Public Service

There has been a spate of retirement announcements lately from various senators. Many of them have served in the Senate for well over a decade, and I can understand their fatigue and frustration with the way that the Senate has become such a negative place in the past decade. Done well, it's not an easy job under the best of circumstances.

I grew up with images of the Senate as an Old Boys' Club (as I'm sure most people did), where party lines were blurred and collegiality ruled. Senators referred to each other as "my esteemed colleague" or "my friend from the state of" and generally acted as though they really meant it. When it came time for them to do hard work and make tough decisions for the country, politics could enter the picture, but they'd always have a backdrop of mutual respect and be able to compromise or even change minds on difficult issues in the best interest of the citizenry (or, for jaded cynics, the best interest of the people paying the campaign bills). The fact that senators are elected to six-year terms helped keep them from being in a permanent campaign mode, and many of them made use of the fact that they weren't constantly in the headlines to do the work that they thought was right for at least the first three or four years of a term, even when they knew that it wouldn't resonate well with their electorate.

Of late, the illusions of camaraderie in the Senate have disappeared. While the honorific terms are still used, we know full well that many senators despise each other. Party-line votes have become so common that it's almost unnecessary for individual senators to show up for a roll call before observers know the exact vote tally. Procedural tactics have been misused to the point where the deliberative process (formerly what the Senate was renowned for) is almost nonexistent.

In this poisonous environment, I can't blame anyone for wanting to get out. The thought of spending millions of dollars and months of personal energy and effort in order to get a job that promises to be six years of headaches, second-guessing, frustration, and blame is enough deterrent that I can't imagine any sane person without aspirations to higher office investing those dollars, energy, or effort. For any senator who is aware that higher office isn't calling any time soon to resign seems to make sense.

But.

I know that I was jubilant at the thought of a Jon Kyl-free Senate. I can't imagine having my political and ethical leanings and not celebrating his announced retirement. The man represented everything that I despised about politics and the Senate in specific. But.

At a time when extremists are taking over seats in the Senate, the House, and in many governors' mansions (as well as state legislatures) and pushing agendas that have less to do with the general welfare and the public good than they do with ideological purity, I can't help but wonder if we should be questioning these recent resignations. These are people who know how the process can work. These are people who have seen what the Senate looks like when it does its job. These are people who can remember a time before the filibuster became a monster. These are people who have ties to lobbyists, sure, and to corporate America, sure, and who have allowed the process to get as dirty as it currently is, sure, but they also are people who knew what it was before they screwed it up. As nice as it is to think that fresh blood might clean away some of the mess, perhaps it would be more effective to have the old blood stick around with a new mission of restoring what has been lost.

Finally, I wonder about how responsible some of these retirements are. If you're Joe Lieberman and you know that your state will elect someone who will vote similarly to you, on average, maybe it's not a bad idea to step down when you can. If you're Jeff Bingaman and you know that your state may well elect someone completely unlike you, how responsible is it to retire at a time when party-line votes and filibusters define the daily operation of the chamber? After all, these senators are elected to be public servants. As important as personal health (physical and mental), family time, and whatever other considerations may be, what is more important than making sure that the people's business is conducted in the best possible manner by the people best able to do so? If you know that you can do the job and that resigning will open the position up to someone who cannot do it as well as you or who will do it in a way that runs counter to your personal beliefs, then you are not only being irresponsible, you are also violating the compact of trust created when the voters first elected you and you first took the Oath of Office.