Living Politics: President Bush's War At Home

Iraq isn't the only place where George W. Bush must unify warring tribes. He has the same mission on Capitol Hill--inside his own Republican Party.

Ending the growing feud between the militant armies of Sheik Tom DeLay in the House and the Senate's more moderate Bill Frist Front is crucial to the president's re-election. Why? Because the GOP "runs" Congress, and Bush won't be able to blame the Hill if he has few legislative achievements to call his own.

When legislators went home for the Easter-Passover recess, they left behind a battlefield littered with the casualties of friendly Republican fire. Specifically, I'm told, DeLay and other House GOP leaders are attacking (behind the scenes) what they increasingly see as an inept--and a way too accommodationist--command structure in the Senate. The main beefs: that Senate Leader Frist hasn't pushed through the president's most conservative judicial nominees (Miguel Estrada in particular); that Frist was unable to end the ban on oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and that he allowed (and was maybe even was complicit in) a Senate decision to whack the president's $726 billion tax cut in half.

Much of the anti-Frist squawking is predictable, and not really fair. Unlike the House, where the rules allow even leaders with thin margins to run things in dictatorial fashion, the Senate is designed to be a nearly ungovernable mess. An iron fist often requires 60 votes, and even a "simple" majority is hard to corral when, as is now the case, the GOP has only 51. Subtracting for a party-within-a-party--three semi-liberals from New England (last remnants of the "Rockefeller Wing")--Frist only has 48 votes to work with on any given day.

But the new tribal warfare is about more than rules and numbers. Part of the enmity stems from the way Frist came to power, as the result of what true-blue conservatives saw as a media-driven putsch against the former Senate GOP leader, Trent Lott. Remember him? He was drummed out of the leadership (with the tacit support of the White House) for having waxed nostalgic about the segregationist days of Strom Thurmond's political career. Frist was seen by some as a little too hungry to take advantage of the Lott fiasco.

Frist, one of the hardest-working men in Washington, has done his best to overcome that start, meeting regularly with members to hear their concerns. The scion of a powerful family in Nashville, Tenn., he's painfully polite in manner. But he's also spent 20 years as a leading heart-and-lung transplant surgeon, and became used to giving orders that others--as a matter of life and death--were expected to carry out instantly. Things rarely happen instantly in the Senate.