Evan Bayh Call Home
Birch Bayh and LBJ
Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana is reacting surprised by the response he got when he announced the formation of a group of 15 Democratic Senators he called the Practical Coalition last week.
After his announcement, many liberal commentators and writers criticized Bayh’s group as too conservative. At the time, I asked a simple question in this space: Why? Why did the Senate need a practical coalition? Is the Senate in danger of becoming extremely liberal? What exactly about the President’s policies are impractical? Other than obstructing the President’s agenda and giving credence to Republican objections to the President’s plans for economic recovery, what exactly is their agenda?
In trying to answer these questions this week in the Washington Post, Bayh confirmed their validity. He says in the Post, “As moderate leaders it is not our intention to water down the President’s agenda. We intend to strengthen and sustain it.” Then later in the piece he provides an example:
We plan to be a positive force in our caucus, exemplified by the constructive role a number of us played in making reasonable adjustments to garner the GOP votes needed to pass the president’s economic recovery package.
What can you call this other than an effort to water down the recovery package? The practical thing to have done on the recovery package was to follow what their constituents wanted them to do – support the President’s package, without Republican demands to shortchange money to states and use it for tax cuts.
Bayh’s own example demonstrates that the Practical Coalition believes its mission is to make overtures to Republicans to change the President’s policies.
The Democrats have a strong majority in the Senate, and the President has the confidence of the public. Making overtures to the party of “no” when the public wants a “yes” to this President’s program is anything but “constructive.” If Bayh wants to be helpful, he should pressure majority leader Harry Reid to stop making 60 vote agreements with Republican leaders. There is no need for these agreements. Democrats should allow the Republicans to filibuster whatever they want. Let them hold up the senate to stop the President’s economic recovery plan. Then we will see if the public truly wants it stopped, changed, or passed quickly as the President has asked. Dare the Republicans to do that once or twice and the need for seeking 60 votes will disappear.
Bayh, Senators Tom Carper of Delaware and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and other members of the Practical Coalition talk is as if they alone speak for moderate voters. Someone needs to remind them that Barack Obama won a majority of moderates and suburbanites because they want him to fix the big problems that face our nation. This President does not need senators to tell him how to bridge to moderates.
When you consider all the effort Senator Bayh is putting into making sure Republican views are inserted into policy, you can only say with astonishment: What a difference a generation makes. The last Bayh to sit in the Senate was not a man whose life was evaluated by how many programs he could water down or how many big ideas he could trim into half measures.
Birch Bayh, Senator Bayh’s father, was the author of many big ideas during his time in the Senate, from 1963 to 1981. A liberal Democrat in a conservative state, he suffered no identity problems. He was not a small thinker or doer. He believed in equal rights for women, so he authored a constitutional amendment – the ERA, Equal Rights Amendment – that would have etched this pledge in our most important civic document. The states never ratified it but the efforts around trying to make it law drew women and women’s advocates together in ways that continue to this day. He did not “win” ultimately, but he brought about lasting change. This could not have come about if early on in the process he had decided to lower his sights because some people objected to his idea. One cannot help but think the younger Bayh would have settled for a “sense of the senate resolution on women’s rights,” and called it a victory. Practical, huh?
Birch Bayh also authored Title IX of the Higher Education Act, which for the first time required public colleges to provide the same funding for programs for women as men; and he authored the Constitutional Amendment to lower the voting age to 18. He remained throughout his career an unapologetic friend of organized labor.
I wonder what Birch Bayh thinks of the Practical Coalition?
Message to Evan Bayh — call home.