It’s a refrain passed through history as successive generations bemoan the spite, division and dysfunction that defines their own political age.
But as Donald Trump’s presidency staggers to life, intense discord and fury are battering the capital.
Capitol Hill is still reverberating from its latest political earthquake — Tuesday night’s startling vote by GOP senators to shut down Democrat Elizabeth Warren and prevent her from speaking on the floor for a debate over the confirmation of Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general. In a controversy laced with race and gender, Warren was censured by the GOP majority for reading a letter written by Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., opposing Sessions’ nomination to a federal judgeship three decades ago.
The incident became an instant political firestorm in a capital still getting used to Trump’s young administration. But more fundamentally, the dispute underscored the profound — and personal — anger flowing through Washington in the aftermath of last year’s election and reflects a nation torn in half by bitter political divides.
With the Senate poisoned, the House in the grip of a zealous GOP majority and a new president who only knows one political strategy — all-out personal attack — there is every reason to think the animosity will continue to boil. Some seasoned Washington observers are starting to believe that for once, Beltway nastiness really has hit a historic nadir.
“It has very seldom been worse,” said Steven Smith, a congressional expert who wrote the 2014 book “The Senate Syndrome” about what he considers a period of rising parliamentary warfare in the chamber.
There have, of course, been dark moments in Washington’s legislative corridors, including a brutal beating of a Massachusetts senator in the Senate chamber several years before the Civil War after he delivered a blistering attack on slavery.
“But it’s hard to imagine a time when for actually year after year it has been so intensely partisan as it has been,” said Smith, a professor at Washington University, St Louis.
Trent Lott, the former Republican Senate majority leader, co-authored the book “Crisis Point” last year with former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that warned congressional polarization was making governing impossible. He cautioned against overreacting to the current turmoil while admitting the antagonism in Washington is at dispiriting levels.
“I have been in this city now approaching 50 years. I came here in 1968. When I got to Washington, there were machine guns on the steps of the Capitol,” Lott said in an interview.
During that tumultuous period, he said, the protests of the Vietnam War era and later the trauma of the Watergate scandal were moments when politics appeared to be careening off the rails.
But he added: “I must admit that it’s probably as rough right now as I have seen it in years in the Senate.”
Source: CNN
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