Republicans have instituted term limits for their chairman, meaning they can't monopolize top committees for decades and giving other members of their caucus a chance to hold leadership positions. Democrats, on the other hand, work on a seniority system that rewards the longest-serving members and converts them into corrupt, arrogant and unaccountable autocrats.
There's no better example of this dynamic in action than Sen. Max Baucus and his Senate Finance Committee, where he and three of his best buddies are working to overrule the will of the entire House and virtually the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate while vacuuming up huge dollars from his lobbyist friends. But he doesn't give a shit, because there's nothing anyone else can do about it.
Except that some in the Democratic caucus are tiring of this arrangement.
In an apparent warning to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), some liberal Democrats have suggested a secret-ballot vote every two years on whether or not to strip committee chairmen of their gavels.
Baucus, who is more conservative than most of the Democratic Conference, has frustrated many of his liberal colleagues by negotiating for weeks with Republicans over healthcare reform without producing a bill or even much detail about the policies he is considering.
"Every two years the caucus could have a secret ballot on whether a chairman should continue, yes or no," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. "If the ‘no’s win, [the chairman’s] out.
"I’ve heard it talked about before," he added.
Senate Dems should absolutely get this done. Any Democrat who doesn't have a chairmanship should want to vote for this. They outnumber the committee chairs:
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who survived a secret-ballot referendum on his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee in November, said he would oppose such a vote on all chairmen.
Time to end the tyranny of the long-serving.