Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 8

Page A8 Decatur, Illinois, September 15, 1982 Seeate clliaini ge Opinion- Wayne E. Settle Publisher Thomas L. Blount Editor Richard D. Brautigam Managing Editor Richard H. Icen Opinion Page Editor Community gives way to individualism MR CENTRAL ILLINOIS I- ir hs I i irMWis Opinions are expressions Pepper spices IT'S NOT the dirtiest political trick we've ever heard.

But we can't quite accept press aide Bill Wilson's plea of innocence either. Wilson works for Rep. Paul Findley, the Pittsfield Republican who has long served west central Illinoisans in the Congress. This year, his district has been recarved and enlarged to include lots of new territory to the east, including Decatur and the southern half roughly of Macon Claude Pepper County. Findley probably has a better than even chance of staying in Congress despite a strong challenge from democrat Richard Durbin.

But Findley is taking few chances. Overconfident candidates often have awakened losers the day after the balloting. And Durbin is a hard worker. Recently, he brought in Rep. Claude Pepper the salty 82-year-old Florida Democrat who- is seen as senior citizens' champion in Congress to bolster his campaign.

It was probably a good, move. There are many elderly voters in the new 20th District. Findley, for one, must have seen it as a good move. He admits trying to dissuade Pepper from coming. "Pepper and Findley have cooperated on bipartisan legislation in the past.

In fact, Findley has a letter Pepper wrote two years ago praising the Illinoisan for leadership instrumental in achieving legislation which ad of the Editorial Board. up campaign vanced significantly the employment rights of citizens over 65." And, therein lies the wag of this tale: Shortly after Pepper's Illinois visit-in Durbin's behalf, a Findley newsletter (the postage paid by us taxpayers, incidentally) appeared in mail boxes of area seniors showing Pepper and Findley in a classic "winners" pose on the Capitol steps. The accompanying article quoted the two-year-old thank you letter in the same sentence in which Pepper's Illinois trip was mentioned. Durbin's name was left out altogether. It sounded as if Democrat Pepper had come to Illinois specifically to campaign for Republican Findley.

Wilson, who wrote the newsletter item, professed innocence, although he admitted one could get that impression from the construction of the sentence. Frankly, Bill, we find that one a lit-tle hard to swallow. It may not be in the same league with Donald Se-gretti's legendary skulduggery in Paul Findley Richard Nixon's behalf, and except in an election year Pepper probably does appreciate Paul Findley's help on legislation he supports but, all the same, it wasn't fair to Durbin. Of course, no one said politics has to be fair. Ambassador Duke may have a hard time adjusting to government bought and paid for by PAC money or college students more concerned with mastering systems and climbing the corporate ladder than with attacking "the system" and getting high on drugs.

Trudeau plans to resurrect the comic strip in the fall of 1984. In the interim, his 700 subscribers will have to find something to fill in. Whether his fans will still feel loyalty to the characters after they have completed growing upr whether there will be sufficient demand for publishers to drop an-. other strip to make room for the new Doonesbury, are not unknown. If it doesn't work, Doonesbury will become a footnote in the history of cartooning.

At age 14, he seems too young to die. But, as Trudeau apparently has discover ed, time stands still for no one not even a cartoon character. Trudeau's break's risky Most of the senators of the 1950s arrived in Washington each January on the train. Nine months later, they left on the train. In between, they stayed in Washington, making no weekend trips home because there were no jet planes to get them there and back that fast.

If today's senators do not socialize, it is largely because they are not in Washington a great deal. Warren B. Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican serving his first year in the Senate in 1981, went home 38 weekends out of 52. If he exceeds the average, it probably is not by very much. The personal contact that came naturally to old-time senators, tied to Washington nine months of the year, may have been the glue out of which a working institution was made.

When Minority Leader Robert C. Byrd asked the 46 other Democrats to a weekend retreat in West Virginia last fall and got more than 40 of them to come, it was seen as a symbol of party unity. But it was also a fact of the contemporary Senate that its members had to set aside time in West Virginia to talk to each other. Even when senators are in town, staffs do much of the work that used to be done by the membership. "Very often," says Sen.

David L. Boren, the Oklahoma Democrat, "I will call a senator on an issue, and he won't know anything about it. He'll ask me to get someone on my staff to call someone on his staff. It shuts off personal contact between senators." More hostility Many members believe this semi-stranger quality of Senate life has an unpleasant by-product an increase in hostility and open confrontation on the floor. It is impossible to measure the change in Senate manners over time, but there is a widespread feeling that old-fashioned Senate courtesy is on the decline.

By ALAN EHRENHALT 4 Congressional Quarterly WASHINGTON A surprising number of senators can recall a photograph, taken in 1954, of three Senate Democrats in an informal baseball game. Henry M. Jackson is the batter, John F. Kennedy is catching, and Mike Mansfield is umpiring behind the plate. Jackson and Mansfield are wearing T-shirts; Kennedy is in a sport shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

That picture is relevant to present-day senators because it seems to stand for a Senate that has disappeared in the years since then one whose members knew each other well, worked and played together and thought of politics as a team game. Today Senate, many oi its own members complain, is nothing like that. It is seen from within as a place where there is little time to think, close personal, relationships are rare, and individual rights, not community feeling, is the most precious commodity. Serious policy implications exist for a Senate where the individual is in control. The more individuals have to be personally satisfied for a policy to be enacted, the more likely it is that there will be none.

or that what emerges will be the lowest common denominator. 1 he more senators insist on entering a debate to offer a parochial point of view, the less chance the institution has to deliberate about what it is doing for the country in the long run. The current Senate has talked almost endlessly about balancing the budget and making the Social Security system solvent, to cite two current examples. But while indi vidual senators have been able to use these issues to keep themselves politically secure at home, the nation is no closer to resolving either question. The phrase "deliberative bodv is one that Majority Leader Howard H.

Baker Jr. of Tennessee has used repeatedly in his search for ways to equip the Senate to deal more effectively with the issues of the 1980s. As a start. Baker has appointed two recently retired members. Republican James B.

Pearson of Kansas and Democrat Abraham Ri-bicoff of Connecticut, to spenda year looking into the ways the Sen ate does its business. Pearson is convinced the most serious problems of the Senate are separate from the question of whether Democrats or Republicans are in control. "Partisanship has very little to do with it," he says. "The institution goes on its way no matter who is in charge. We need to find a way for these people to read and study and think and deliberate.

The Senate is an absolute squirrel's cage." Mirror of society It is not entirely clear, however, that the Senate's problems can be solved within the chamber. Much of what has happened to the Senate simply mirrors the larger changes in American society during the past generation. It is an open question whether the Senate of a generation ago was the cocoon of friendship that nostalgic old-timers occasionally picture. But nearly everyone believes day-to-day Senate life has been changing in a way that makes true community very difficult to achieve. Transient Congressional Quarterly The 97th Congress may riot be the best one from which to draw permanent conclusions about Senate life.

The new Republican majority has disrupted a quarter century of Democratic control, per-" haps changing the style of the place as well. The unusual number of incumbent defeats in 1978 and 1980 has meant an institution dominated by junior members. At the moment, 55 senators are in their first term. Some of the current problems are made worse by a tran-, sient atmosphere that itself could prove temporary. Still, nearly all of those interviewed see the current institutional situation as an extension of trouble that developed in 1970s.

"When you have this increasing fragmentation," says David Boren of Oklahoma, "and. you add to that rules which allow the individual to exploit that fragmentation, you've got problems." An extraordinary amount of time in the current Senate has been taken up by individuals, or pairs of competing individuals pushing the system to see how far it caa go without collapsing. New obstructionism The new obstructionism comes from both right and left and goes beyond budget issues to virtually anything the Senate takes up that provokes strong feelings. Lowell P. Weicker held off action on an anti-busing bill for eight months, filing a total of 604 amendments to the legislation, before giving up Feb.

25 with the vow that "this bill will not become law." running for re-election the day they arrive. It's unbelievable." Every 'member knows the campaign mortality rate of senators in the past few years. Nine incumbents were beaten in 1976, 10 in 1978 and 13 in 1980. when a senator's chance of re-election was only marginally better than 50-50. This year may be different, but few of those running want to bet on that.

Senators now perform most of the constituent services House members perform to keep themselves afloat: the political difference between the two jobs is disappearing. There may not have been much more statesmanship 30 years ago, but there was considerably more political freedom of action. The most powerful senators Democrats such as Richard B. Russell of Georgia and Harry F. Byrd Sr.

of Virginia and Republicans such as Styles Bridges of New Hampshire had safe seats representing one-party states. The possibility that a particular action in the Senate could hurt them at home was remote. No more teamwork "There not only was a social camaraderie in the old davs." savs Bumpers, "there was a teamwork. Occasionally they could vote to accommodate a friend in ways that would be politically lethal now. That's one reason party discipline has broken down.

A system in which senators can quietly accommodate each other is one in which they can also put aside personal political needs and the short-term interests of their states. Few of today's senators can or at least few think they can. The kinds of public scrutiny to which the Senate has been subject ed in recent years are familiar. Political action committees, in creased roll-call voting and open meetings are onlv a few of them. Most senators seem to agree that all these developments have made negotiation and political self-sacri fice infinitely more difficult.

Open meetings are singled out most often. "There was an enormous give-and-take," Pearson says of the old closed-door committee system. "People could change their minds as a result oi hard bargain ing and deliberation. But nobody wants to admit in public that he was wrong." the end of the session and in changes that are made in response to a filibuster threat before bills even reach the floor. Rights question The individual rights problem in the Senate goes beyond filibusters.

At the borders, the difference be tween obstructionism and free ex pression is hard to define. Dozens of senators who do not consider themselves obstructionists still guard their right to take up large blocks of time on issues of importance to them. The Senate has always been far less willing than the House to, defer to expert members on issues. Part of the tradition of free expres sion has been that any member is competent to debate a measure and to try to amend it. Today, any major bill presents a free-for-all, with little distinction between those who have worked on a subject in committee and those starting fresh on the floor.

"It's every man for himself," says retired Sen. James B. Pear son. "Every senator is a baron. He has his own principality.

Once you adopt that as a means of doing business, it hard to establish any cohesion. Pearson is careful to insist" that no quick tinkering with any rule is likely to accomplish very much. "The problems of the Senate have to do with its people, he says. "It's the character and motivation and attitudes of the people there. There aren't any recommendations that will change that.

THERE WILL be another change in the Herald Review's comics page after the first of the year. This one, like it or not, we have no control over. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau is taking a sabbatical from his popular and controversial Doonesbury strip, which appears both daily and Sunday in the Herald Review. Both he and his cast of characters need a break, he says. They are locked in a timejwarp, Trudeau told an interviewer, their college life spanning from the anti-Vietnam protest years to the preppy renaisance.

"The trip from draft beer and mixers to cocaine and herpes is a long one," he said. "It's time they got a start on it." Some Herald Review readers will welcome the disappearance of Doonesbury, with its leftward-leaning viewpoint and barbed attacks on presidents, politicians, television newsmen and the Moral Majority. Others will feel something's missing when they finish the Sunday funnies. Trudeau is taking some big risks. He sounds as if he plans to' make substantive changes in both the strip and its characters.

Fans may not accept Zonker Harris graduated and coping with the problems of a 9-to-5 job. And what of Ambassador Duke, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the self-annointed "gonzo" journalist of the Hippie generation? Ambassador Duke "We have pairs of senators now," jokes Dale Bumpers. who came in 1975, "who have to have bulletproof vests when they deal with each other." Virtually every major bill considered in the Senate this Congress has brought a new confrontation.

When Ohio Democrat Howard M. Metzenbaum insisted on filibustering a water rights bill July 16. despite a unanimous consent agreement to vote that afternoon. Republican Whip Ted Stevens of Alaska accused him of "violating one of-the basic rules of the Senate, which is to be a gentleman." It is too much to blame all of the perceived isolation and tactics of confrontation on the jet plane. The senators of a generation ago were not just physically separated from their constituents most of the year they were insulated from the public scrutiny that now seems to govern members' lives every day they are in office.

And all this constituent pressure, from constituencies with vastly different demands, pulls senators apart. "Every organization in America that has an interest in legislation and that's all of them -can get here in four hours." complains Gaylord-Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat who lost his bid for a fourth term in 1980. "Some days, I had somebody from the state in my office every 15 minutes. Seventy-five percent of my time, or maybe 80 percent, was spent on non-legislative The floor is being used as an instrument of political campaigning far more than it ever has before. People seem to expect that." One might dismiss Nelson's views as the disappointment of a defeated incumbent if they weren't echoed by members from both parties who came in about the time he was going out.

"The Senate is on a hair-trigger," says Republican John C. Danforth of Missouri. "There's an absence of a long view. People are session. I can slow down a markup or find some tactic to keep a bill off the floor," Garn said afterward, "I'll do it.

I don't particularly loyalty to tradition." GOP Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Gam's Utah colleague, blocked labor law revision, a AFL-CIO priority, with a filibuster against it in 1977, his first year. "The filibuster rule," he argued, "is the only way the majority of the people, who are represented by a minority of the Senate, can be heard." Today, Garn and Hatch both are in the Republican majority and are major committee chairmen. Now they face obstructionist threats of their own: Hatch has to deal with a rebellious liberal Republican bloc on his LatJor Committee, and Garn has encountered stubborn resist-.

ance to his efforts to promote a bank deregulation bill. But the records of senators such as Garn and Hatch make it difficult for them to force much discipline out of colleagues who do not want to cooperate. The accession to power of senators without old-fashioned Senate loyalties makes the newest generation that much more difficult to control. Some of the most serious consequences of current SenateNobstruc-tionism are not apparent in the short run. The filibuster always is broken, often by Majority Leader Howard H.

Baker decision to force an all-night session, and the legislation almost always seems to get passed. The price is paid in quiet decisions not to take up major issues because time runs out on them at atmosphere thwarts control A few months after Weicker ended his filibuster, Republican Sen. John P. East of North Carolina launched one from the other direction, against renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which he said discriminated against Southern states. East's filibuster raised the level of Senate concern about individual obstruction because, unlike most such efforts, it was waged on a bill that had only a handful of opponents.

There was no doubt that the necessary 60 votes existed to call for an end to debate on the issue. Missouri's John Danforth left his officeduring that debate to make an uncharacteristically angry response to East on the floor and to suggest some consequences. "In addition to the Voting Rights Act," Danforth said, "something else is involved before the Senate, and what else is involved is whether this body can be held up by this kind of Filibuster changes The older Southern Democrats, however adamant they may have been about the filibuster, used it almost exclusively on a single issue about which they had the strongest feelings. Some current filibusters are like-that, but others seem to be waged over issues of a far more transient In the past decade, the Senate developed a militant New Right bloc who felt obstruction was not only a right but a duty. In 1976, his second year in the Senate, Utah Republican Jake Garn killed an extension of the Clean Air Act by filibustering it on the last day of the 1- "peak, peat Yco think.

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