Ready To Mix It Up

By DOUGLAS WALLER

By the end of last year, dispirited Democrats in the Senate "were ready to drink hemlock," as a top aide put it. Republicans had given President Bush a major boost by passing his Medicare-reform and prescription-drug bill. Minority leader Tom Daschle was under fire for caving in to the hardball parliamentary tactics used by the Republicans to steamroller Democratic objections.

But Bush's slipping poll numbers, combined with large turnouts of angry Democratic voters in the presidential primaries, seem to have emboldened and united the Senate Democrats. In a private meeting with Senators on Jan. 20, Daschle warned it was time to "put the past behind us. If we don't hang together, we'll hang separately." He has hired Phil Schiliro, an aggressive and seasoned House Democratic operative, to craft a more combative legislative strategy. Instead of going along with bipartisan compromises, the plan is to introduce more "message" legislation to rally the Democrats' base and force Republicans into unpopular votes. Senator Ted Kennedy plans to introduce a bill next week to raise the minimum wage to $7 an hour, and he plans to attach it to the next measure the Republicans want to push through the Senate. Democrats last week pounced on N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, who said the outsourcing of U.S. jobs was "a good thing" in the long run; bills were quickly introduced to repudiate him and require firms to give employees three months' notice before they are laid off because of jobs being moved abroad.

Daschle will also be more aggressive in using parliamentary maneuvers to block House-Senate conferences if they exclude Democrats from key decisions, as happened on the Medicare legislation. At the same time, Daschle plans to impose more party discipline. Democrats who supported the Republican Medicare bill, for example, will not be given seats on the Senate Finance Committee, which writes health-care legislation, when the next vacancies occur.

--By Douglas Waller