GMF - The German Marshall Fund of the United States - Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation

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As President-elect Barack Obama considers moving his agenda in a new atmosphere of bipartisanship, it is useful to reflect on the role weekly party caucus luncheons have played in the modern party-driven Senate, the institution that threatens Obama's agenda with partisan filibuster.

Every Tuesday, senators break bread with their party's leaders and members. From these caucus lunches come policy positions and commitments on procedural votes that lock the Senate into partisan struggles over virtually every major issue confronting the nation.

Today, this strong role of parties and their leadership seems normal. But a Senate driven by party and leadership is less than three decades old. As the former staff director of the Democratic Policy Committee under Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), I staffed the first four years of regular Democratic caucus lunches, which began in 1981. Prior to meeting every week, the Democratic caucus met every two years.

Historically, the Senate majority leader managed the flow of legislation, but committee chairmen held the power. They dominated policy and operated on a largely bipartisan basis. The ideological overlap of moderate Northern Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats contributed to the Senate's bipartisan tradition. Compared with today, the filibuster was rarely used.

In the late 1970s, the Republicans, long in the minority, turned their party lunches into a partisan whipping operation under then-Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.). When Baker started organizing his troops around selective "Republican positions," there were only 41 in his conference. Bringing his lawmakers together regularly provided a way to impose discipline on his outnumbered troops.

Republicans started voting "no" on a largely procedural vote to raise the debt limit, and they pushed Kemp-Roth income tax cuts as amendments to other measures. These issues were used against Democratic incumbents, helping to defeat a combined 14 in the 1978 and 1980 elections. In 1980, Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time in 26 years, entering the Reagan administration with a sustainable 53-46 majority (there was also one independent who caucused with the Democrats).

When Democrats found themselves ousted from the majority in 1981, Byrd adopted Baker's model of weekly party lunches to forge party discipline. They were organized largely as an alternative to the Reagan agenda. Byrd appointed a number of task forces that engineered scores of party-line votes each year on Social Security, spending and foreign policy. He even fed the caucus the Reagan school lunch, which counted ketchup and relish as vegetables. In 1986, these votes, collected as "Democratic Alternatives" in documents that included each senator's votes, helped the Democrats regain the Senate.

The partisan shift that preceded 1986 was not easy for many senior Democrats, who were repelled by the notion of partisan stances on issues that had not previously been partisan. Many former chairmen at first saw no role for the caucus in their policy business. Sen. Russell Long (D-La.), the long-reigning chairman of the Finance Committee, argued that there was no such thing as a Democratic position on taxes, since most of his tax bills had more Republicans than Democrats voting to report them. Many Southern Democrats, elected as moderates or conservatives, worried about endorsing "national Democratic Party" positions. But cut out of the legislative process for the first time in their careers, most Democratic senators soon warmed to the partisan challenge.

I always thought Baker got too little credit for delivering the Reagan Revolution. His ability to keep his troops together, especially on budget and tax issues, gave Reagan amazing victories. Byrd ­- who had so much personal affection for Baker that he would not use his procedural skills to outmaneuver his friend - used to lament that he was never Jimmy Carter's man, but the Senate's man. And he could not understand why Baker had become Reagan's man.

In hindsight, I think senators in the 1980s set in motion an up-the-ante partisanship that ultimately led to the gridlock we have today. The very able leaders in both parties over the past three decades did not set out to do this. They were trying to sharpen the distinction between the parties and the choices available to the American people.

Now stark choices seem less the issue than failure to come to grips with the enormous challenges facing our country. It will take a determined effort by the Obama-Biden administration to appeal to the American people to change today's reflexive partisan patterns. Vice President-elect Joe Biden, soon to be president of the Senate, lived through the change to its modern partisan form. That experience, and his memory of a less partisan, committee-driven Senate, could prove very useful to the new administration's work.

Rob Liberatore is a senior trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund.