Lieberman and the Senate

Mike Tomasky writes, correctly, that to understand the Lieberman dilemma you have to understand the Senate:

When you're elected to the Senate, you don't assume an office so much as you join a club, a very exclusive club, and they let you know it. You will be told about all the differences between the Senate and the House of Representatives, from which you may well have risen. You will have an audience with Robert Byrd, the dean of the Senate, and he will present you with his gravely serious-looking, leather-bound, eleventy-hundred volume history of the body, and he will instruct that you read every volume, right down to the 150-page section dissecting the minutiae of that famous 1829 debate on interstate commerce because it turned on a vital parliamentary question that you will be expected to master.

You will be shown the stately private rooms in which senators hobnob and conduct their horse-trading, typically grander than the lower house's rooms. If you're a Democrat you'll see the beautifully paneled Mansfield Room, for example, named after legendary majority leader Mike Mansfield, with its steroided portraiture and baronial fireplace. You'll see the cloakrooms, where, in the old days, senators smoked and chewed tobacco (spittoons were still used on senate premises until the 1960s, I'm pretty sure), and where today they still relax in lacquered privacy.

Finally, you will be escorted to the floor and shown your desk, an antique wooden number with a flip-up desk top. You will open that desk top, and inside, you will see inscribed the names of every senator from the beginning of the republic right up to your immediate predecessor who has also used that very desk....

You get the idea, I trust, of a culture that just doesn't commit acts that could remotely be described as intemperate, even against one of its number who has acted intemperately.

As much as most senators probably wanted to strip Lieberman of his gavel, a majority felt compelled to vote--in secret, no less--against that course of action. It's silly and antiquated and problematic for all sorts of reasons, but that's how it is. Generally speaking, the Senate is comprised not of 100 policy robots, but of a bunch of very rich people who behave, by and large, like very rich people.

In this instance, though, the secret society undercut itself. If there's ever a moment when it's appropriate to buck tradition and kick a fellow member out, its when that member has himself violated terms of membership. Lieberman campaigned against Barack Obama. In doing so, he betrayed not just his former party, but a fellow senator. And now, the people he crossed have signaled to the next generation of Democratic senators that, in this party, in this body, you can get away with political treason.