BIDEN AND THE SENATE….Harry Reid got some attention over the weekend for telling the Las Vegas Sun that Joe Biden should stick to his end of Pennsylvania Avenue after the inauguration:
In a move to reassert Congressional independence at the start of the new presidential administration, the vice president will be barred from joining weekly internal Senate deliberations, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in an interview with the Las Vegas Sun….”He can come by once and a while, but he’s not going to sit in on our lunches,” Reid said. “He’s not a senator. He’s the vice president.”
….A spokeswoman for the vice-president-elect said “Biden had no intention of continuing the practice started by Vice President Cheney of regularly attending internal legislative branch meetings — he firmly believes in restoring the Office of the Vice President to its historical role.”
“He and Senator Reid see eye to eye on this,” said Biden’s spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander.
This is fine, and certainly in keeping with tradition. But here’s the funny thing: of all the things that Dick Cheney did to expand the role of the vice president, spending more time on Capitol Hill was one of the few that seemed pretty legitimate to me. The vice president is, after all, the president of the Senate, so the idea that he might spend a lot of time in the Senate cloakroom taking the temperature of presidential initiatives and just generally working to help round up votes — well, that doesn’t really sound like much of an abuse to me. The fact that Republican senators tended to knuckle under to Cheney’s strongarming says more about Republican senators than it does about whether the vice president is a good choice to liason with Congress.
Of course, all Reid has said is that Biden won’t be welcome at Democratic caucus meetings, so maybe we’re all reading more into this than is really there. That really was a bridge too far for Cheney, but there’s plenty the vice president can do outside of formal caucus meetings if he wants to. And offhand, I can’t think why he wouldn’t want to.
