A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

The problem for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn't just President Bush. It's the Senate.

Pelosi sounded more apologetic than celebratory Friday when she announced with her Senate counterpart, Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democrats' list of accomplishments six months after they seized control of Capitol Hill and promised "a new direction" in Washington.

"I'm not happy with Congress, either," Pelosi, of San Francisco, conceded.

She pinned the blame on "the obstructionism of the Republicans in the United States Senate."

Immigration has joined Iraq, stem cell research, Medicare drug pricing, the 9/11 Commission's recommendations and other promises in the dustbin of the current Congress. Heading into a July Fourth recess after a bruising failure on immigration, Congress has a public approval rating in the mid-20s, lower than Bush's and no better than Republicans' ratings on the eve of their catastrophic election defeat in November, when the GOP lost control of the Senate and the House.

So little has been achieved that Reid threatened to hold the Senate in session during the August recess, the congressional equivalent of torture.

Pelosi acknowledged the rock-bottom poll numbers but argued that Congress has "never been popular." Just six months into her speakership, she was postponing many of her hopes to 2009, saying a new president could change things -- presumably assuming it wouldn't be a Republican.

"Congress is a big institution to turn around," she said. "A new president comes in, and he or she is given every opportunity, because we -- everybody wants the new president to succeed. A Congress comes in, and it's Congress. It's an institution that has not been popular."

Fortunately, the story just doesn't let Pelosi get away with her claims. You live by obstruction, you die by obstruction, after all:

Democrats, who once infuriated Republicans by using the extraordinary power of the Senate minority to block action, are feeling the brunt of an institutional constraint that is little understood by the public. No case was clearer than Iraq, where Democrats spent most of their first months in power confronting Bush by attaching withdrawal conditions to war funding, only to back down in the end after a veto confrontation.

"The Republicans are doing what the Democrats did," said Julian Zelizer, a history and public affairs scholar at Boston University. "They're using the power of the Senate filibuster, and the power in the House when you have narrow majorities, to make a do-nothing Congress -- even when there's a lot of issues on the table, even when there's a lot of interest in accomplishing things."

The Democrats in their years in the minority made a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority -- rather than a 51-vote simple majority -- the threshold needed to pass any legislation in the Senate. Democrats routinely blocked all but the most noncontroversial bills. They created a Senate crisis in 2005 by filibustering Bush's judicial nominees, provoking Republican leaders to threaten to do away with the filibuster. That showdown was averted only by the intervention of a dozen moderates in both parties.

Republicans complained at the time, but many of them are happy now. They are wielding the filibuster weapon freely in a Senate where Democrats hold 49 seats and where their majority comes from the support of two senators who are independents. And one of the Democrats, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, has been sidelined for months by a stroke.

And of course, Democrats never paid any price whatsoever for their obstructionism. Republicans have duly noted the lesson. The Democrats can't complain all too effectively that their own tactics are now being used against them.

But they'll try. Oh, rest assured that they will try. In the end, however, the American electorate ends up blaming gridlock in Congress on those who are responsible for governing Congress. If the Republicans are able to recruit some effective candidates, put forward a small-government agenda and blame the Democrats for a "do-nothing" session, their message may very well find some resonance with the voters--especially if it ties in well with the message propagated by the eventual Republican Presidential nominee.