Lame Duck Frist Struggles To Maintain Control
From the Associated Press: Long past dark Thursday at the Capitol, Bill Frist was in a joking mood. “What’s the news? What’s next? How’s it going?” he asked a reporter, smiling as he walked across the tiled floor from his office to the Senate chamber. Just a few hours later, the Senate would pass a $60 billion bill extending the Bush tax cuts — just the sort of gritty horse-trading that burnishes the reputation of a Senate majority leader.
For Frist, that victory comes near the end of a tough year. Dogged by scandal and trouble, the Tennessee Republican is struggling to maintain his hold on the Senate. Republican chairmen have nixed his plans, and angry conservatives question his spine. Democratic leaders brazenly defy him, sending him into a televised rage about being “slapped in the face.” He’s closely identified with a Republican president whose popularity is at an all-time low, in a party whose other leaders are knee-deep in accusations and scandal. Frist himself faces multiple federal investigations over the profitable timing of when he sold his shares in HCA Inc., the hospital chain founded by his family.
James Thurber, director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, said he’s heard a joke around Washington that sums up Frist’s current situation: “He came in like Jimmy Stewart, and he’s going out like Martha Stewart,” Thurber said. That’s exactly the sort of perception Frist will have to overcome if he wants to win the Republican nomination for president in 2008.
Asked to evaluate the past year, Frist replied with a list of legislative accomplishments: A new bankruptcy law, long sought by banks and credit card companies. Bills to fund highways and energy projects that Congress had been unable to pass for several years. “I’ve been very pleased with the year thus far,” he said. But does he still feel like he’s an effective leader in the Senate? “You just heard the track record,” he said.
Other Republican senators defended Frist’s record, which includes completing most of the appropriations bills in Congress this year and shepherding through the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts. “I think he’s got a great record of success. There’s a lot of stuff he got done,” said Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. But that might not be enough to preserve his power in the Senate, said Bruce Oppenheimer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. “He still lacks some of the instincts that some of the people who rise to that position usually have, politically.”
Thurber said the troubles are rooted in how Frist became majority leader. He took over from Sen. Trent Lott in 2002, after the Mississippi Republican took heat for comments made at a party honoring Sen. Strom Thurmond. Because he had ascended so quickly into the role instead of climbing into it over time, Frist delegated leadership tasks to colleagues such as Santorum, Thurber said. “He relied on others … and that weakened him as a leader.”
Last week, Frist found himself in a firestorm over a resolution requesting White House reports on progress in Iraq and calls for “significant transition” toward withdrawal over 2006. The Wall Street Journal editorial page issued a stern rebuke Friday: “Majority Leader Bill Frist did his reputation no good by allowing this spectacle.” Frist offered his resolution as a compromise instead of a more harshly worded Democratic measure, and he called it an “absolute repudiation” of the Democrats’ move after it passed.
But Tom Perdue, an Atlanta political consultant and the architect of Frist’s 1994 Senate campaign, was livid. “There is no leadership right now. It is a total leadership vacuum,” he said. “I blame that on the president. I like the president, but he has sure dropped the ball in the last six to eight months.” Perdue said, “I feel bad for Sen. Frist. I care for him very much as a person, and I care for him very much as a U.S. senator. I think he got rolled by the cowardly Republicans … I wish he would walk around with a baseball bat and use it on occasion.”
There have been other bumps this month. On Nov. 1, Democratic Leader Harry Reid stunned Frist by throwing the Senate into closed session to discuss prewar intelligence without consulting the Republican leader. Frist said the Senate had been “hijacked.” “(Never have) I been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution,” Frist said to the cameras. “For the next year and a half, I can’t trust Senator Reid.” Reid said that things have cooled off since the maneuver. “I think it’s fine,” Reid said of their working relationship now.
