By Alan K. Ota, CQ Staff

Commentators and kibitzers have long fretted over the question of how to make the Capitol a less partisan place, suggesting everything from a revamping of the way congressional districts are drawn to a downgrading of the storied powers of seniority. Little did anyone suspect that all it took was breakfast.

When the 110th Congress got started 15 months ago, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut — newly re-elected to the Senate as an independent after being denied renomination as a Democrat — received Majority Leader Harry Reid ’s blessing to launch a series of early morning, early-in-the-week sessions where senators could mull over the upcoming legislative calendar and perhaps form bipartisan alliances on the votes ahead. Lieberman pitched the sessions to Nevada’s Reid as an opportunity for the new but narrow Democratic majority to pick up a few crucial votes from the GOP. Hosting the egg-and-cereal buffet, Lieberman hoped, might also help him burnish the reputation he cultivates as an above-the-fray dealmaker and vote broker.

MODERATE CONSPIRATORS: Lieberman and Reid at a news conference last year. (GETTY IMAGES \ AFP \ MANDEL NGAN)

The breakfasts worked as advertised early on, helping pave the way for the Democrats’ minimum wage increase and lobbying an ethics package to move through the Senate with overwhelming GOP backing. Even into the fall, the Monday meetings were credited with helping build Republican support for an expansion of the federal medical insurance program for children, which died under a pair of President Bush’s vetoes.

But over the past year, the meetings on Monday or Tuesday mornings have taken on an enlarged portfolio, a more independent profile and an expanded roster of leaders. They’ve grown from a tentative exercise in intramural dealmaking into broader, give-and-take sessions to debate upcoming votes and contentious issues. Lieberman now shares the hosting duties with such senior centrist Democrats as New Mexico’s Jeff Bingaman and California’s Dianne Feinstein , as well as with the chairman of the GOP Conference, Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander . And rather than arriving at accommodations in the interests of the moderate-minded of both parties, the confabs are starting to flex their own legislative muscle — sometimes to the consternation of the same Democratic leadership that helped get the meetings off the ground.

FISA Face-Off

Consider the fortunes of the controversial Bush administration proposal to shield from lawsuits those telecommunications companies that helped the government with its warrantless surveillance program. Eleven months ago — four days after the Bush administration first asked Congress to grant such immunity as part of a broad expansion of its surveillance powers — the Democratic chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, and the panel’s Republican vice chairman, Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, touched on the issue during a presentation before the breakfast group.

Bond recalled later that the audience seemed to warm to his arguments in favor of giving Bush what he wanted. “Maybe it made a difference,” he said.

It may well have. Ten months later, in February, 19 Democrats joined the GOP in passing legislation granting the telecom companies’ immunity as part of a rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a vote that has helped Bush apply strong pressure on the Democratic majority in the House to do likewise.

Some of the regular Democratic attendees at the breakfast have also provided important votes for some top-tier GOP goals of the past year, including continuing funding for the Iraq War without any troop-withdrawal language attached and hewing to Bush’s domestic spending limit in writing the appropriations bills for the current fiscal year.

The Democrats who now help run the breakfast club reject the notion that they have provided a safe house for rebels in their own ranks. “I don’t think the breakfasts are part of the problem,’’ said Bingaman, who pointed instead to his own side’s leadership. “Republicans can look for Democratic votes. But so can Democrats.”

And Feinstein says she’s confident the mealtime meetings will help her party win more fights than they lose. “The more that we sit and talk and try to effect legislation which reconciles differences,” she said, “we enable a better-functioning body.”

Getting Down to Business

In recent years, Senate centrists had rarely met except in temporary ad hoc formations. Such a group formed to focus on health care issues early in the decade, but it dissipated after one of its leaders, Louisiana Democrat John B. Breaux, retired in early 2005. Later that year, the “Gang of 14” sprung up and cut a deal on judicial confirmations just as the two parties’ leaderships were prepared to wage a parliamentary war on the topic, but that group faded away when the next election sent a few of its members packing.

The current group grew out of a recognition that partisan conventions were starting to hamper the Senate’s ability to get even its most basic legislative work done — and was born, Lieberman says, in conversations he had with Alexander in 2006. “We both agreed there was too much partisanship. We said that the place is organized to encourage partisanship. Separate lunches. Separate meetings. Separates sides of committees. Separate staffs,” Lieberman said. “What if we took a small step in the direction of making this better — if we provided a place where once a week Republicans and Democrats can gather together without staff ?”

Last year, the group met 23 times for breakfast — and five other times, in the evening, for discussions over glasses of wine. Typical attendance is 14 senators or so, about evenly split between the parties. One gathering drew about 40 senators. There is no membership roster, and perhaps 60 senators have stopped by at least once, the organizers say. Most of the meetings are held either in a meeting room on the ground floor of the Capitol dominated by an enormous chandelier or a few steps away in a room named for Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania. As the Senate’s decidedly centrist Republican minority leader from 1969 through 1976, Scott joined the majority that rejected Clement Haynsworth, one of Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees, and was among those who convinced Nixon that his support in the GOP caucus was fast evaporating over Watergate and that he had no choice but to resign.

Many of today’s Republican participants in the Monday meetings say they want to legislate closer to Scott’s example. “We had lots of team meetings where we plotted how to whip Democrats,” said John Cornyn of Texas. “This would be one meeting where we would look to find things we could agree on.’’

But that’s not to say that GOP leaders aren’t also mindful of seizing opportunities when they present themselves at these sessions. “We had a more compelling case to make,” Alexander said in explaining the recent run of success the GOP has enjoyed in the meetings. And Alexander himself has made the arrangement work to his own benefit — claiming some credit for brokering some of the GOP victories that have been backed by Democrats in his successful campaign last year for the No. 3 job in the party’s Senate hierarchy.

It’s less clear, however, what concrete gains the Democrats hope to claim from the bipartisan klatches this election-shortened legislative session. Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate leader on the Democratic side, acknowledged that his party of late has little to show for its original strategy of pressuring centrist Republicans to break ranks on the war and on fiscal issues. For example, just one GOP senator, Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, voted for an unsuccessful effort at the end of last month to break a filibuster and advance Democratic legislation to ease the mortgage-foreclosure crisis.

Senior Democratic aides say the vote by Smith, who faces a tough re-election race this fall, is the exception this year. Most other GOP senators who are vulnerable to defeat in November, these aides say, are declining to cross sides and join the Democrats on pivotal roll calls because they have concluded that, even if a few of them do break ranks, the majority still won’t be able to put together the 60 votes needed to break a GOP filibuster and push their priority bills to passage.

But Reid’s strategy at this point is to discount the need for GOP crossover votes. Instead, his design has been to create roll calls that seek to pin down vulnerable Republican incumbents on hot-button issues — and as a consequence complicate their re-election campaigns. “I’ve told the Republicans to enjoy it while you can,” Reid said.

That’s one reason Reid and Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois continue to back the gatherings, and see no reason to discipline Democratic attendees who break party ranks later on. These leaders say they’re confident that GOP unity will erode next year if the Democrats win more seats this fall. And so one of their long-term calculations is simple: “We need more centrist Republicans,” Durbin says, who would be willing in 2009 and beyond to vote with an enlarged Democratic majority to advance legislation past any filibuster blockade.

Other Democratic moderates, such as Evan Bayh of Indiana, argue that the bipartisan sessions could help push the Senate wing of the party toward a more moderate agenda — a potentially tall order because the two senators fighting for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, would both be pushed hard by the party’s liberal base to avoid governing from the center as president.

Still other Democrats use the meetings to pursue quite narrow agendas. Nebraska’s Ben Nelson , for example, recalls attending a breakfast last fall as part of his effort to win the confirmation of Leslie Southwick to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Critics said Southwick was insensitive to African-Americans while on the state appeals court in Mississippi. “We’re in an extremely partisan environment now. I don’t think a Gang of 14 would be possible now,” Nelson said. “But in the breakfast, we can at least talk and try to work things out.”

Beyond the Partisan Horizon

The weekly sessions also serve to promote ties between lawmakers at different points on the Senate’s seniority ladder — as well as across the metaphorical partisan aisle. Lieberman, Alexander and others have been able to use the breakfasts as informal tutorials on Senate customs for freshmen such as Democrats Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Another freshman Democrat, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has used the breakfasts to champion a proposal to create regional presidential primaries; Alexander has agreed to sign on as a cosponsor. And Klobuchar and Whitehouse have presented their views that proceedings on the floor could be improved. Whitehouse, for example, is eager to do away with the annual senatorial ritual of putting a series of minimally debated amendments to the budget resolution to roll call votes in rapid succession — the “vote-a-rama,” it’s called — viewing it as an entirely political and somewhat demeaning exercise.

The breakfasts and receptions can also help to emphasize collaboration on the kind of issues that typically get no hearing in a Congress dominated by partisan deadlock. Budget Chairman Kent Conrad , a North Dakota Democrat, has used the meeting as a forum to tout his proposals to slow the growth of the federal debt, a topic that’s essentially off the legislative table this year. In January, Conrad and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the Budget panel’s ranking Republican, made their pitch for a commission to recommend measures to curb the growth of entitlements; it now has 18 cosponsors. A similar House measure has won praise from both Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland and Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio.

All participants, in both parties, recognize that the recent centrist boom could vanish after the election — especially if Democrats get close to a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority or if the winner of the presidential election moves sharply to the right or left.

But Lieberman and Bayh remain bullish on the post-2008 prospects for legislative centrism. “I will try my best to help John McCain pull together bipartisan groups of members of Congress to find common ground on problems,” said Lieberman, who has displayed his independence no more forcefully than when he endorsed the Arizona Republican senator for president.

Bayh, who has endorsed Clinton, says a Democratic president might work with the breakfast group and do the same. “The question is how do we govern,’’ Bayh said. “If we govern in a sensible way, and forge bipartisan compromises, then the progressive-center coalition will hold. If not, we will allow the Republicans to come back.”

FOR FURTHER READING: FISA overhaul (HR 3773), CQ Weekly, p. 725; mortgage relief (S 2636), p. 562; Alexander, p. 546; Reid, p. 432; fiscal 2008 domestic spending (PL 110-161), p. 22; lobbying and ethics (PL 110-81), p. 39; minimum wage (PL 110-28), p. 44; children’s health, p. 266; Gang of 14, 2005 Almanac, p. 14-8. Klobuchar’s primary bill is S 1905; the Conrad-Gregg bill is S 2063.