The strange Grassley situation

During a workout, eyes on the screen, I watched Chuck Grassley talking with some of his Iowa constituents. I had a human rather than political reaction -- the kind you have when you're too unfocused to even remember the senator's name or what the issue is. 

Here was a man who looked ill, detached, possibly exhausted. Add in his political power and this very human situation turns into a frightening reminder that the lives of many Americans are affected by a senator too tired or befuddled and angry to do his job.

Reading Ezra Klein's reaction to what's happening in the Senate's Finance Committee, I could hardly disagree with how he saw the politics surrounding the mystery of Senator Grassley and the odd tenacity of his co-chair, Max Baucus.  They may be friends but, Klein reminds us, Grassley hasn't gone along with Baucus in health care votes for a long time.  Right now he appears to be hanging Baucus out to dry.

 ... There's no plausible endgame here. Chuck Grassley can't, and won't, support the final bill. He has said as much. Baucus saw him defect on stimulus, and Baucus, in recent years, has repeatedly had to abandon Grassley on much less controversial health-care reforms than this one.

Yet Baucus has put himself completely on the line to preserve Grassley's role in the process. He's taking an enormous amount of fire for prizing bipartisanship over speed. He's increasingly loathed by liberals and facing an enormous amount of anger from the other members of his committee. There's even talk of reforms meant to deprive him of his chairmanship. And Grassley, for his part, is raging against the bill in public and doing nothing to provide cover for his friend or inspire confidence in the process.

I want to offer a clean conclusion here. I want a neat theory of what the Gang of Six* is attempting, or how they see this playing out. But I don't have one. It's the single part of the process I really and truly do not understand.

So the rumors that Baucus is under fire within the Senate are true. It would take almost a declaration of war to get Baucus out of the leadership of the most powerful committee.  Harry Reid could do it but no one seems to think he will.  Something has to be done -- not just because of the health care issue but because of the Baucus-Grassley problem and what it says about the make-up of the Senate.  Their odd failures to provide leadership show us how weak and corrupt -- not to say demented -- this Senate, as a whole, may be.  Probably is.
_____

*Baucus, Grassley, Conrad, Bingaman, Snowe and Enzi