Abolish the party committees

The immigration advocates are right: Some jobs are so dirty and demeaning that Americans just won't do them.

Exhibit A: The chairmanship of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Ever since Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.) let it be known that he wouldn't continue in the role, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has had trouble filling the vacancy.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) refused. Sen. Michael Bennet (Colo.) declined. Sen. Mark Warner (Va.) begged off. Sen. Al Franken (Minn.) demurred. Sen. Mark Udall (Colo.) sent regrets. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) rejected the offer. Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.) resisted.

Now there's talk that Reid should split the job in two to reduce the workload, or perhaps expand his job search beyond the membership of the Senate.

Here's a better idea: Abolish the position entirely. In the unlikely event that Reid pushed to make that happen -- and in the even less likely event that Republicans were to do the same -- there's a chance Congress could return to solving the nation's problems.

The party committees, as they are known, deserve much of the blame for the lamentable state of our politics. In recent years, these long-standing bodies -- the DSCC, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee -- have become leading causes of the dysfunction in Congress.

The committees are behind the dehumanizing of lawmakers, causing the two parties to view each other not as colleagues but as targets. Through the party committees, Democratic lawmakers work to recruit, raise money and campaign for challengers to their Republican colleagues -- and vice versa. The committees, more than any other single factor, have replaced legislating with endless skirmishing. That's why Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), head of the NRSC, says he has taken another term leading the committee so he can “finish the job in 2012” of defeating the Democratic senators he's supposed to be working with. That's why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says the “single most important thing we want to achieve” is not a balanced budget or national security but the defeat of President Obama.

There's little hope that the party committees will go away. But there are some challenges to their hegemony -- and that's a good thing.

The McCain-Feingold ban on soft money has reduced the committees' hauls, and the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, though it flooded the system with anonymous cash, came with a silver lining: The spending by outside groups has made the party committees less important.

In 2002, before the soft-money ban and Citizens United, the party committees were responsible for 53 percent of spending, according to numbers prepared for The Washington Post by the Center for Responsive Politics. But in 2010, the amount raised by the party committees is just 33 percent of the total (the rest was raised by candidates and outside groups).

This has coincided with a loss of clout for the committees. Candidates that Cornyn's NRSC formally or informally supported fell to tea party challengers in Alaska, Delaware, Nevada, Kentucky, Utah and Florida. Then there's the trouble in finding a volunteer to run the DSCC, a job made less desirable by the fact that 23 of the 33 seats on the ballot in 2012 are held by Democratic caucus members.

Years ago, members of Congress, playing by unwritten rules, would never go to colleagues' districts or states to campaign against them. That unraveled in the 1990s and fell apart completely in 2004, when Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist went to South Dakota to campaign against his Democratic counterpart, Tom Daschle.

Fueling the antagonism are the lawmakers whose party-committee jobs are to unseat colleagues. The resulting bitterness leaves both sides in no mood to make politically difficult compromises on health care, entitlements and the budget.

“The way you get people to accept short-term pain for long-term gain is broad bipartisan support,” said longtime Congress-watcher Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “How do you get that when among the most exalted roles in Congress are people designated to try to assassinate or bring down those people you're trying to get to work with you on policy?”

Now, some would protect the party committees' strength by returning to the era of unlimited donations. Among those anti-reformers is Dan Lungren (R-Calif.), the incoming chairman of the House administration committee.

If he succeeds, says campaign finance reformer Fred Wertheimer, “then the parties would be much more greatly engaged in beating the hell out of each others' members.”

This dirty job should be beneath our representatives.

Dana Milbank's e-mail address is danamilbank@washpost.com.

© 2010, Washington Post Writers Group