WASHINGTON – It would be hard to find two politicians more different than John Breaux and David Vitter.
Breaux, who is retiring from the Senate, is a centrist Louisiana Democrat and pragmatic dealmaker who shuttles between parties in search of legislative compromises.
Vitter, who was elected to succeed Breaux, is one of the most conservative Republicans in the House. He likes term limits, loathes gambling and rarely votes against his party or the president.
That changing of the guard is part of a broader trend emerging from Election Day that helps explain why the Senate – like the greater political landscape – has become so polarized. The centrists are leaving Congress in droves; unvarnished conservatives are arriving in their place.
The retirement of Breaux and several other Southern Democrats depletes even further the dwindling ranks of lawmakers inclined to work across party lines. They are being replaced largely by a younger generation of Republicans, schooled in a more uncompromising form of conservatism.
Six of the seven Republican senators-elect are former members of the House – a far more partisan, combative institution ever since firebrand Republican Newt Gingrich ran the place. Two of the newcomers were backed by the Club for Growth, a group dedicated to clipping the GOP’s liberal wing. Most of the newly elected senators are significantly more conservative than those they are replacing.
“It’s a sea change in terms of losing the political center,” said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, co-chair of the Senate’s bipartisan Centrist Coalition.
The rightward shift will put pressure on the GOP moderates who remain. When Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who is in line to head the Judiciary Committee, recently predicted that antiabortion judicial nominees would have a difficult time getting Senate approval, conservatives clamored for him to be denied the chairmanship.
But the Senate makeup also presents a challenge for Bush: Although the 2004 elections have given him more Republican lawmakers dedicated to his agenda, most of the new senators are not the kind of bipartisan coalition-builders the president will need to enact his plans to overhaul the tax code and Social Security. Because those aims are more ambitious and riskier than his first-term agenda of tax cuts and expanded Medicare benefits, many analysts say it will be even more important for Bush to seek bipartisan support.
“It will necessitate consensus building, especially on the large issues the president is talking about,” Snowe said. “I don’t see how it can be a unilateral approach.”
With the retirement of Breaux, Bush is losing one of the very few Democrats who supported his idea of allowing workers to invest Social Security taxes in private accounts. The Louisiana lawmaker also brokered a compromise on Bush’s 2001 tax cut and was one of two Democrats who had a hand in writing last year’s Medicare bill.
The influx of new conservatives also may harden Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., against compromise.
“The pressure on Frist – to be hard-nosed and try to run over the Democrats rather than accommodate them – will be pretty high,” said Barbara Sinclair, a University of California, Los Angeles political scientist.
So while the Senate in recent years has tempered the conservatism of the House on taxes, spending and social issues, House Republicans now should find more allies in their campaigns to slash government spending, revamp the tax code and curb abortion.
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