Rules dating back to Jefferson are supposed to keep the Senate a decorous place where prerogative rises above partisanship. The Kavanaugh proceedings are breaking it.
WASHINGTON — The nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has exposed just how far the Senate has drifted from the rules of decorum that once elevated senatorial prerogative over party, leaving behind the kind of smash-mouth partisan politics that have long dominated the unruly House.
Senate rules dating back to Thomas Jefferson mandate that lawmakers refer to each other by state and title — “my good friend, the senator from California” — and forbid members from questioning motives, maligning a home state or imputing “to another senator or to other senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator.” Senators are not even supposed to read a newspaper while another member of the body is speaking on the chamber floor.
Few of such niceties have been in evidence as the Senate struggles to fill the Supreme Court seat of the retired Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Republicans have accused Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of plotting a last-minute smear of Judge Kavanaugh, and have privately argued that the party’s senators demeaned themselves and the body by asking a nominee to the Supreme Court intimate questions about his drinking habits and sexual behavior.
With only circumstantial evidence, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, called for an investigation into whether Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, sat on and then leaked Christine Blasey Ford’s letter accusing Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has delivered an escalating series of threats to his Democratic counterparts.
Even the nominee himself threatened Democratic senators, warning, “What goes around comes around.”
Democrats charged that Republicans are trying to cover up and “plow right through” with the confirmation of a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault simply in service to power politics. And they were unforgiving in their own assessments, accusing Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, of a “railroad job” to get Judge Kavanaugh through.
Mr. Grassley seemed to see it coming as he embarked on trying to confirm a stalwart conservative justice to the seat vacated by Justice Kennedy, the Supreme Court’s moderate swing vote.
“To the public, it looks like Republicans and Democrats never speak to each other, we don’t ever work together,” Mr. Grassley recalled saying at the outset of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. “And for this nomination, I can understand why they would come to that conclusion.”
Judge Kavanaugh helped breech the Senate’s own protocols with his lashing performance last week. When two Democratic senators, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, questioned his drinking habits, he tried to turn the tables. “I’m curious if you have” ever been blackout drunk, he said to Ms. Klobuchar. To Mr. Whitehouse, he quipped, “Do you like beer, senator, or not? What do you like to drink?”
Far from coming to their colleagues’ defense, Republicans pressed on without a mention. They said Judge Kavanaugh’s emotional outbursts were justified given the circumstances. (He later apologized to Ms. Klobuchar.)
Mr. Cotton joined in, deriding Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, for lying about his service in Vietnam: “Maybe he should reconsider before questioning Judge Kavanaugh’s credibility.”
It was not supposed to be this way, and the rules were supposed to prohibit it.
“Jefferson’s argument was that politics were always going to be contentious, emotional, divisive, so to have any cool, reflective debate under those circumstances, you had to have rules to operate under some sort of decorum,” said Donald A. Ritchie, the Senate’s historian emeritus.
There have been obvious and famous exceptions that make present circumstances appear civil. In 1856, Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts abolitionist, was caned in the chamber by a pro-slavery House member from South Carolina.
In 1954, senators voted to condemn one of their own, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, for contempt for flaunting the body’s norms. Notably, their measure sidestepped McCarthy’s divisive tactics in smearing supposed communists coming before his committee, the crux of the issue, in favor of his offenses against the Senate itself.
There was discussion of a rules breach as recently as 2015, when Senator Ted Cruz, the hard-charging Texas Republican, accused Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, of telling “a flat-out lie” on the Senate floor amid a debate about the Export-Import Bank. In a sign of the times, Mr. Cruz went on conservative talk radio afterward rather than apologizing for the breach.
But by and large, Jefferson’s rules have served their purpose, Mr. Ritchie said. Even during the most heated debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most divisive legislative periods in the modern Senate, senators drew a distinction between political differences and ad hominem attacks, said John Stewart, who served as Senator Hubert Humphrey’s top legislative aide during the debate over that legislation and other hallmark bills of the period.
Mr. Stewart recounted a fiery debate between Mr. Humphrey, who was tasked with advancing the Civil Rights Act, and Senator Absalom Willis Robertson, a pro-segregation Democrat from Virginia. When it was over, he said, Mr. Robertson crossed the Senate floor to stick his confederate battle flag pin on Mr. Humphrey’s lapel — a compliment for a debate well conducted. The two men walked off the floor arm in arm to drink bourbon in Mr. Robertson’s hideaway office.
“It was a club,” Mr. Stewart said in an interview. “You hate to sound like you are just living in the past, but damn it, it was different. It was much more civilized and much more respectful.”
Senator Jeff Flake, a retiring Arizona Republican, has said he had something similar in mind last Friday when he walked across the Judiciary Committee dais to hatch a deal with a friend, Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware. After a furious hour of negotiations that came to involve nearly every member of the committee, the two men agreed to start a one-week F. B. I. investigation into the accusations against Judge Kavanaugh and put off a final Senate vote on his confirmation.
“It’s always been the body where the rules of the Senate bring you together,” Mr. Flake said Tuesday during an event at the Atlantic Festival. “The Senate requires and pushes you together. But lately there have been so many things that have simply drug us apart.
