It’s not a book you would expect a two-term senator to write.
But coming from former Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a centrist once dubbed the “last man standing” for holding out on the 2009 Obamacare bill, Death of the Senate, My Front Row Seat to the Demise of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body makes sense.
“It’s at least on life support at the moment,” Nelson said in an interview.
His is the latest and clearest warning that hyperpartisanship is killing the politics of compromise in Washington and America. He cited the tight battles over Supreme Court nominees and critical legislation over the past dozen years and how key senators shifted from workhorses to show horses.
“The Senate cannot keep going on like this,” he wrote in the book, published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.
Nelson, a former Nebraska governor who served in the Senate from 2001 until 2013, dated the end of bipartisanship to the birth of the Tea Party in the wake of former President Barack Obama’s massive economic bailout plan following the 2008 collapse. From then on, he watched as centrist members quit or shifted leftward or rightward and much more partisan lawmakers such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to town.
“Extremes can’t lead,” he said. “They can disturb, they can win, but they can’t lead the country.”
His book calls out those he feels caved to politics and cashed out their pragmatism, including Sens. Rand Paul and Susan Collins. He also nicks those more interested in presidential politics and glam, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders.
He recalled Sanders arriving in the Senate in 2007 and taking a desk next to him. Then, one day, Sanders moved to the back of the chamber.
“I just walked up to Bernie and asked what was so wrong with sitting down by me. Was it my voting record? He smiled sheepishly, and pointed up toward the C-SPAN cameras mounted in the gallery. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘the camera angle is better up here.’ The celebrity culture of the Senate was now firmly entrenched — with so many of my colleagues wanting to be noticed rather than accomplishing something out of the limelight,” Nelson wrote.
Imagine how much worse partisanship would have been if Sanders had won the presidency, not Joe Biden. “It would have been a floor fight all the time because Bernie would keep driving it as far to the left as he could because his car doesn’t have a right blinker,” Nelson said.
Now, as Congress faces its most divisive ever spending package, Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion social welfare expansion, Nelson said that Washington “tribalism” will be on full display, with just a handful of centrists calling the shots, among them Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
He suggested that the outcome will signal if bipartisanship has a chance or if the Senate really is dead.
Nelson is not the only voice of reason. Notably, former Senate GOP leader Trent Lott and former centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman have also cried out for unity. In an introduction for Nelson’s book, they wrote, “Most of what we achieved that we feel good about — then and now — was bipartisan. But the Senate doesn’t operate that way today. It is a dysfunctional and divided place utterly lacking in the joy and sense of shared purpose we knew. That’s why this book by our colleague Ben Nelson matters so deeply.”
Nelson remains somewhat hopeful. “I’d like to write a follow-up that said they found the gold ring,” he said. “I hope to get to write a sequel saying it’s alive, it’s growing and thriving.”
