The incoming Republican chairs of 14 key Senate committees have a problem: they're not getting any younger (with an average age of 70-plus) and there's no time like the present to leave behind a legacy of accomplishment. But that means compromising in order to produce legislation that's palatable to President Obama. And he is not popular among many of the Southern white voters who put the GOP senators both in office and in charge, notes
David Rodgers at Politico.
Indeed, history can’t ignore the fact that the nation’s first black president will be matched against a Senate so dominated by Southern Republicans who rely so much on white votes to get to Washington ...
Must these chairs wait for the president to leave and sacrifice accomplishments in this Congress? Or can they jump into these waters while they still have time in their own lives to get things done — even if it means getting his signature?
As low as Obama's approval ratings have recently been among all Americans, they've been abysmal among whites in the South.
In Obama’s case, a WSJ-NBC survey in December showed the president with a job approval rating of 45 percent nationally. But when the numbers are broken down, this fell to 37 percent among all white voters in the survey and 32 percent among white voters in the South — a total drop of 13 points.
In December of 2013, the dropoff was worse—from 43 percent nationally to 27 percent among Southern whites, or 16 points.
President Bill Clinton also suffered a double digit dropoff among white Southern voters, but he started with much higher numbers overall. Even during his impeachment vote in 1998, Clinton enjoyed 65 percent approval nationally, which dropped to 52 percent among Southern whites.
Republicans are promising a Senate that functions like days of old—with lots of collegial debate and legislation to follow.
“This is post-Sen. Reid,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, 81, told Politico, noting that Reid didn't run the Senate like his Democratic predecessors—Sens. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, George Mitchell of Maine, and Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
“He ran the Senate differently than Mitchell and Byrd and Daschle. It was a very much a deliberative body under them,” Grassley said. “So if there was anything that is going to be different starting January the 6th, it is the Senate is going to be a deliberative body. Extended debate, seldom-use of filling the amendment tree or filing cloture motions and both Republicans and Democrats offering amendments to do what the Senate is meant to do.”
The proof will be in the pudding and we're about to find out just how warm and fuzzy the upper chamber is under the leadership of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.