The United States Senate and Senator Feingold

I highly recommend Jonathan Cohn's tribute to Russ Feingold.  Over the weekend, I asked liberals who they were especially rooting for tomorrow, and Feingold got lots of mentions.  As far as I'm concerned, that's nuts, but I'll have to admit I'm just not a fan.  Perhaps its something about that part of the country that I just don't get (I never liked Proxmire, either), but I don't know why liberals would care so much about someone whose main accomplishments were symbolic, and who couldn't be counted on to support his party when it mattered.

All that said: I do think he's been a good Senator, in one important sense.  As I've said over and over when talking about the filibuster, United States Senators have strong incentives to create a decentralized, non-hierarchical, body.  The problem is that such a Senate doesn't go well with boringly partisan Senators.  If we're to have a Senate in which individual Senators matter, then it's not such a bad thing to have some Senators really act as individuals.  You don't have to be independent of your party to do that -- Ted Kennedy was as orthodox as they come in his voting record, but he sure wasn't just a generic Democrat -- but it's one way to do it.  By that standard, I think Tom Coburn is a good Senator; Bernie Sanders is a good Senator; and Russ Feingold is a good Senator.

I'll add that in a two-party system, it's not such a bad thing that the institution encourages Senators to act apart from their parties.  It's a good thing when Americans whose views don't really match up with either mainstream Democrats or mainstream Republicans can point to at least one of a hundred Senators as "theirs."  For good government liberals, Russ Feingold has been a match.

It's not the only thing that the Senate needs -- the Senate also needs workhorses, someone like Paul Sarbanes, who was a great workhorse in the Senate, wasn't exactly an "individual" of that type.  (You can be both, as the Ted Kennedy example shows).  I don't think that's Feingold's thing, though, although he did do serious legislative work on the campaign finance stuff, I suppose.  Russ Feingold has been a good Senator in the way that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a good Senator.  As I've said, he's not to my tastes, but I guess that's the point; if we're going to have something like the United States Senate, we should hope that it doesn't get filled with 100 nameless timeservers and party hacks, or else there really is no point to it.  And I say that as about the biggest fan of party hacks that you're going to find.

Feingold vs. the Bank Tax

Here's Kevin Drum, Monday, on Russ Feingold's decision to oppose the banking bill as it came out of conference:

But seriously: WTF? This is the final report of a conference committee. There's no more negotiation. It's an up-or-down vote and there isn't going to be a second chance at this. You either vote for this bill, which has plenty of good provisions even if doesn't break up all the big banks, or else you vote for the status quo. That's it. That's the choice. It's not a game. It's not a time for Feingold to worry about his reputation for independence. It's a time to make a decision between actively supporting something good and actively supporting something bad. And Feingold has decided to actively support something bad.

That's  Monday.  And what was, apparently, the real-life effect of Feingold's stubborn stand?  Well..back to Drum, on Tuesday:

After three Republican senators threatened to vote against the financial reform bill unless its $18 billion bank fee was removed, Democrats briefly reopened conference committee proceedings today and voted to remove it.

Granted, I don't have any idea whether Feingold's support would have save the bank fee, which I assume Feingold actually would support..  But it might have!  The truth is that the practical effect of Feingold bailing on the bill isn't to sink the bill; it's to empower the three New England Republicans a bit more than they would have been had he supported the bill.  Which, in this case, meant something that the banks, presumably, will be happier with. 

My larger point here is just to echo what Drum said: when politicians worry more about posturing than they do about making the best of what they have, there are real consequences.  That doesn't always mean that liberals in the Senate, for example, should just give up and do whatever the 60th most liberal Senator wants; there's plenty of room for fighting and negotiating and bargaining.  And sometimes, walking away may still be the best choice. However, what I'd say is that walking away better have some real-life, substantive benefits, or else the Senator is simply being self-indulgent and/or irresponsible.