Reducing congressional politics to a numbers game

By Lisa Mascaro

Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010 | 2 a.m.

One of the emerging trends in this hyperpartisan era of politics is the enhanced view senators have of their ability to be the one person who can make or break the legislative agenda.

The day Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts election for Senate last month, he signed autographs as “41” — the crucial 41st Republican in the Senate needed to stop Democrats from advancing their agenda.

Democrats experienced the same sense of self-importance when they reached a 60-vote majority — the number of senators needed to overcome opposition from Republicans.

In a closed-door meeting during the health care debate last fall, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who last year switched from Republican to Democrat, told his colleagues he would be their 60th vote.

This development arrives in a chamber where outsized egos reign. Senate rules allow any senator to object to floor action, a power that requires the 100 individual actors to collaborate or languish in legislative gridlock.

But as the political parties have become more divided, the use of the filibuster to block legislation has gone from an occasional occurrence to standard operating procedure. Former Republican leader Bob Dole used to say during the waning days of the Reagan administration that he needed just 41 votes to stop the Senate’s Democratic majority.

Senators frequently filibuster routine procedures, only to later vote overwhelmingly in favor of the bills. The filibuster becomes simply a stalling tactic, a chance for the opposition to run out the clock on the majority.

Used to its fullest, the filibuster requires the majority to deliver 60 votes to pass any bill, as we saw repeatedly last year — perhaps most vividly on the Christmas Eve vote on health care. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid needed every vote from his

60-member Democratic caucus in the face of unified Republican opposition.

“It has become much more the order of business,” Senate Historian Donald Ritchie said.

The power of one has not gone over well in the Capitol’s other chamber, the House, where Democrats are furious over the Senate minority’s ability to jam up their agenda.

During last year’s debate over the economic recovery act, Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley bemoaned the power of Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine to single-handedly force the removal of school construction money before giving her vote.

President Barack Obama has his own frustrations with the Senate, which played out on national TV last month. Obama scolded the Senate during his State of the Union address in a decidedly insider-y conversation about the perils of procedural abuse.

“If the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well,” Obama said.

Shortly after Brown was sworn into office last week, he reiterated his standing as the 41st Republican.

The Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, mused recently of Brown that he “will always think of him as 41.”

The only problem is Brown is not the only 41st senator — given 40 other Republican senators also know that their vote could be the one that is needed to ensure their party can block the Democratic agenda.

Those 40 other Republican senators, who have much more experience and seniority than Brown, can extract steep sums from their party before they give their vote to keep the conference unified against the Democrats.

Among the other 40 senators, the power of one just got “enhanced,” as Ritchie put it.

As Brown begins his new career, he may learn quickly that he is not the only 41st senator.

In fact, a quick consultation of Senate records shows Brown is not 41 at all, but the 1,914th senator to hold office.