The Senate's Rhythm
A great deliberative body? Or presidential wannabes who can't stop talking?
Over in the House of Representatives, the Democrats now in control raced through their 100-hours agenda. They passed new ethics and earmark rules and their six campaign pledges on issues like the minimum wage and stem cell research. The Senate, meanwhile, took a more leisurely approach. Senators took eight days before passing an ethics and earmark bill, the first and only bill they'd considered. Twice there were votes to end debate. What started as a bipartisan bill devolved into a partisan fracas before eventually being resolved.
Searching for an explanation the day after one late-night kerfuffle, a dyspeptic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid turned to the Founding Fathers: "The Senate," he allowed, "was set up not to be very efficient." Not back then and certainly not now. This time around, as many as 10 senators may be running for president, so there may be more than the usual quotient of posturing in the so-called world's greatest deliberative body. And with only a 51-to-49 majority in the Senate, Democrats have an even steeper task ahead: They must sway Republicans if they're to fulfill their campaign pledges. So the programs being passed by the House may take a while to get through the Senate and become law. And some won't become law at all. The Senate will do its own thing. At its own pace.
The Senate was, indeed, set up to be the more deliberative of the two bodies. And that compromise was reached only after the framers decided to accommodate smaller states wary of their larger brethren. In fact, the Senate has always had its quirks. In the first Congress in 1789, senators often adjourned their own slow hearings to listen in on the more rambunctious House. And for the first six years, senators never conducted their business in public: The first Senate employee was a doorkeeper to shoo away members of the House and the pesky public.
A constitutional amendment ratified in 1913 finally did away with the arcane process of letting state legislatures select senators in favor of statewide popular elections, but significant procedural differences with the House remain. There is no formal committee as there is in the House that sets the terms of debate and gives the majority party significant power. A single senator can speak for unlimited time—a filibuster—to scuttle a bill, unless there are 60 or more votes to invoke "cloture," which technically ends debate. Senators can even place a secret hold on a bill, stopping it in its tracks.
Louisiana Sen. Huey Long led one filibuster in 1935 for 15 hours, 30 minutes; he finally stopped speaking to go to the restroom. The record filibuster, though, belongs to Sen. Strom Thurmond, who took to the floor in 1957 to oppose a civil rights bill; he spoke for 24 hours, 18 minutes. It's little wonder majority leaders have often found their jobs irksome: Republican Howard Baker suggested that running the Senate was like herding cats; Democrat George Mitchell compared it to working with 100 independent contractors. "I like the legislating," says freshman Democratic Sen. Benjamin Cardin of Maryland. "But I also like to get things done. It's a little frustrating."
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