The Senate Caves

Harry Reid has a hangdog face and eyes that droop behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. He sits across from me in front of a giant portrait of Samuel Clemens. Ask him about Mark Twain, and he's got the genial affect of a shopkeep at a general store. But when the conversation turns from 19th-century riverboating to 21st-century governance, Reid takes on a wearied slouch. He seems troubled by the responsibility of majority rule. After all, nobody really thought that the Senate Democrats were actually going to win in 2006. "The House was expected to get the majority, and we weren't," he says. "Surprised everyone."

Reid is not a "leader" in any traditional sense of the word. As speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi can bend Democrats to her will — including the likes of Rep. John Dingell, the lifelong champion of automakers whom Pelosi has muzzled in the debate over global warming. She has even been able to bring conservative "blue dog" Democrats to heel, repeatedly garnering their support for a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq.

Reid, by contrast, is an enabler for Senate committee chairmen, whom he grants free rein over their fiefdoms. Indeed, he recently took to the Senate floor to criticize Pelosi for her "iron hand." His real strength, Reid says, is as the master of the Senate's arcane parliamentary protocols. "One reason I am the majority leader is people respect how I understand the procedures in the Senate," he says. "I don't mean to be boastful at all, but I know the rules really well." Which is perhaps why he is so adept at using them to shield himself from accountability for the Senate's failings.

Take the warrantless wiretap bill passed by Reid and Co. In the House, Pelosi defied the president — and the Senate — by refusing to hold a vote on the measure, which would have allowed the White House to spy on U.S. citizens without court approval. "The bill the Senate passed is really a disaster," Pelosi says. "With all due respect for my friends over there, it is a terrible bill." How then did it emerge from a Senate controlled by her own party? "You're going to have to ask them about it," she says.

The bill was terrible from its birth, the spawn of negotiations between Dick Cheney and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Reid insists that he bitterly opposed the bill, so I press him on why it ever made it to the floor of the Senate — especially given that the Judiciary Committee had introduced a competing measure that didn't bypass the courts. Reid's answer suggests that he values his precious Senate protocols over the Constitution. "Because of our rules," he says, "primary jurisdiction of this bill belonged to the Intelligence Committee." But couldn't Reid have used his discretionary powers as majority leader to call a vote on the alternate bill — particularly given that the rights of Americans were at stake? "I couldn't do that because it was wrong," Reid says. Besides, he adds, "the committee chairs would have been upset."

A look back at the Senate debate over the bill, however, reveals that Reid is not always the stickler for the rules he claims to be. Dodd, who made his opposition to the measure a centerpiece of his presidential bid, had placed a "hold" on the Rockefeller-Cheney bill — a parliamentary procedure that lets a single senator block debate. Reid, who routinely honors the holds used by archconservative Sen. Tom Coburn to block funding for breast cancer research and other bills, refused to honor Dodd's move. "A 'hold' is a word that's meaningless," he tells me.

Even some Republicans are bewildered by the failure of Senate Democrats to stand up to the White House. "When you see a headline like 'In The Senate, A White House Victory On Eavesdropping,' something is wrong," says Lincoln Chafee, a moderate Republican from Rhode Island who was ousted from the Senate in 2006 by voters who believed a Democratic majority would take on the Bush administration. "We threw out all these incumbents for a reason. But there's been no discernible change in direction."

Instead, Chafee says, Senate Democrats caved to Bush on wiretapping because they're still "skittish" about being tagged as soft on terror. Reid and the Democrats, he says, need to "draw a line on what's more sacred: short-term thinking about a possible terrorist attack, or the long-term ramifications of undoing our Constitution."

But what really made Chafee "drop my coffee" was the day Democrats led a 76-22 vote to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard — part of the Iranian government — a terrorist organization. "You have the new senators like Jim Webb warning Democrats that 'this is the last ticket we want to give Bush-Cheney' — an excuse to engage in Iran. And they did it anyway. Harry Reid was quoted as saying, 'We certainly don't want to be led down the path, slowly but surely, until we wind up with a situation like we have in Iraq. So I'm going to be very cautious.' And then votes 'aye'! He makes the exact linkage to Iraq, in which he voted 'aye' — and he does it again. That to me was beyond the pale."