NATION

The U.S. Senate is a chamber split in two—two parties, two ideologies and, at times in recent days, two different centuries. There was majority leader Bill Frist accusing the Democrats of trying "to kill, to defeat, to assassinate" President Bush's judicial nominees. To show what he thought of Frist, New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg carted in a poster of the diabolical Supreme Chancellor Palpatine of Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith. "In a far-off universe, in this film, this leader of the Senate breaks rules to give himself and his supporters more power," Lautenberg said. Then he quoted another character from the movie saying, "This is how liberty dies."

Should the Senate remain a place where a minority can have its say and even have a shot at winning a battle here and there?

One floor below, off a corridor adorned with 19th-century frescoes, two Senators who rarely vote the same way were doing things the old-fashioned way: putting their heads—and their combined 72 years of Senate experience—together in an effort to pull their less seasoned colleagues back from the brink. Virginia Republican John Warner and West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd had each brought a copy of the Constitution and were poring over Alexander Hamilton's "Federalist No. 66" to see if they could discern precisely what the Founding Fathers meant when they gave the Senate the power to advise the President on whom he appoints. The two ran into each other by chance the day before in the Russell Senate Office Building and Byrd all but begged Warner: "We've got to see what we can do."

What both men were trying to avoid was a vote, engineered by Frist and set for late May, that would change Senate procedures to make it impossible for Democrats to continue blocking Bush's judicial appointments by talking them to death. The Democrats have been winning by filibuster—which requires 60 votes to overcome—what they cannot accomplish on a simple up-or-down vote, since Republicans have 55 Senate seats to their 44.

Ostensibly, the fight is over a handful of long-blocked court nominations, but both sides admit that it is really about how the Senate will approach any upcoming vacancies on the Supreme Court, the first of which may open within weeks since ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist is expected to step down.

That a showdown was not more easily avoided reflects a generational shift under way in the Senate, and the fact that the once insular institution has become more reflective of the polarized political landscape around it. Moderates, of either party, are few. Traditionalists like Warner have increasingly been supplanted by a younger generation of Republican Senators, most of whom have arrived there by way of the more autocratic House.

At stake is the essence of the Senate: Should the institution maintain the unique culture that the framers of the Constitution envisioned for it, a place where a minority can have its say and even have a shot at winning a battle here and there? "The whole idea of the Senate is that it's different from the House. The passions of the moment can cool here," says North Dakota Democrat Kent Conrad, one of the Senators who was trying to come up with a deal to avert the vote on what has become known as the "nuclear option" to abolish the filibuster.

Judging from the tone in recent days, that unique culture of the Senate has already disappeared. For that matter, so has civility. "You know what?" said New Mexico Republican Pete Domenici. "I don't think it could get any worse." —from TIME, May 30, 2005

Questions

1. What procedure was Senate majority leader Bill Frist threatening to eliminate?

2. What do both sides acknowledge was the main issue at stake in this dispute?

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