The Charleston County Republican Party’s executive committee took the unusual step Monday night of censuring U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham for stepping across the GOP party line.

Marc Ambinder has the full text of the resolution. Here are the key portions:

Whereas, U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (SC) and John Kerry (MA) have called for a bipartisan bill dealing with “climate change” via a “Cap & Trade” energy bill;

Whereas, the basis of Cap & Trade – global warming caused by carbon emissions – is still in doubt as evidenced by the past decade of cooling temperatures;

Whereas, the people of South Carolina can ill afford the job-killing Cap & Trade bill’s ripple effects on our state’s economy and on personal energy bills; [...]

Therefore, let it be resolved: The Charleston County Republican Party Executive Committee respectfully requests, with sincere sadness that the South Carolina Republican Party withdraw their resolution commending U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham and that the Charleston Country Republican Party censure U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham for many of the positions he has taken that do not represent the wishes of the people of South Carolina, such as: passing a “Cap & Trade” energy bill, bailing out banks, and granting amnesty for illegal aliens.

Which Republican senator will be next to step up and cross party lines on climate legislation?

Due, in large measure, to the efforts of Senator Olympia Snowe, who has worked tirelessly, the legislation passed by the Senate Finance Committee represents a substantial improvement over the costly and flawed alternative approved by the Senate Health Committee as well as the House bills.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Collins would support the bill as it stands. Indeed, her statement also takes time to blast provisions she said would raise costs and steal choices from consumers and businesses. A final proposal, she said, shouldn’t slow Medicare growth to the extent that the Finance bill does, and it should take longer steps to limit medical malpractice suits.

Still, Collins said she “share[s] the goal of passing responsible health care reform and, working with members on both sides of the aisle who share these concerns, I am hopeful that many improvements will continue to be made to produce a bill that can achieve bipartisan support.

Our goal should be legislation that protects affordable health care choices, safeguards Medicare, and reduces costs to the consumer and the taxpayer especially at a time when we simply cannot afford to pay more.

That’s not an endorsement, but it’s certainly a more tempered approach than that coming from GOP leadership.

“Something as big and important as health care legislation should have broad-based support,” Grassley said in a statement issued yesterday.

“We ought to be focusing on getting 80 votes,” he told The Washington Post.

Funny, then, that in 2003, when Republicans pushed through the Medicare Modernization Act — which represented the single largest overhaul to the Medicare program since its creation nearly 40 years earlier — the same rule wasn’t in effect.

Indeed, the MMA, which created both the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the Medicare Advantage program — was popular among Republicans because it took broad steps toward privatizing the popular seniors’ health care program. But it certainly wasn’t embraced by those across the aisle. Indeed, the final bill passed the Senate by a count of 54 to 44, with support from just 11 of the 46 Democrats who voted that day.

In the House, the count was even closer, with Republicans ultimately forced to hold the 15-minute vote open for nearly three hours while party leaders twisted arms and literally bribed members in efforts to gain support. Then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), for example, offered to endorse the son of Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) in an upcoming election in exchange for his vote. Smith refused, and “ten months after that rejected offer was made and after 3,400 pages of sworn testimony and response to subpoenas were analyzed, the House ethics committee admonished DeLay for ‘improper’ behavior,” The Hill’s Bob Cusack wrote in the definitive account of that vote published two years after the fact.

Another GOP leader, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (Calif.), allegedly offered Smith’s daughter a job in Hollywood.

The tactics worked, and the bill passed at dawn by a count of 220 to 215, with just 16 of 205 voting Democrats supporting the bill.

This is all a long way of saying: Republicans might care about broad-based support on enormous health care reforms — but only when they’re in the minority.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) (WDCpix)

Senate Democrats negotiating health care reforms with Sen. Charles Grassley are finding out the hard way that the Iowa Republican, while boasting a reputation for reaching across the aisle, appears hard set on supporting GOP leadership above bipartisan compromise.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Not only is Grassley threatening to vote against the bill — even a bill he supports — if it doesn’t gain enough GOP backing, but his home-state recess tour has found him echoing false GOP accusations that the Democrats’ plans would empower the government to ration services and euthanize seniors. Many health policy experts say the behavior is indication that Grassley — the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee who’s up for reelection next year — has bowed to pressure from conservative colleagues to oppose the health care overhaul in favor of more incremental reforms. Or none at all.

“The hard-core Republicans are pretty hard core and so he is hearing a lot from them and less from others,” Michael Bailey, political science professor at Georgetown University, said in an email.

David Mayhew, professor of political science at Yale University, pointed out that Grassley’s GOP colleagues aren’t the only ones applying the pressure. Constituents at animated town hall gatherings this month have also made clear their reservations with the Democrats’ reform plans, and Grassley has already held four such events, with 16 more planned for next week. “Grassley seems to be drifting to an anti position on this health-care drive,” Mayhew said in an email. “That is not surprising … Right now, the median voter in Iowa must be quite nervous about this drive. The median voter in any upcoming Republican primary in Iowa is more than nervous.”

The comments arrive as the nation’s health care spending continues on its unsustainable skyward path, and the Democrats, behind a fervid push from the Obama administration, are proposing sweeping reforms to rein it in. Four congressional committees — three in the House and one in the Senate — have already passed reform proposals. Only the Senate Finance panel has yet to contribute a bill. As a result, all eyes this month are on the Gang of Six, the bipartisan group of Finance members charged with crafting a compromise.

Grassley, a member of that bunch, issued a statement Wednesday reiterating the importance of coming up with a bipartisan bill. “Something as big and important as health care legislation should have broad-based support,” Grassley said. “So far, no one has developed that kind of support, either in Congress or at the White House. That doesn’t mean we should quit. It means we should keep working until we can put something together that gets that widespread support.”

But that call for widespread support is making some observers anxious, particularly in the wake of comments by Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, vowing to oppose the Democrats’ proposal unless they scrap the current plan and start anew. “There is no way Republicans are going to support a trillion dollar bill,” Kyl told reporters.

In an interview with National Review Wednesday, Grassley fingered four policy priorities he wants from the final bill: the absence of a public insurance plan, protections against rationing, assurances that Washington won’t disrupt the doctor-patient relationship, and tort reform.

Yet, to the surprise of many health care experts, Grassley is also threatening to vote against a health reform bill — even one he backs — if it doesn’t win enough votes within the Republican caucus. “If I can’t negotiate something that gets more than four Republicans,” he told MSNBC Monday, “I’m not a very good representative of my party.”

Julius Hobson, former lobbyist for the American Medical Association and now a senior policy analyst at the Washington law firm Bryan Cave, said that stipulation, by hinging Grassley’s support on whether guys like Kyl get on board, leaves Democrats with little power of negotiation.

“That’s a really big deal,” Hobson said. “That comment alone may have done [substantial] harm to the process.”

Jonathan Oberlander, health policy professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, echoed that message, warning that any bill capable of winning 15 or 20 Republicans would lose too many Democrats to pass. Such GOP support won’t be possible, he said, “unless the legislation falls far, far short of what most of the Democratic caucus supports.”

Grassley’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment, but issued a statement Wednesday reiterating the Iowa senator’s commitment to fighting for a bill that a substantial number of Republicans would support.

Not that Grassley isn’t capable of political independence. In 2007, for example, he bucked both the Bush administration and Republican leadership by leading the unsuccessful bipartisan effort to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Revealing the limitations of that independent streak, however, he ultimately voted with GOP leaders against SCHIP’s renewal when it came up again in January, arguing that the expansion was too broad and would encroach on private insurance markets. Further displaying his party-line feathers, in 2003 it was Grassley, then-Finance Committee chairman, who pushed through controversial Republican legislation creating Medicare’s prescription drug benefit and the Medicare Advantage program, both of which took steps toward privatizing the popular Medicare program.  The American Conservative Union rates Grassley with a lifetime score of 83.

“More often than not he is a reliable conservative Republican, especially on economic issues, which may be at the core of his discomfort with the health care bill,” David P. Redlawsk, political scientist at Rutgers University, said in an email.

The historic relationship between Grassley and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) is an unusually close one, riding straight into this year. Baucus has gone out of his way to appease his counterpart throughout the health reform debate, delaying release of the bill until September so the sides could iron out differences. Yet Grassley has reportedly balked this month over a face-to face meeting between members of the Gang of Six. Moves like that have left many health policy experts wondering if, on this health reform drive, the committee’s working relationship isn’t deteriorating.

Oberlander said that Grassley’s eyebrow-raising behavior has created “the appearance of a strain” in the bipartisan working relationship among the Finance leaders.

“You have the Republican who’s supposed to be the most cooperative, and he’s out there talking about death panels,” he said.

An impasse in the Finance Committee could have serious consequences. Without Grassley’s endorsement of the bill, there are real questions whether a sweeping health reform proposal stands a chance in the upper chamber, where 60 votes will be required to defeat a likely GOP filibuster. Although the Democrats have a 60-member majority, it’s uncertain whether ailing Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) would be available to vote.

Taking a lesson from the Clinton administration’s failed health reform push in 1993 and 1994, Obama has been careful not to make specific policy demands, instead laying out broad goals he wants the reforms to accomplish. But, as the thorny Finance panel debate has revealed, that strategy has its perils as well. Some observers are beginning to wonder if the White House is being aggressive enough in its push for a health system overhaul.

“If Mr. Obama wants to jettison the now-weakened public plan to dampen overheated opposition,” editorialists at The New York Times wrote Wednesday, “he should say what he will insist on instead.”

[P]rivately, White House officials said the administration is moving closer to advancing the overhaul under a congressional procedure known as budget reconciliation that would make the bill immune to filibuster in the Senate.

While the administration still prefers to get a bill that commands some Republican support, its standard for a bipartisan agreement is a measure that contains GOP amendments — not something that will necessarily attract Republican votes.

There’s good reason for the administration’s mid-debate semantics exercise: The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee today passed its version of the Democrats’ health reform bill. The measure included more than 160 GOP amendments, but didn’t get a single vote of support from panel Republicans.

I understand that when the last administration asked this Congress to provide assistance for struggling banks, Democrats and Republicans alike were infuriated by the mismanagement and results that followed.  So were the American taxpayers.  So was I.

…

My budget does not attempt to solve every problem or address every issue.  It reflects the stark reality of what we’ve inherited – a trillion dollar deficit, a financial crisis, and a costly recession.

Given these realities, everyone in this chamber – Democrats and Republicans – will have to sacrifice some worthy priorities for which there are no dollars.  And that includes me.

….

There will be many different opinions and ideas about how to achieve reform, and that is why I’m bringing together businesses and workers, doctors and health care providers, Democrats and Republicans to begin work on this issue next week.  I suffer no illusions that this will be an easy process.  It will be hard.  But I also know that nearly a century after Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform, the cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and the conscience of our nation long enough.

That’s not even going into the references to charter schools, regulatory reform, and other conservative goodies.

After last year’s State of the Union, then-candidate Barack Obama asked the nation to imagine a time when a President’s agenda would draw standing ovations from both sides of the aisle. That sort of bipartisanship is an admirable goal – and one that unfortunately continues to elude Washington.

Ironically, this hit the e-mail box as both parties were applauding the president for demanding CEO accountability.

Not only was no summary of the plan available, but, anecdotally, Senate negotiators — those in the room supposedly crunching the numbers — couldn’t pin down the specifics of the bill. Reporters yesterday afternoon scrambled for scraps of detail, mostly to find silence or shrugs from congressional offices. At 9 p.m., the Senate Finance Committee sent a release revealing the reason:

Updated scores on many elements of the bill remain pending, and policy staff for the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, the Senate Finance Committee, and the House Ways & Means Committee are drafting final bill language tonight.

On top of that, Senate Democrats seemed to have riled their House counterparts in the process. Reid took pains to emphasize that the House was very much a part of the negotiations, yet no House members appeared during the announcement. The New York Times lends a part of the reason:

House Democrats, angry over some cuts, particularly for school construction, initially balked at the deal and delayed a final meeting on Wednesday between House and Senate negotiators.

Democratic officials said Speaker Nancy Pelosi felt that Mr. Reid went too far by announcing a deal before it was vetted by her office and discussed by House members in an emergency caucus meeting, setting off the last-minute flare-up.

Ms. Pelosi said at a news conference that the delay helped House Democrats win some final concessions, including an agreement to let states use some money in a fiscal stabilization fund for school renovations. “There is no question that one of our overriding priorities in the House was a very strong commitment to school construction,” she said. “That’s still in the bill.”

To avoid detracting from a major legislative victory for President Barack Obama, Democratic leaders will downplay the significance of the intra-party tiff. Yet, there’s no denying: In the name of reaching across the aisle for Republican votes, Obama and Senate Democrats not only failed to get many votes (remember that the House proposal attracted zero Republican supporters, and the Senate version found just three), and also alienated liberal Democrats, but, substantially, the final stimulus bill is much smaller than the package many economists say is necessary to be effective. As columnist E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post wrote today:

The Senate’s compromise bill was the essence of preferring the illusion of moderation over substance. By stripping out of the House bill significant amounts of fiscal help to the states, school construction money and other forms of spending, those so-called moderate senators who provided the key votes made the proposal far less stimulative. [Snip]

There is nothing wrong with a sensible centrism that tries to balance competing goods. But Washington has become too concerned with appearances and with calculating the distance from some arbitrary midpoint in any given debate. The sensible center should be defined by what works, even if that means discovering that the true middle ground isn’t where we thought it was.

The point isn’t just that Republicans are playing silly word games, but that “bipartisanship” is going to be harder and harder to come by in the most ideologically divided Congress since, perhaps, the early 1800s. There are not really any moderate Republicans left in the House, and perhaps two left in the Senate; there are few Democrats in either chamber as conservative as the most right-leaning members of the party in 1994, the last time the party held Congress and the White House.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (BiggerPictureImages flickr)

When Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) switched from Democrat to independent in 2006, Democrats needed him to remain in their caucus to control the Senate with 51 votes.

Yet many Democrats openly disdained Lieberman for championing the war in Iraq. The disdain escalated this year, when Lieberman campaigned tirelessly for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the Republican nominee for president.

It was something of a surprise, then, when a newly configured Democratic Senate caucus — no longer clinging to a one-vote majority — decided Tuesday, by a vote of 42-13, to keep Lieberman as one of their own. He will even retain his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which is responsible for oversight of the executive branch.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The vote appears to be less about Lieberman and more about Democrats and President-elect Barack Obama building a consensus. While highly critical of Lieberman’s straying allegiance, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was careful never to cut him loose. And Obama signaled that that he wanted Lieberman to remain in the caucus.

“The Democrats wanted to string up Lieberman by his toes and hit him with a broom,” said Kenneth Dautrich, a public policy professor at the University of Connecticut. “But by extending this olive branch, they’ve learned to overcome their emotional response and not be vindictive.”

“The result of the vote is not because the Democrats want to forgive him,” said Dautrich. “It’s because he’ll be an important vote.”

The 55-member Democratic Senate caucus — including at least five newly elected members — also allowed Lieberman to hold onto his chairmanship of an Armed Services subcommittee. But it stripped him of his chairmanship of a subcommittee of the Environmental and Public Works Committee.

After the caucus meeting, Lieberman said the vote “was done in a spirit of reconciliation.”

The vote came after 11 months of Lieberman stumping for McCain. The Arizona Republican even wanted Lieberman as his running mate before GOP strategists persuaded McCain to choose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

That didn’t stop Lieberman from delivering a speech at Republican National Convention exalting McCain and blasting Obama.

“Sen. Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man,” Lieberman said in his Sept. 3 address. “But eloquence is no substitute for a record — not in these tough times. In the Senate, he has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party.”

Two days after Obama won the presidency and Democrats widened their margin in the Senate, an aide to Reid told the Associated Press that Lieberman would likely lose his chairmanship of the homeland security committee. Reid himself told a CNN reporter that, “Joe Lieberman has done something that I think was improper, wrong — and if we weren’t on television, I’d use a stronger word of describing what he did.”

The statement made headlines but Reid also hinted at reconciliation. “Joe Lieberman votes with me a lot more than a lot of my senators. He didn’t support us on military stuff, and he didn’t support us on Iraq stuff. But you look at his record — it’s pretty good.”

Then last week Obama informed Reid that he held no grudges toward Lieberman and wanted him to remain in the Democratic caucus.

“Once Obama intervened on this, it made it more likely that Democrats would treat Lieberman gently,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Julian E. Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University, praised Obama’s support for the Connecticut independent as consistent with the president-elect’s calls for post-partisanship. “The Obama strategy of wanting to keep broadening his coalition is genuine,” Zelizer said. “Obama’s aware of the political flack he’ll take. But it’s a pragmatic move. He’s a non-ideologue.”

With Lieberman in the fold, the Democrats still have an outside shot of a 60-member caucus that could end Republican filibusters. That possibility hinges on yet-to-be decided races in Georgia and Minnesota.

“Lieberman will be a senator until 2012,” said Dautrich. “In the next four years, there will probably be votes on health-care reform legislation and Supreme Court nominees. … The Republicans will try to filibuster and the Democrats will need 60 votes.”

Lieberman, a senator since 1988, has had a rocky relationship with Democrats since he lost to Ned Lamont in the 2006 Democratic primary in Connecticut. After declaring himself an independent, Lieberman went on to defeat Lamont in the general election. He vowed to continue to caucus with Senate Democrats.

His chairmanship of the homeland security committee was largely viewed as both a reward and an incentive to prevent his defection to the GOP.

But the same issues that cost Lieberman in the Democratic primary also made him an oft-criticized chairman, especially his unflagging support of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq and overall “war on terror.”

It is unlikely that Lieberman will provide tougher oversight of an Obama administration that has welcomed him back into the Democratic Party.

“Lieberman is a very calculating politician,” said Zelizer. “I don’t think he wants to spend his political capital on investigations.”

Lieberman is thus expected to tread carefully. Thanks to the new configuration of the Senate, he needs the Democrats at least as much as the Democrats need him.