Gangstalking Senate

“Why the Senate likes to ‘gang’ around those divisive issues

By David A. Fahrenthold, Published: May 6

The U.S. Senate has a gang problem.

To tackle immigration, senators formed a Gang of 12. On energy policy, they tried a Gang of 10 ( which became a Gang of 20). Now, under pressure to lower the national debt, Congress is waiting for a bipartisan plan from a Gang of Six.

Those are the gangs. This is the problem: Often, they don’t work.

The gangs of 12, 10 and 20 all failed. So did the Senate’s last Gang of Six , which sought bipartisan agreement on health care in 2009.

These informal groups are intended to create breakthroughs, in a Senate paralyzed by odd rules and polarized parties. But they usually fizzle out, because the Senate is paralyzed by odd rules and polarized parties.

This week, the newest gang was already dragging its feet. So the Senate may be on the verge of re-learning a lesson that it never seems to remember.

“It’s soothing to believe that these seemingly intractable problems can be at least addressed by people of goodwill, working together” in gangs, said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University.

“Even though they can’t be,” he said.

The current Gang of Six — three Republicans and three Democrats — has been working together for months. Its goal is to to forge a compromise on the most divisive issue in today’s Congress: how to reduce the deficit and the ballooning national debt.

On Thursday, gang member Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Budget Committee, said the group’s talks remain on hiatus while another member, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), is out of town tending to a family emergency.

Conrad is one of the Hill’s most committed gang members. He participated in the Gangs of 10 and 20, as well as the Gang of Six on health care. But he said he was “quite optimistic” that this group could succeed where others had faltered.

“There have been mixed results, that’s for sure,” he said in a telephone interview. But Conrad said the circumstances demanded forming a new gang (Conrad calls them “groups”). He said the debt demanded a real solution — and in a divided Congress, a solution could only come from a bipartisan agreement.

“There’s a growing consensus that failure is not an option,” Conrad said.

While his group works, House Republicans and President Obama have already proposed their own separate budgets, and Vice President Biden is leading another bipartisan work group of legislators.

Gangs like this one are a product of the Senate’s independent ethos. The House functions like two choirs: party leaders pick the music, and their members generally line up and sing. The Senate, on the other hand, acts more like 100 soloists, each feeling free to make his own alliances.

A “gang” is usually an alliance focused on a specific issue, which forms outside the Senate’s party structures. The media nickname for these groups is new, taken from the “Gang of Four” that helped rule China in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the idea is an old one. In 1860, for instance, a bipartisan “Committee of 13” senators set out to find a compromise that would stave off the Civil War.”