The World Is Run By Those Who Show Up

Posted Thursday, June 10, 2010 by Pema Levy

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  • The World Is Run By Those Who Show Up

SOURCE: Flickr/Senator Mark Warner

The world is run by those who show up. Isn’t that how the saying goes? But the one place this isn’t true — no surprise — is the United States Senate.

I’ve spent some time on the Hill in the last few months. I’ve been to the Senate hearing on Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, and various Judiciary Committee hearings, including yesterday’s BP Hearing titled “The Risky Business of Big Oil.” What I say yesterday is what I have seen at all the others: Democrats.

Republicans don’t show up. Yesterday, Democratic Senators Leahy, Whitehouse, Feingold, Durbin, Kauffman, Klobuchar, and Franken and lone Republican Jeff Sessions discussed how current laws encouraged BP to cut corners. The goal of the hearing was to figure out how to change those laws to discourage recklessness in the future. One witness, Chris Jones, was the brother of one of 11 victims of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. No one wants a disaster like this one, everyone knows death is a tragedy, and these facts make the BP spill a fairly nonpartisan issue. Obviously, there is much disagreement over whether and how to change the laws, but Republicans didn’t even show up to have that debate.

In House and Senate hearings, Republicans sit on one side of the room and Democrats on the other. Their aides sit behind them. This makes it really easy to see who cares about the issue. Seeing a room filled on one half and empty on the other makes you think, not that Republicans have fundamental disagreements over financial regulation, for example, but that they just don’t care.

The situation reminds me of Obama’s words at the State of the Union in January: “And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that sixty votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.” The problem is that they can just say no. They can derail and thwart without ever showing up. Remember when Senate Republicans shut down all hearings to try and stop Health Care Reform?

With Senate rules giving so much power to the minority party, Republicans no longer have to show up. And they don’t have any interest in governing. We are getting stuff done, but Republicans have way more influence than their attendance should allow for. From where I sit, that’s what it looks like.

Pema Levy is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

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