Capitol Hill is no stranger to curse words, with former Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson’s profanity-laced “persuasion” sessions having long occupied a prominent place in congressional lore. But LBJ, who revered the traditions of the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” would be embarrassed by Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, who delighted this week in using the six-letter adjective for excrement during official Senate proceedings. Levin pointedly repeated the word 13 times during this week’s Senate inquisition of a half dozen Goldman Sachs executives. Levin drew inspiration from the fact the word had been used in an internal e-mail from a division head to subordinate Daniel Sparks concerning a mortgage package sold by the Wall Street firm before the economic meltdown of 2008.
But Levin, who is chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on governmental investigations, wasn’t just quoting somebody else, he used the word over and over, like the 4-year-old who keeps repeating something naughty until an adult corrects him. Clearly, Levin wasn’t listening as a child when his mother explained that profanity is most often heard from people who lack either the intellectual capacity or energy to choose more suitable language. Perhaps he would listen now to a well-deserved censure by his Senate colleagues.
Levin is not alone in demeaning the upper chamber. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed determined this week to sink the leadership standards governing his position to new lows. Perhaps it’s because of the pressures of waging an increasingly desperate re-election effort back home, while simultaneously serving as the Senate frontman for President Obama’s comprehensively unpopular agenda. Whatever the reason, Reid’s studied mendacity has been on crude display during the debate on the Obama-Dodd financial reform bill. It wasn’t enough that Reid hypocritically accused Senate Republicans of wanting the financial reform measure “worked out beforehand behind closed doors and out of view from the public.” He went so far as to claim the GOPers were seeking to do something “that’s unprecedented in the more than 200 years we’ve been a Senate.” This is the same Harry Reid who, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wrote Obama’s stimulus and health care reform bills behind closed doors and out of public view.
Amazingly, Reid found a way to surpass himself, further blasting Republicans for “wanting to do something about this bill before it gets on the floor,” and calling that effort “really anti-Senate and anti-American.” So it’s OK for Democrats to write legislation behind closed doors but un-American when Republicans try to suggest improvements? If there is ever to be a restoration of civility in American politics, the adults in the Democratic Party ought to tell Reid and Levin to clean up their acts.
