The US Senate lost a beacon of bipartisanship when Republican Richard Lugar was trounced by an ultra-conservative challenger — the latest erosion of a moderate congressional middle that will leave Washington more polarized than ever.
The crushing defeat of the longest-serving US senator from Indiana in a party primary on Tuesday is a glaring example of anti-incumbent sentiment and a warning to lawmakers of both parties — not to mention US President Barack Obama — in a pivotal election year.
Lugar, 80, considered himself a true conservative, but his propensity to work deals with Democrats over the decades — and often siding with Obama or Senator John Kerry in the US Foreign Relations Committee — steadily eroded his influence in a legislative body consumed by gridlock.
With hyper-polarization emer-ging as the Capitol Hill norm, the six-term Lugar was seen as increasingly out of touch with a changing political landscape that more often than not rewards ideological rigidity over cooperation.
After all, Lugar lost to a candidate, Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who once described bipartisanship as: “Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
Conservative Republican Senator Rand Paul said that it would be naive as a lawmaker to believe in “this whole idea that we need to all be bipartisan, hold hands and sing Kumbaya.”
Paul was among a handful of lawmakers swept into the Senate in 2010 on support from the US “Tea Party” movement — the low-tax, small-government movement that targeted moderate Republican incumbents and put forward anti-establishment alternatives like Paul.
Lugar spent years in statesmanlike cooperation with Democrats on some of the major foreign policy issues of his time, namely nuclear non-proliferation.
It was notable that some of the warmest words of tribute on Wednesday after Lugar’s defeat came from Democrats.
“He refused to allow this march to an orthodoxy about ideology and partisan politics to get in the way” of the business of Congress, Kerry said on the Senate floor.
“That’s something we’re going to lose: the institutional experience, the judgment, and the wisdom of the approach on some of those issues,” he said.
Former Republican senator Chuck Hagel, who served 12 years in the chamber until 2008, was irate that his former colleague might possibly have been done in for his non-ideological temperament.
“You’re penalized in the Republican Party today if you have a relationship” with someone outside the party, he told National Public Radio.
“What’s the point of that? I remember a time when a relationship with a president was pretty significant and people used to be proud of that,” Hagel added.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not