Bush must navigate partisan fault lines

If a re-elected George W. Bush, with an eye on his legacy, does indeed plan to offer disappointed Democrats an olive branch (with or without the olive), he may encounter an unexpected obstacle – the new, even more Republican Senate.

It’s to be expected that any concessions or accommodations the president might have in mind to soften up Democrats would meet resistance in the House of Representatives. Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, the GOP majority leader, runs things there, and he believes in shooting the wounded, especially Democrats.

The Senate has historically been a clubbier place. Democrats and Republicans are “colleagues” as well as political competitors. And the rough edges of ideology get sanded down in the Senate as they rarely do in the House. As a result, the hard-edge conservatism that dominates GOP policy under DeLay – and kills compromise – is less evident in the Senate.

At least that was the case before Tuesday. But the changes in the Senate lineup wrought by the electorate will give the place a sharply more conservative and ideological cast. And that could complicate any Bush bid for detente with Democrats – assuming that’s what he has in mind.

Five Southern Democrats leave the Senate in January via retirement, all to be replaced by far more conservative Republicans, including some from the GOP’s most extreme wing. A sixth new GOP addition, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who replaces a Republican, is perhaps the most faith-fueled member elected to the Senate in some time. (A seventh Republican, John Thune, who kicked out Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, also is a conservative but of the less torrid Great Plains type.)

A physician, Coburn has advocated that abortion doctors be given the death sentence. He makes DeLay look like a candidate for the Mother Teresa award.

He won’t be lonesome. The other new Senate GOP freshmen from the South – Richard Burr of North Carolina, Mel Martinez of Florida, Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Jim DeMint of South Carolina – all are proclaimed conservatives. None more so than DeMint.

In the course of a heated campaign, DeMint suggested no homosexuals be allowed to teach in public school. Later he ventured that unmarried women who become pregnant also should be banned from teaching in public classrooms.

Even for South Carolina, he sounded almost – how to put this? – DeMented. He also wants to abolish federal income, estate and payroll taxes. But, like his fellow freshmen, DeMint will have a voice and a vote on whomever Bush selects for the Supreme Court.

These newcomers won’t always mean more votes for the Bush agenda. Some of the Dixie Democrats they replace, like John Breaux of Louisiana and Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, occasionally would cross the aisle to support Bush. But their support was worth more than merely a vote; they lent a patina of bipartisanship to the Bush agenda. That’s been lost with their leaving.

Something else may be lost or at least diminished. With the help of these moderate Democrats, the GOP leadership in the Senate during Bush’s first term was in a reasonably good position to fend off or tone down the more extreme legislative efforts passed in the House, such as an energy bill crafted by DeLay’s Texas oil cronies.

Coburn, DeMint and Co. are more likely to emerge as Senate cheerleaders and allies of DeLay and his hard-right agenda. And that could complicate matters for Bush and Senate GOP leader Bill Frist.

The biggest immediate losers in the new Senate are likely to be its few Republican moderates, an endangered species. They’ve little power even now. But on close votes in the current Senate, where the GOP has a precarious 51-48 lead, with one left-leaning independent, they’ve had to be courted.

That may no longer be true in the new Senate, where Republicans will hold a larger 55-44-1 lead and a cushion that undercuts the leverage of the moderates.

With a re-elected Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican moderates are positioned to make a stand – maybe their last – against a further lurch to the far right when Bush, as expected, gets a chance to nominate his first justice to the Supreme Court.

Specter has signaled he’s opposed to any choice deemed too ideologically extreme. But the new GOP freshmen have made clear already their determination to push the Bush agenda as far as possible to the conservative extreme, especially court appointments. They view Tuesday’s victory as a vote for a right-wing revolution.

The challenge for Bush will be to safely navigate the fault line between his new and even more conservative base in Congress and the GOP moderates and Democrats needed to close the partisan gap he has helped create.