The next session of Congress will probably see 10-12% turnover in the Senate. As things stand today, twenty-four senators first took their oath of office in 2007 or later. Two of the twenty-four (Burris and Kaufman) are retiring. But if we add the 10-12 new members that will enter the chamber in 2011 to the twenty-two relatively new members sworn in since 2007, we get about a third of the senate being made up of members who joined after the GOP's meltdown in 2006.And the answer to that question is "Of course not." Deal-making is not in the vocabulary of the Republicans who will be left after 2010. You have to look no further than the current few months of the 111th Congress to see what the GOP version of "negotiation with Democrats" is for Senators like Mike Enzi, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, John McCain, John Ensign, and John Cornyn.Some may wonder how the partisan makeup of the chamber will change. But regardless of whether the Dems hold, lose, or increase their numbers, we know that it will have a lot of new blood. If all the incumbents are reelected, the Senate will still only have 54 members who voted on the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq (including 15 of the 23 that voted against it).
The big question is: what does it mean to have such a large turnover for the culture of the Senate? These new members won their seats in a horribly polarized environment. They won their seats with the assistance of a newly assertive grassroots (on the Democratic side) or on the platform of Bush dead-enderism and the Politics of Palin. Cross-aisle cooperation in the Senate is at an all-time low. Is there even a place for Teddy Kennedy's style of deal-making anymore?
No wonder Mel Martinez is getting out now and Arlen Specter switched parties. Deal-making supposes there's people amenable to deals. Clearly this generation of Senate Republicans only see the Democrats as the enemy.
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