With Lamar Alexander leaving leadership, Harry Reid may find compromises come easier

By Karoun Demirjian

Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2011 | 11:51 a.m.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might have caught a break from one of the Senate’s most respected Republicans.

Sen. Lamar Alexander announced today that in January he would resign his leadership post. Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, serves as Republican conference chairman, the third-ranking position in the party.

It signals that Senate Republicans are undergoing a seismic generational shift in leadership, as Republican Whip Jon Kyl -- the GOP’s No. 2 -- announced earlier this year he’d be retiring at the end of 2012.

It could also present a political opening for Reid.

“Stepping down from the Republican leadership will liberate me to spend more time working for results on issues that I care most about,” Alexander said this morning on the Senate floor. “That means stopping runaway regulations and runaway spending but it also means confronting the timidity that allows health care spending to squeeze out support for roads, support for research, support for scholarships and the government functions that make it easier and cheaper to create private-sector jobs.”

Political differences have brought votes to the brink, whether the issue is funding roads and staffing airports (that was last week’s crisis), Pell grants, or determining where the government should make investments to create jobs.

The difficulty comes because most contentious issues have to pass by more than a simple majority: those usually carry the threat of a filibuster, and getting around one of those takes 60 votes. While Democrats have the majority, they only have 53 seats, meaning inter-party cooperation is necessary for the trickiest topics.

Alexander’s announcement doesn’t mean he’s about to leap across the aisle into Reid’s political camp.

“I’m a very Republican Republican,” he informed the Senate as he made his announcement Tuesday morning, defining himself as a one with “conservative principles and an independent attitude.”

“By stepping down from leadership I expect to be more, not less aggressive on the issues,” he said.

But that pledge may come as welcome news to Reid, who has scored a few successful compromises with Alexander’s help.

“I don’t know all the reasons for his doing this, but I want the record to be spread with the fact that I have found Lamar Alexander to be one of the most thoughtful people I have ever served with in the Senate,” Reid said, calling Alexander a “unique” person who accomplishes a lot more than he gets credit for.

For example, Alexander this year helped resolve a standoff between Republicans and Democrats over how to amend their rules.

“I know that he will continue being a stalwart in the Senate,” Reid said. “I look forward mostly to his sense of fairness, which he has been so very exemplary in.”

Republicans also said Alexander’s new role means the parties may have to recalculate the balance of standoffs and compromises in the Senate.

“I can tell you...the United States Senate is going to become very quickly a more interesting place to serve,” said Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the junior Senator from Tennessee, commending Alexander for having the “courage” to step down from a leadership position most would be gunning for. “For all of us that have been concerned about our lack of ability to solve our nation’s greatest problems, I look at what you’ve done today as a step towards us as a body being able to deal with the more pressing issues.”