Most people will vote in just one election this year, on Nov. 5. But another very important election will take place just days later, although only around 50 people will vote. That election will be for the next Senate majority leader, and the outcome will go a long way to determining how well the next Congress will function, no matter who wins the White House.
The Democratic Party controls the Senate, although thanks to a difficult electoral map for it this year, that will almost certainly not be true by Nov. 6. There are 47 senators who claim the Democratic Party label and four “independents” who caucus with them, giving Democrats 51 votes for determining who controls the chamber.
Democrats seem set to lose seats in Montana and West Virginia. Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are possible Republican wins as well. At a minimum, Republicans should have 51 seats — failing that would be regarded as a disaster — and their majority may even grow to 54.
This means that whoever wins the election to lead Senate Republicans next Congress will likely also become Senate majority leader, an office that includes procedural powers such as the ability to decide what matter the Senate will take up next and how many amendments, if any at all, will be considered by the body.
For hundreds of years, the Senate functioned as a collegial institution in which the office of each senator was respected and senators were allowed to bring amendments to the floor and have them voted on by their colleagues. That began to change in the 1990s, when bipartisan “gangs” of senators met behind closed doors on contentious issues, came to a complete agreement on legislation, and presented their final product to the full body with a commitment to vote against all amendments, even ones a senator might have liked, to preserve the overall compromise.
This may be a good tactic for the occasional piece of landmark legislation such as the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, but when it becomes the only way the Senate does business, a key element of democracy is lost. To make matters worse, the written rules of the Senate, which can only be changed by statute or a supermajority of senators, empower the Senate majority leader to perform a legislative maneuver called “filling the tree,” which blocks all other senators from even offering an amendment to the legislation that is being considered.
During former President Barack Obama’s administration, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, made “filing the tree” common practice for most legislation and not an occasional exception. Not that the Democratic Party is entirely to blame. Once in power, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blocked amendment votes just as ruthlessly as Reid did. The results can be seen in the statistics. The Senate cast amendment votes on roughly three times as many bills between 1969 and 1990 as it did between 1999 and 2020, according to an analysis by the University of Oklahoma. While the 101st Congress of 1990 cast amendment votes on 59 bills, the most recently completed Congress only had amendment votes on 15 bills, according to Roll Call.
The result is that almost all of the people’s business is now conducted behind closed doors by small gangs of senators with little transparency or input from other senators. It is a lobbyist’s dream come true. If we want to fight the power of special interests in Washington, we need to move legislative debate out from secret backroom deals and onto the Senate floor.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is not running for Senate majority leader, but he did write a letter asking his colleagues only to vote for a candidate who promised to limit the use of “filing the tree” and make it easier for all senators to bring amendments to the floor and get a vote. The bipartisan group Fixing Congress has endorsed similar policy in a separate report.
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Empowering senators to get a vote on an amendment to proposed legislation is not a silver bullet that will fix Congress. It will require a lot more work on the part of senators though, who will be forced to take more votes on more issues, many of which will be difficult votes. But we should want our senators making tough choices in public and explaining those decisions in public. That is the only way we can hold them accountable.
We’ve let too many senators hide behind closed doors for too long. It’s time to make Senate amendment votes great again.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
