Our junior senator has taken a lot of heat for his performance (or non-performance) during the recent debt-ceiling crisis. Regardless of his flaws (and they are manifold), not sure there’s a real basis to criticize him on this particular issue. What would you have had him do differently? Structurally, there wasn’t any role for him to play except vote-caster. When it came time to cast his vote, his was no different than John Kerry’s or the majority of the house delegation: yes on the deal.
Look at the structural elements at play. This was a House-driven crisis. More particularly, it was driven by the most radical element of the House GOP caucus. Whatever leverage Brown had to shape the deal was as a Senate vote to approve.
Ultimately, whatever deal was going to have to be acceptable to a majority of the Senate, which is majority Democrat. It needed at least 3 Democrats to vote yes, but more likely was not going to get full GOP support, so it was going to need (and ended up needing) many more Democrats. There is no configuration of Senate support for this deal that would have put Brown anywhere near being the 60th vote (or even 51st). He is, by policy preference, to the right of all 57 members of the Democratic caucus. To get any Democrats to vote yes, the deal would have had to be to the left of where Brown stands. He had no leverage to stop the hostage-taking or make the deal less radical, even if it were his policy preference, which it is not.
Not everybody gets to be a leader on important issues. The structure provided Brown had no role to play in this deal.
Could/should he have gotten on a bully pulpit? Towards what end? To tell the Tea Party caucus that it was immoral to hold the country hostage? It didn’t seem to do anybody else any good. And, they were working to serve his purposes. He’s for a balanced budget amendment. He wants to reduce spending without raising revenue.
Should he have embraced the Tea Party caucus? Again, why? It was clear that the stink of this deal was going to sit most heavily on the radical right.
No, Brown played it about right. He kept his mouth shut while others did his dirty work. He voted consistent with most of the Massachusetts delegation. To the extent anybody did, he got his way on policy. And, there’s not a whole lot of political ammunition he provided his opponents.
