Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) openly discussed how Vice President Cheney had personally asked him about his Medicare vote. Chambliss said he told the vice president that he needed to back his local doctors and senior citizens. GOP senators scramble for lifeboats

Republican Senate leaders — terrified by the prospect of losing five or more seats in November — have freed their members to vote however they need to vote to get reelected, even if that means bucking the president or the party’s leadership.

On at least four votes over the past month — Medicare, housing, the GI Bill and the Farm Bill — Republican leaders haven’t even bothered whipping members to toe the party line or back President Bush’s veto threats. Instead, a GOP leadership aide says leaders have told vulnerable senators that it’s all right to “get well” with voters by siding with Democrats on anything but energy and national security.


It’s unusual for rank-and-file members to get a green light to blow off their party leaders. But these are unusual times for Republicans. They are genuinely worried they could get their clocks cleaned in November. The prevailing attitude: It is better to lose some big votes now than big races in November.

This helps explain why so many Senate Republicans are taking flight from President Bush and their own leaders — and doing it loudly and proudly.

Shortly after the Medicare vote, the website for Sen. John Cornyn featured news that the Texas Republican — best known as a Bush loyalist — had voted to override the president’s veto.

In a brief conversation with POLITICO, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) openly discussed how Vice President Cheney had personally asked him about his Medicare vote. Chambliss said he told the vice president that he needed to back his local doctors and senior citizens.

“I said, ‘Dick, I’m beyond that,’” Chambliss said. Cheney’s “my good friend and my hunting buddy, but my mind was made up.” Asked whether Republican Senate leaders had whipped the Medicare vote, Chambliss said he hadn’t been pressured.

Both Chambliss and Cornyn are up for reelection, and both were hammered back home over the Fourth of July recess by the American Medical Association lobby on the Medicare bill.

An aide to a Republican senator who voted to override the veto said, “Republican leadership wrote us off from the get-go. We were never whipped on this. Leadership just left us alone.” Another GOP leadership aide said leaders didn’t bother whipping the housing bill, because only a small cadre of conservatives were opposed to it.

Senate Republican leaders argue that some votes have been so lopsided — 70-26 on Medicare, 84-12 on a procedural step on the housing bill — because Democrats, searching for compromise, removed some of the most objectionable items from their bills. Indeed, Democrats have crafted narrower bills on housing, energy and even Iraq war funding in an effort to lure GOP support and build their legislative résumé heading into the fall.

Still, this trend in Senate voting represents a stark contrast to the first 18 months of the 110th Congress, which were defined by razor-thin partisan votes in the Senate and a near-daily blame game over the use of the filibuster.

“It looks like after months of hanging together with their leaders, they’re beginning to have an every-man-for-himself attitude,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “They started the year with a strategy of doing everything they could to grind the Senate to a halt. What’s changing now is we’re getting closer to the election.”

With the apparent freedom to vote their consciences — or at least their states’ consciences — even members of the GOP leadership team have gone separate ways on certain issues.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) voted against the Medicare veto override, but two other GOP leaders, Cornyn and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) — vice chairman and chairman, respectively, of the Senate Republican Conference — voted in favor of the override. On a housing bill procedural vote, McConnell voted yes, but Kyl voted no.

On a Medicare amendment sponsored by conservative rabble-rouser Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), McConnell, Kyl and Cornyn backed DeMint, but Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), also part of the GOP leadership, went the other way.

“I don’t think you can infer from that that we’re not going to come together and block bad bills,” Cornyn said. “I think Medicare was a special case.”

But on virtually all of these mixed votes, it’s not a case of McConnell and Kyl losing control of their conference and losing major votes. In fact, GOP leaders are allowing for political expedience to trump partisan stalemate.

By letting politically vulnerable GOP senators such as Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Susan Collins of Maine, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and Gordon Smith of Oregon join Democrats on key issues, Republicans are neutralizing the issues.

Now these senators can head home and brag that they stood up to Republican leaders in Washington and voted to save Medicare from cuts, to expand GI benefits and to help out in the housing crisis.

Republican leadership aides point to the fact that the GOP has been unified on its top two issues right now: national security and energy.

“On energy, you’ve seen Democrats coming over to our side and not the other way around,” said McConnell spokesman Don Stewart. “On national security, it’s the Democrats who have been doing the jailbreak.”

On the last major national security vote — the expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — it was the Democrats who were divided, with 21 voting for the bill and 28 voting against it. The Democratic leadership stuck together in opposition.

For Republicans, the next opportunity for independence will come by the end of this week, when the Senate takes its final votes on the oil speculation bill. Although the GOP leadership has been whipping energy votes generally, this one puts Republicans in a difficult spot: between voting for a measure they don’t much like — Republicans want a broader bill that includes drilling, conservation and electric car production — or risking being tagged as a friend of Big Oil.