During 18 years in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington
Democrat, has been in the minority party. She’s been in the majority
party. She’s seen fierce debate on a host of issues.
But the anger and divisiveness she has witnessed this election year —
inside the Senate and out — is new and disturbing, she said Friday in
an interview with The Columbian’s editorial board.
That divisiveness flared in eastern Washington last Saturday when the
organizer of a tea party rally in Clarkston drew applause from a crowd
of 500 for saying Murray should be hanged. The comment was recorded by a
Lewiston, Idaho, TV station.
“I’ve been around for a long time, and I’ve seen anger come from a
lot of places,” Murray said. “You can’t dismiss it.”
“What worries me about inflammatory language is, it drives us further
apart.”
Murray placed much of the blame for voter frustration on the
recession and stubborn high unemployment. It’s obvious, she said, that
Americans are reeling from the economic downturn and insecure over the
loss of jobs and retirement savings.
“Whenever people feel the ground shift, it’s a hard time to be in
elected office,” she said. “People have only one place to express
themselves,” and that’s with their elected officials, she said.
Washington’s senior senator, who is running for a fourth term this
year, is a member of the Senate leadership. She chairs the subcommittee
that writes the federal transportation budget.
Five Republicans, including state Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, have
launched campaigns to unseat her.
Murray professes to be too busy to worry about her own political
future.
“I have to do my job. I have to do it well. I have to make people
feel secure, and the politics will follow.”
But getting things done in the U.S. Senate is harder than ever
before, Murray said. That’s because minority Republicans insist on
invoking cloture — a parliamentary maneuver that requires 60 votes to
end debate and bring a matter to a vote — on even the most routine
matters, she said.
The tactic of blocking a bill from coming to a vote on the Senate
floor is known as a filibuster.
With the election to the Senate of Massachusetts Republican Scott
Brown, the Democratic caucus lost its filibuster-resistant 60-vote
majority. That will make it even more difficult for Democrats to pass
legislation.
“The filibuster has been used disrespectfully,” Murray said. In
effect, she said, it is bringing important Senate business to a halt.
“The problem we have today in the Senate is time on the floor,” she
said. “We can’t get our budget bills out, we can’t get our
appropriations bills out.”
It wasn’t always this way, Murray said.
“We used to have unanimous consent” for approval of presidential
appointments and other straightforward votes, she said. “But we have a
couple of members who don’t want to approve anything by unanimous
consent.”
Changing the filibuster rule requires a two-thirds majority of the
Senate. That’s not going to happen, Murray said.
“I believe there is a group of senators who are trying to come up
with a solution. Unfortunately, they are all Democrats,” she said.
But the Democratic and Republican majority leaders have it within
their power to break the stalemate, she added.
“If Sen. (Harry) Reid and Sen. (Mitch) McConnell sat down and said,
‘We’re going to fix it,’ it would happen.”
– The Columbian
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