With the passing of Teddy Kennedy, many are asking who will step up and replace him. It’s a good question. One thing we know for sure is that the culture of the Senate is changing, and changing rapidly. We already know for a certainty that 10% of the Senate will not be back in 2011. The following ten senators are not running for relection.
Kit Bond of Missouri
Sam Brownback of Kansas
Jim Bunning of Kentucky
Roland Burris of Illinois
Judd Gregg of New Hampshire
Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas
Ted Kaufman of Delaware
Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts
Mel Martinez of Florida
George Voinovich of Ohio
There are also some members who may be voted out of office in the 2010 election. According to Nate Silver the most vulnerable incumbents are:
Chris Dodd of Connecticut
Harry Reid of Nevada
Michael Bennet of Colorado
Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania
Richard Burr of North Carolina
Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas
David Vitter of Louisiana
The odds are against any of those incumbents losing, but I’d be surprised if they all survive. The next session of Congress will probably see 10-12% turnover in the Senate. As things stand today, twenty-four senators first took their oath of office in 2007 or later. Two of the twenty-four (Burris and Kaufman) are retiring. But if we add the 10-12 new members that will enter the chamber in 2011 to the twenty-two relatively new members sworn in since 2007, we get about a third of the senate being made up of members who joined after the GOP’s meltdown in 2006.
Some may wonder how the partisan makeup of the chamber will change. But regardless of whether the Dems hold, lose, or increase their numbers, we know that it will have a lot of new blood. If all the incumbents are reelected, the Senate will still only have 54 members who voted on the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq (including 15 of the 23 that voted against it).
The big question is: what does it mean to have such a large turnover for the culture of the Senate? These new members won their seats in a horribly polarized environment. They won their seats with the assistance of a newly assertive grassroots (on the Democratic side) or on the platform of Bush dead-enderism and the Politics of Palin. Cross-aisle cooperation in the Senate is at an all-time low. Is there even a place for Teddy Kennedy’s style of deal-making anymore?
Who could break this impasse?