Sen. Phil Berger of Rockingham County, the Senate Republican leader, is a well-liked, respected and thoughtful legislator. I think he has had some good ideas, including some proposals that would make the Senate's debates friendlier to members of his party and some Democrats, too. Among other things, he proposed altering an arcane rule on calling the question that has caught senators by surprise more than once -- in effect ending debate on an entire bill instead of just on one part. But Democrats rule the roost in the Senate. With 30 of the 50 Senate seats, Democrats call the shots.
Berger is understandably frustrated by this. The minority always is, and Senate Republicans have been in the minority since the crust of the earth cooled. I don't blame them for feeling run over. I would too.
After Wednesday's opening session, when Democrats rejected proposed Republican rules changes, Berger let fire with a complaint about partisanship and the need for bipartisanship. No quibble there.
But the language Berger used illustrates a problem for his party. He, like many Republicans, likes to call it the "Democrat Party," not the Democratic Party, and refer to their colleagus as "Democrat senators," not "Democratic senators." They deliberately ignore the fact that the formal, legal, actual name of the organization is "Democratic Party." Democrats do, of course, use "Democrat" as a noun; they do not use "Democrat" improperly as an adjective.
"The ungrammatical conversion of the noun 'Democrat' to an adjective was the brainchild of Republican partisans, presumably an attempt to deny the opposing party the claim to being 'democratic' -- or in the words of New Yorker magazine senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg, 'to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation,'" notes the Web site Media matters. "In the early 1990s, apparently due largely to the urging of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the use of the word 'Democrat' as an adjective became near-universal among Republicans."
The Web site also notes that President Warren Harding liked to call it the "Democrat Party" and so did U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy R-WI, who, Hertzber wrote,"made it a regular part of his arsenal of insults."
In his Wednesday news release, Berget put himself in the logically challenged position of beginning, "Now is the time for a bipartisan effort to remake North Carolina's government from the ground up. Democrat Senator Marc Basnight's speech…."
And later, referring to the rejection of rules changes, Berger said, "Unfortunately, this failure indicates a continuation of past practices in which Democrat leaders dictate the operations of an extremely partisan Senate from behind closed doors."
Berger's right about the need for bipartisanship. But as long as he and his colleagues continue to deliberately misuse the name of the opposition party in such a high-schoolish way, it's hard to see how Democrats would feel much reason to change their ways. It probably only reinforces the Democrats' view that Republicans are only going to play political games, and so the Grand Old Party's legitimate gripes can simply be ignored.
