Democrats' resentment against Lieberman cools
The Connecticut senator may get to keep a key chairmanship. On the GOP side, Ted Stevens of Alaska may face expulsion from the party's Senate caucus.
Reporting from Washington — Joe Lieberman's longtime Democratic allies grew practically apoplectic as he backed John McCain for president, stumped for the Republican candidate and criticized Barack Obama.
So when Obama won and Democrats cemented their hold on Congress, liberal activists demanded the independent Connecticut senator be tossed out of the Democratic caucus, and some Democratic senators called for him to be stripped of his committee chairmanship.
But none of that looks like it's going to happen.
Instead, when Senate Democrats vote this morning, they are likely to ask Lieberman to step down from chairing two subcommittees -- and allow him to keep running the homeland security and governmental affairs committee he now heads.
Sometime between the heat of the presidential campaign and now, the passion for retribution cooled dramatically. Much of that may have been because of the president-elect. Last week, Obama said he believed Lieberman should continue to work with the party.
One senior Democratic Senate aide said that before Obama made his feelings known, more senators than not thought Lieberman should "pay the price." But, the aide expects "the caucus to follow [Obama's] lead."
As part of a deal, Lieberman might give up chairmanship of two subcommittees, one a panel of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the other of the environment and public works committee.
The compromise, should it occur, would provide an anticlimactic ending to one of the more stirring subplots of the presidential campaign.
Already unpopular with many rank-and-file Democrats after running and winning as an independent candidate in Connecticut in 2006, Lieberman stirred even more resentment when he not only campaigned for McCain but suggested that Obama was not ready to be president.
"I am one who does not feel that somebody should be rewarded with a major chairmanship after doing what he did," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in an interview with Vermont Public Radio last week. "But I felt that some of his attacks that he was involved in against Sen. Obama. . . . I thought they went way beyond the pale."
After meeting this month with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) about his future, Lieberman suggested that he could join the Republicans if he lost his chairmanship.
