Looming retirements could smooth rough votes for House Democrats

There’s a silver lining for House Democratic leaders in the growing list of retirements in their caucus — it could make it easier to round up votes for contentious bills like healthcare.
 
Four centrist Democratic House members are retiring this year without seeking higher office. More are expected, and analysts see the number of departures as omens of the Democrats’ fortunes in the November election.

{mosads}One of the four, Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), took one for the team last week. He switched his vote after time ran out to pass a short-term increase in the debt limit. Baird had announced his retirement earlier this month.
 
The other three — Reps. Bart Gordon (Tenn.), Dennis Moore (Kan.) and John Tanner (Tenn.) — also voted to increase the debt limit. That was surprising as they’re all Blue Dog Democrats, dedicated to fighting deficit spending.
 
Tanner was particularly surprising. He’s a Blue Dog founder who’d bucked his party leadership in the 1990s to oppose increases in the debt limit. Tanner called a 2002 increase in the debt limit a “generational mugging.”
 
Tanner didn’t go easily, though. He castigated both parties on the floor for turning a surplus in 2000 to a $12 trillion deficit today. But he took particular aim at former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, enacted despite increasing spending on government programs and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
The increase in borrowing authority is expected to cover things for two months. Tanner said Congress should use that time to enact fiscal reforms, like embedding “pay-as-you-go” rules in law and establishing an entitlement commission.
 
“What we have around here is too many Republican Americans or too many Democratic Americans instead of American Democrats and American Republicans,” Tanner said.
 
Republican and Democratic leadership aides viewed the retirees’ votes on the debt limit as a way to protect fellow centrists members worried about the political liability of voting to increase the debt.
 
“It gives them four automatic votes that they wouldn’t normally get,” said a Republican aide.
 
The aide said Republican Reps. Mike Ferguson and Jim Saxton, both from New Jersey, became much more reliable votes for GOP leadership after announcing their retirements in the last Congress.
 
More Republicans than Democrats have announced plans to retire. But all 12 retiring Republicans are seeking higher office. Of the 11 Democrats to announce thus far, only seven will still plead their case to voters next year.
 
Retiring lawmakers are generally more likely to support their party and take difficult but “responsible” votes, like raising the debt limit to avoid default, said Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar with the Brookings Institution. He said scholars who have studied voting behavior have found a “modest difference” in voting patterns.
 
Centrist Democratic retirements could help pass a healthcare overhaul, Mann said, but probably not climate change legislation.
 
“The best option for Democrats is to have the health bill pass, but be able to say they voted against it,” Mann said. “They feel vulnerable in their districts, but if they’re not running again, they can provide a little cover to other members.”
 
That’s less likely to happen on climate change, he said, which is bogged down in the Senate and not seen as being as high a priority as healthcare.
 
But there won’t be as many difficult votes next year. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said she is in “campaign mode.” Privately, she has been telling Democratic members she would not bring controversial bills, such as immigration reform and “card-check,” to the House floor unless the Senate passes them first.
 
Still healthcare looms. It passed out of the House by a three-vote margin, and only after some significant horse-trading. Of the four Democratic retirees not seeking higher office, three voted against it. Only Moore voted for it.
 
And there are other tough calls to be made on Afghanistan, spending and the economy.
 
The last standalone vote to raise the debt limit was in 2004, when all House Democrats united against it. Since then, increases have been tucked in other bills, such as annual budgets, the stimulus bill and the Wall Street bailout.