A hardball 108th Congress

Despite intense partisanship and a narrow margin of Republican control, the 108th Congress moved quickly when it had to, especially in its last hours of legislating before November elections.

This week, Congress sent to the president the most sweeping rewrite of the corporate tax code in 20 years, $14.5 billion in hurricane and drought aid, and $33.1 billion in spending for homeland security in 2005.

Most significantly, both the House and Senate left Washington after voting on the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, which have dominated the legislative agenda ever since the report's release in July. The reforms, which would overhaul intelligence gathering, may be finalized before the election if a compromise is reached.

But a decade of legislating in a closely divided Congress has taken its toll on the culture of Capitol Hill, where deadlock has become a way of life and personal relations - the vital element of an effective Congress - often turned toxic. A Senate minority leader was refused admittance to a conference of which he was a member during the 108th Congress, and a House GOP chairman summoned the Capitol Police to evict minority Democrats from a committee room.

House leaders in opposing parties rarely speak. And those few members who do work across party lines often feel a chill in their own caucuses. Even in the clubby Senate, senators who once prefaced public references to each other with "the distinguished senator," "my good friend," or simply "senator," now jump straight to "he" or "she" - a small point to outsiders, but a sign of how worn the patina of civility has become. The House canceled its biannual, bipartisan civility retreat next year due to lack of interest.

"This Congress leaves a legacy of extreme partisanship, deadlock, and delay. It's an institution that hasn't addressed the question of having enough resources to fight a war," says James Thurber, a political scientist at American University in Washington.

In this Congress, longstanding efforts to pass a national energy policy, a highway bill, a patients bill of rights, reform of welfare, bankruptcy, toxic cleanups, corporate-pension rules, and tort liabilities. Nor did this Congress deal with the need to raise the debt limit or complete more than four of 13 must-pass spending bills.

The budget process, the culmination of a quarter century of effort to check the executive branch, broke down. Aggressive oversight languished. At the same time, the procedural arsenal to obstruct action in Congress was vastly enhanced - setting a precedent for the future.

In the House, Democrats were all but shut out from offering amendments on the floor. (When Democrats controlled the House with large majorities, as they did for much of the past half century, resort to such procedures was less necessary, because minority amendments had little prospect of passing.) Now in the Senate, Democrats used the threat of filibuster to make 60 votes the new "supermajority" threshold for judicial nominations or major legislation.

"In the past, senators were reluctant to use the filibuster, because it constituted a nuclear weapon. Now, it's become a conventional weapon: We now have a de facto supermajority rule in the Senate," says John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont-McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

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