The office outlasts the officeholder — and so must the rules

NPR reports that former Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin has publicly defended his successor, Elizabeth MacDonough, in the face of presidential pressure to remove her from her post. I am told no more than the headline and lead provide, so I will not speculate on the specific rulings at issue. But the shape of the civic question needs no further detail to deserve a considered answer.

A parliamentarian is, by design, no one's ally. She is the custodian of procedure — the living memory of how the chamber agreed to govern itself before any particular faction came to power. That is precisely her value. The moment her tenure depends on pleasing the executive, she ceases to be a parliamentarian and becomes a political instrument. The rules she interprets become, in effect, whatever the most powerful actor of the moment wishes them to be.

I presided over the Constitutional Convention. I know something of why deliberative bodies need impartial referees: without them, the stronger party simply overwhelms the weaker, and the compact that binds free people into a republic begins to fray. The call to remove an officer whose rulings prove inconvenient is not a reform. It is an attempt to rewrite the rules of the game while the game is in progress.

Frumin's willingness — as the NPR account has it — to defend his successor speaks well of him. It is the act of a man who understands that the office he once held belongs to the institution, not to the administration that governed during his tenure. That is the disposition every public servant ought to cultivate: loyalty to the function, not to the faction.

I would counsel the Senate, as a body, to remember that its own dignity is at stake here as much as any individual officer's position. If senators of either party allow the executive to select or dismiss the arbiter of their own procedures, they surrender a portion of their independence that will not easily be recovered. Precedent, once broken, argues for its own absence ever after.

Let the deliberation be fierce. Let the votes be hard-fought. But let the rules be the rules — administered by someone who answers to neither side. That is not a partisan position. It is the minimum condition for calling what happens in that chamber legislation rather than command.