Thursday, March 18, 2010
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
In some ways, Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin has accomplished every senator’s dream without the chores of fundraising and vote-seeking that mark the lawmakers’ lives in elective politics.
Frumin doesn’t have to talk to a single voter, raise a dime or deal with reporters, but he wields as much power over the fate of health-care reform as President Barack Obama or any of the Democrats who control Congress. And, he’s becoming almost as famous.
“You’re our new celebrity,” Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., recently teased the bespectacled Frumin on the Senate floor.
In that way, the mustachioed scholar of Senate procedure is living every senator’s dream. But his job can sound like a nightmare, too — especially with the stakes as high and the partisanship so pronounced as they are on health care.
Fortunes ride on the fate of the health- care bill after more than a year of tortuous debate that has taken a toll on Obama’s standing and the public’s trust in Congress. Health-care changes will affect one-sixth of the nation’s economy and every American — millions of whom will elect or toss out lawmakers come November.
Frumin’s outsized influence over health care stems from the fact that he’s one of only a few people who fully understand the rule that will govern its progress on the Senate floor. But technically, he’s only an adviser to majority Democrats. They can rule as he recommends or ignore him and rule as they please — and risk the wrath of a public already deeply suspicious of one party’s controlling both houses of Congress.
Also, they can fire him.
“I foresee a very miserable period for him,” said Frumin’s predecessor, Bob Dove, who was fired in 2001 when Republicans, then in the majority, disliked his recommendations on a budgetary matter.
“I did not like it when I was there,” Dove said of reconciliation. “My sense is, he will be happy when it’s over.”
On most days, Frumin is the Cyrano de Bergerac of the Senate. When freshmen senators take their turn presiding over routine business, it’s Frumin, seated just out of camera range but within whispering distance, who makes these lawmakers sound like they know how to run the place.
Reconciliation is anything but routine. Contrary to the way it sounds, it’s the most divisive procedure in the majority’s tool box because it blocks filibusters that might otherwise have been launched by the party in the minority at the time — this time, Republicans. So when health-care reform comes before the Senate in pieces, it’ll be up to Frumin to divine — from a few rules and precedents and his own three decades in the Senate — what changes, if any, are in order.
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