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American Morning

Senate Power Shift: New Balance Will Have Wide-Reaching Effects

Aired June 06, 2001 - 11:29   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: You're looking at live picture from the well of the Senate. You see there Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, now beginning to lay out the schedule for the week. We've been watching as he has been officially recognized as the Senate majority leader.

Watching along with us is our senior political correspondent Candy Crowley, who is in our Washington bureau.

Candy, I'd like you to give us an idea.

Also I should mention, as we see here all the three that we have with us this morning, we have our us Bill Schneider, standing by in Los Angeles this morning; that's Candy Crowley, who's in Washington; and our Jonathan Karl, who's on Capitol Hill.

Candy starting with you.

Your thoughts after hearing the statements that we heard this morning. It sounded as though bipartisan is going to be the rule here.

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I don't want to be the resident cynic here. I'm sure they'll try. What, actually, I thought about was I've seen so many of these -- obviously, not in the middle of session -- when you start out and the majority leader says I'm going to work together and we're going to have bipartisanship. The fact of the matter is sometimes it comes down to what your definition of bipartisanship is. For some people, particularly on the wings of the Democratic and the Republican Party, bipartisanship means going along with what they want.

Senator Daschle, like Senator Lott, will be pulled by his wing. Obviously, the numbers force them and Senator Daschle -- absolutely right -- to work together more because nobody can steam roll anything through. Does this mean that from here until the next election it will be sweetness and light? I would predict not. They will find plenty of things to bicker about. When someone is opposed, they think that's partisanship.

We'll see some good arguments, and we'll see them coming together.

HARRIS: Linda.

LINDA STOUFFER, CNN ANCHOR: Now to Bill Schneider. We want to pull you in. Bill Schneider's watching all of this from Los Angeles.

I know Tom Daschle has such a fine line to walk here, Bill. We've seen his first outing as majority leader. First off, how's he doing?

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, he's essentially treating this as a mandate for bipartisanship. I think the Democrats' argument is that George Bush, when he become president, really overreached, that he didn't really have strong mandate. It was a disputed election. It was excruciatingly close, not just for president, but also in the Congress. Republicans have a very narrow majority in the House, and it was tied evenly in the Senate. So he should have governed in more genuinely bipartisan way.

The Democrats' view is the president spoke bipartisanship, but he never really compromised with the Democrats; he just picked off a few who would support his tax cut, his energy program, or other measures. And their view is they want now to hold the president's feet to fire and say, You want bipartisanship, we're here to give to you, because their view is their mandate is to do that.

STOUFFER: What does this really mean for the president looking forward, in terms of practical terms? As the president tries to put forth his agenda, what does he face?

SCHNEIDER: He faces a Democratic Party that has its own priorities -- minimum wage, managed care, reform in the health care area, prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients -- and their view is they're going to put these issues on the agenda. They want to hold the president to making deals with them to get these things passed, because they believe these are the public's priorities.

The interesting point about this is it's very much like November 1994, after the first two years of the Clinton administration, when Clinton tried to govern from the left, and the voters said, Stop, you're going too far with health care reform and with gun controls and with the tax increase, and they gave Congress to other party.

The difference here is, number one, that only lasted about four months, that the Republicans were governing on their own.

Number two, there's been no election. The voters haven't had a say. Not one member has changed. The only thing that changed was Jim Jeffords switched sides. That's why Trent Lott, in a letter last week, said it was a coup of one, meaning Jim Jeffords.

A lot of Republicans believe they've stabbed in the back. They have not been repudiated by the voters, and they're going to have to make a decision: Are they going to go along with this bipartisanship stuff, or are they going to fight the Democrats tooth and claw?

HARRIS: The one thing they're going to have to do is give up their committee leadership positions. Let's go to our Jon Karl, on Capitol Hill.

Jon, give us an idea of exactly the changes that we can expect to see in some of these committees and the implications thereof. Let's begin -- I believe we have some graphics put together that we can walk through with the audience. First of all, let's look at the Senate Formulations Committee.

JONATHAN KARL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's the nature of the Senate that the committee chairmen tend from come from the extremes of their respective parties. For example, you see the Foreign Relations Committee's outgoing chairman will be Jesse Helms, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, replaced by Joe Biden, one of the most liberal members of the Senate. Potentially, some significant changes there. For instance, take the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Jesse Helms is a strong critic of the ABM Treaty, and not so much Joe Biden.

On several of the committees, you will see rather stark differences. Foreign Relations is certainly one of them.

Another one, on a very similar issue, is Armed Services, where you go from John Warner to Carl Levin, on the Democratic side, Carl Levin a strong critic of President Bush's idea for a national missile defense system.

So you clearly have some major changes on the committee level, but as you saw, both leaders are coming in talking about bipartisanship. The Republican view of this is that they go from being the weakest possible majority, a majority with only 50 votes plus the vice president, to being the strongest possible minority, a minority with 49 votes, and they intend to use that minority power to its full extent. They have the full power to offer any amendment at any time to any bill, and they say they will fully use that power.

HARRIS: Candy Crowley, standing by in the Washington bureau -- with that in mind, what are we to expect in the days to come? Do you see this as a recipe for gridlock, which we thought was gone, but now is back?

CROWLEY: No, I think when they come together, they come together, and when they don't, you won't see any movement. It's not going to be that different. What they have pointed out here is now the Democrats control the Senate. It means they have the committee chairs. It means that, in a certain way, they control the agenda in the Senate. But the president still has the bully pulpit, so he can control, to a certain extent, the agenda out there in the larger public, and that, of course, pushes the Senate.

So what you have are the same votes you had yesterday. I think that what happens is the friendship that you see and you heard spoken of between Senators Daschle and Lott actually seems to be genuine. And you find this sort of all the way back in history, that the two leaders -- the majority leader and the minority leader -- tend to get along. If it were just up to them, you'd probably have a lot of compromise legislation. The problem is they have to go back to their caucuses.

So it's not a recipe for gridlock. Certainly, now is their best time ever to get something done. I think you'll see an education bill pretty darn quickly out of here. The closer we get to 2002, when, of course, the majority and the minorities could switch again, I think that's when gridlock starts to set in -- it always does.

HARRIS: On the way out here, you mentioned an election year. Do you think that there's a difference here because of the fact that this change in leadership happened because of a change in midterm, and not because happened in November, when voters were at the polls? Do you think that is going to play in any way in the minds of the senators or in the public's mind, when they see what these senators actually do?

CROWLEY: I don't. I think these sort of things tend to be forgotten, certainly in the public. I think they look and they say it looks like the same players to them, they seem to be talking about the same issues, and they sort of move on.

I think Jonathan alluded to it: Obviously, they are operating on a very fine margin, the majority Democrats, and really, Trent Lott's job is a lot easier now. Someone once described it to me as the difference between throwing grenades, in the minority, or catching them, in the majority; it's a lot easier to throw them. And so I think they're going to get some things done, but I think it's going to be like a lot of other senates, and I don't think in back of mind it's Oh, gee, we got this in the middle of the session; they just sort of move on It is what it is.

STOUFFER: Let me take that question to political analyst Bill Schneider. Bill, do you agree with that, that an election, in some front, is really no different than a defection?

SCHNEIDER: Let me respectfully disagree a bit with what Candy said, because I think that Republican do resent the way this happened. It was not the judgment of the people. The people did not speak. They feel -- a lot of them, particularly the more conservative members of the Republican minority -- feel as if they got stabbed in the back, not just stabbed in the back because of the perfidy, the treacherousness of one moderate, even liberal senator, Jim Jeffords, but because the Democrats enticed him. They gave him a committee chairmanship. They wooed him away from the Republican ranks. A lot of Republicans claim to see a deal there, to trap them into losing their majority status.

So there is resentment, resentment that you don't ordinarily see in the case of an election where the voters, but resentment because they see it as a deal.

STOUFFER: Political analyst Bill Schneider, thanks so much for your thoughts on that.

HARRIS: We also want to thank our senior political correspondent Candy Crowley, who's in our Washington bureau, and our Jonathan Karl, who's on Capitol Hill. Thanks much, folks, we appreciate the insight. We'll be watching to see how things play out from here -- maybe we're all right, maybe we're all wrong.

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