Trent Lott's Stages of Grief By Michael Kinsley
Michael Kinsley is editor of Slate. Posted Monday, June 4, 2001, at 4:00 p.m. PT Posted Monday, June 4, 2001, at 4:00 p.m. PT
Trent Lott is becoming unhinged...In a "Call to Action" released by his office (and first reported Sunday in the New York Times), the poor man seemed maddened by the loss of power and a sense of betrayal.
Republicans must recapture the Senate not just because that would be nice, but because "We have a moral obligation to restore the integrity of our democracy, to restore by the democratic process what was changed in the back rooms in Washington." Democratic "control of the Senate lacks the moral authority of a mandate from the voters."
One small flaw in Lott's narrative tapestry is that there was not a Republican majority in the Senate even before Jim Jeffords, that impetuous scalawag, betrayed Western civilization. The result was 50-50, remember? It is dubious enough to suppose that when people vote for a particular Senate candidate they are making a conscious decision about which party they wish to see in control. Add in the tie-breaker role of the vice president, especially one elected under the circumstances of this one, and the theory becomes ridiculous.
But suppose that Lott is right and Senate elections are referendums on which party should control the Senate. In that case "the moral authority of a mandate from the voters" belongs to the Democrats, who got 38.38 million votes for senator last November, compared with 37.83 for the Republicans. The fact that states like Montana get just as many senators as New York and California makes it easy for Republicans to have even an actual majority of Senate seats without getting a majority of the vote.
A Republican with a more finely honed sense of irony than Trent Lott's might hesitate before thundering about the moral sanctity of majority rule. Until two weeks ago, the Republicans dominated both elected branches of government without a popular majority in either one. And they were busy with plans to reinforce the effective conservative majority in the third, unelected branch.
Although they rightly contested an inaccurate vote count in Florida, the Democrats have been very good sports about the basic fact that they lost the presidency while getting a majority of the vote. The Republicans, by contrast, seem to find it inconceivable-and illegitimate-that they should be out of power, even when that result is dictated by both simple majority rule and our system's peculiar departures from it.
And to think these were the people who used to be fixated on the need for term limits.