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Analysis: Roy Moore’s victory and Bob Corker’s retirement are fresh indicators of a Senate that’s coming apart

Former Alabama Chief Justice and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore speaks at a rally Monday, Sept. 25, 2017, in Fairhope, Ala. (Brynn Anderson / Associated Press)
By James Hohmann Washington Post

Roy Moore’s victory in Alabama and Bob Corker’s retirement in Tennessee on Tuesday sent shockwaves across the Capitol and shivers down the spines of institutionalists in both parties. The dual developments are fueling concerns about the long-term health of the world’s greatest deliberative body and heightening fears that the center may not hold in American politics.

President Donald Trump’s chosen candidate lost by 9 points in a GOP runoff. Luther Strange, who was appointed to replace Jeff Sessions when he became attorney general, is the first incumbent to lose a primary in five years.

Moore, who brandished a revolver during a rally on the eve of the runoff, has promised that he will never compromise. He has twice been suspended as the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. In 2003, Moore disobeyed a federal judge’s order to remove a statue of the 10 Commandments from the state judicial building. Then last year, after getting elected back to the court, he was removed again after urging state judges to defy the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage. Moore believes in the supremacy of the Bible over the Constitution, and he compares homosexuality to bestiality. Karl Rove has been calling him this year’s Todd Akin.

Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, announced he won’t seek a third term in 2018 after it became abundantly clear that he would face a well-funded primary challenge from his right.

– This is part of a bigger trend: There are fewer dealmakers interested in the finer points of governing. John McCain, a giant of the Senate, is battling brain cancer and said this week that his prognosis is not good.

Strange’s loss may prompt additional retirements and will undoubtedly embolden potential primary challengers next year. Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake has already been in trouble. Now Nevada Sen. Dean Heller and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, who was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee last cycle, both have fresh cause for concern.

A handful of the Senate’s most moderate Democrats might also lose next year. Even though Trump is unpopular nationally, Republicans might pick up seats in the 2018 midterms because of the nature of the map. Several Democratic incumbents are up for reelection in ruby red states, from West Virginia’s Joe Manchin to Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp and Missouri’s Claire McCaskill. If they lose, they’d almost certainly be replaced by much more ideologically rigid lawmakers who have less incentive to reach across the aisle.

– A similar dynamic is at play in the House, where several moderate Republicans have recently announced their retirements. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., lamented how hard it is to be “a member of the governing wing of the Republican Party” when he called it quits three weeks ago. “I’ve fought to fulfill the basic functions of government, like keeping the lights on and preventing default,” he explained. “Regrettably, that has not been easy given the disruptive outside influences that profit from increased polarization and ideological rigidity that leads to dysfunction, disorder and chaos.”

– Mitch McConnell was Tuesday’s biggest loser. His last-ditch effort to repeal Obamacare before the end of the month failed. Corker has been one of his most reliable allies. And outside groups tied to the Kentucky senator just spent about $10 million trying to beat Moore. The judge is openly antagonistic of McConnell’s leadership and, assuming he wins the general election, will undoubtedly become a pain in his caucus.

– For the first time since 2006, Republicans have full control of the federal government: both chambers of Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court. But GOP leaders have mostly been unable to capitalize on this immense power.

For seven years, Republican politicians promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. Tuesday, once again, they failed to follow through.

The conservative grassroots are understandably angry. They are so angry that $10 million from McConnell-aligned outside groups and rescue missions from both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence couldn’t pull Strange across the finish line. “He ran a spirited campaign centered around a dissatisfaction with the progress made in Washington,” McConnell said in a statement congratulating Moore Tuesday night. “I share that frustration…”

– This has happened before: Angry that the Senate is dysfunctional, voters elect new members who prefer to pour more sand into the gears than fix them. “Unburdened by a sense of responsibility or institutional tradition, Moore will have an opportunity to use the considerable powers that individual senators possess to mangle the process of government,” writes Stephen Stromberg, a Post editorial writer. “When votes will be needed to keep the government open, pass a budget or respond to a natural disaster, Moore is likely to join bomb-throwers such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in threatening counterproductive disruption if the country refuses to bend to his views. Once in the Senate, Moore is likely to remain there for many years, posing a unique challenge to whoever may run the chamber, Democrat or Republican, in the future.”

Strange tried to make that argument in the closing days of the campaign, but to no avail. He warned that the race had become “all about Mitch McConnell and the national agenda – power between competing groups.” “I actually had a conservative leader say, ‘Luther, this has nothing to do with you. This is all about Mitch McConnell,’” Strange said Saturday on Fox News, “which is what my grandmother used to say was a classic example of cutting off your nose to spite your face… . My opponent would be an obstructionist and not advance the president’s agenda.”

– In some ways, this is a redux of 2010. Republican dealmakers have been on the defensive since the tea party movement emerged. McConnell masterminded the strategy of total obstruction from the start of Barack Obama’s presidency. Now he’s the victim of “the party of no” mentality that he forced his conference to embrace. The well is poisoned.

Democrats, of course, do not have clean noses. Harry Reid’s legacy will forever be tainted by his myopic decision to go nuclear on lower-court judges in 2013. That gave McConnell a pretext to change the rules this spring to allow Neil Gorsuch to be confirmed to the Supreme Court with a simple majority.

Now blue slips, one of the most cherished prerogatives of senators in the minority, are in grave danger. Gorsuch has demonstrated with his early decisions that he is likely to be the most conservative justice on the high court. The next Democratic president will almost certainly nominate someone who is as far to the left as Gorsuch is to the right. The judiciary will continue to become more politicized, and the country will continue its descent into tribalism.

– The Senate has lost much of its luster over the past several years as it became an increasingly majoritarian body. Trump, who is not steeped in constitutional jurisprudence and does not seem to know the difference between articles and amendments, has pushed hard to blow up the Senate by changing the rules to pass legislation with a simple majority.

James Madison, the brains behind the Constitution, intended the Senate to be “anchor” of the federal government. Madison explained to Thomas Jefferson, who was abroad during the Constitutional Convention, that he designed the Senate to be a “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” of the American people and their more uncouth representatives in the House. George Washington believed the Senate’s purpose was to “cool” House legislation like a saucer cools hot tea. Remember, we didn’t even start directly electing senators until 1913.

– All this dysfunction plays into Trump’s hands. The president feels burned by Republican congressional leaders, who he feels made a strategic error by convincing him to focus on repealing Obamacare before overhauling the tax code. He is frustrated that he waded into Alabama’s Senate race and got behind a losing horse at McConnell’s request.

– This explains why so many senators in both parties mourned Corker’s departure as very bad news for the body.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called Corker “a friend” and “a fine, conscientious, and hard-working senator.” “His thoughtfulness and dedication to the job make him a model senator,” Schumer said. “We all regret him leaving.”

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., partnered with Corker to craft some of the financial rules that were included in the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill, and the two have spent the past few years pushing for an overhaul of the housing finance system in the face of heavy industry lobbying. “No matter the challenge, you can always count on Senator Corker to bring a reasoned, thoughtful approach, and to make decisions based not on partisanship but on what he believes is in the best interests of the American people,” the Democrat said. “I hope this is a wake-up call to all of us in the Senate that we need to recommit ourselves to creating an environment where reasonable, thoughtful people of both parties can come together to solve problems.”

Tennessee’s senior senator, Lamar Alexander, is a practitioner of consensus politics, like Corker, in the tradition of the great Howard Baker. He praised Corker Tuesday night for trying to tackle intractable problems like the federal debt when there wasn’t a political upside. “He says what he thinks, does what he believes is best for Tennesseans, and has helped lead his colleagues on complicated issues,” the Republican said. “His absence will leave a big hole in the United States Senate.”

– “Corker’s departure will be felt perhaps most acutely in the area of foreign relations,” The Post’s Paul Kane and Karoun Demirjian explain. “He established his chops early in his Senate career when lawmakers ratified the New START treaty, a strategic arms-control pact that regulates the size of the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles. Corker was one of the key GOP players who negotiated changes that made it possible to bring more conservative votes on board… . Corker also tackled nuclear security, joining with ranking Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin, Md., to design a bill that gave Congress an opportunity to weigh in on a multilateral deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions before it could go into effect. More recently, Corker has been the chief go-between for the White House and Congress when it comes to whether the president will certify Iran’s compliance with the deal next month.”

– The tensions between congressional Republicans and the White House were also certainly a factor in Corker’s thinking. Trump considered him for vice president last summer and secretary of state last fall. But the Tennessean has grown increasingly frustrated with the president’s inability to lead. He snapped after Trump responded to the violence in Charlottesville with false moral equivalency.

“The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful,” Corker told reporters last month.

Trump, who carried Tennessee by 26 points last November, fired back, tweeting:

“Strange statement by Bob Corker considering that he is constantly asking me whether or not he should run again in ‘18. Tennessee not happy!”

The two men met in the Oval Office the Friday before last, and Corker urged Trump to travel to Alabama to campaign for Strange. “You’ve got to go,” he told Trump. “We need you there.”

– To the winner goes the spoils?

Politics in a constitutional republic is not supposed to be a zero-sum game, but that’s increasingly becoming the mentality in the Senate. “Political fights from health care to climate change in the Trump era increasingly look like the election itself: a raw battle for resources and advantage between red and blue states,” The Post’s John Wagner explained in a smart piece over the weekend. “Since gaining control of Washington, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have pushed an array of policies that tend to punish states that voted Democratic in last year’s presidential election.”

The authors of the Cassidy-Graham health-care bill used the fact that blue states would lose federal funding compared to red states as a selling point to woo conservative senators. “Blue states would also take a disproportionate hit under a prominent provision in Trump’s tax plan,” John notes. “The vast majority of ‘sanctuary cities’ threatened with loss of federal funding are in Democratic-leaning states, as are the majority of young undocumented immigrants who could lose protection from deportation. The administration has signaled its intent to significantly scale back mass-transit funding traditionally favored by more liberal and urban states. And all but one of the handful of states where marijuana has been legalized for recreational use are blue. They are now watching nervously to see whether Trump’s Justice Department reverses course and launches a crackdown on those states and the District of Columbia.”

“Since taking office, Trump has held campaign-style rallies exclusively in states he won last year, and most of the events he has staged as part of his official travel have been in red states… . ‘What we’re witnessing is war between the red and the blue,’ said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ‘This is hardball, and it’s distinctive from what we’ve seen before.’”

– “McConnell’s inner circle did not even try to sugarcoat the failures and what they meant for Republicans heading into the 2018 midterm elections,” The Post’s Paul Kane reports. “On Tuesday, before the election results were official, most Senate Republicans remained staunchly behind McConnell – who, next June, is slated to become the longest serving GOP leader in Senate history. He has won eight straight leadership elections by acclamation, with no challenger, and none appears on the horizon in the near term. His colleagues say McConnell is willing to absorb the criticism that conservative activists fire at him, particularly if it keeps the friendly fire away from rank-and-file Republicans… . But one thing that could hamper McConnell’s long-term standing would be if he became a real albatross to his own incumbents in primary elections ahead. Two years ago this week John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, announced his resignation as House speaker because even close supporters feared voting for him because conservative activists had grown to despise Boehner.”

– The best thing going for McConnell is that there’s no obvious replacement for him.

James Hohmann writes the Daily 202 column for The Washington Post. Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve contributed to this report.