a down-but-not-out Republican Party. No speaker could hold it all together against those odds.

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