The Senate's Rhythm

[Ron Burgundy]

U.S. News & World Report - 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 (news, bio, voting record) 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 (news, bio, voting record) of Maryland. "But I also like to get things done. It's a little frustrating."

The nature of the institution has given rise to some larger-than-life characters. Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, minority leader for most of the 1960s, regularly switched positions on issues (the "Grand Old Chameleon," they called him) and was a huge influence on the Democrats' agenda, leading colleagues to label him "the most powerful member." Nine-term West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd (news, bio, voting record), a staunch guardian of Senate tradition, regularly takes to the floor to declaim the body's proper operations. (He's also author of a 3,009-page Senate history.)

Partisans. Over time, the Senate has become more rigid and hierarchical (formal party leadership began only in the early 1900s), which has made passing bipartisan bills a bit more difficult. Yes, there are still measures sponsored by strange bedfellows; Democratic Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) and Republican Sen. Jim Bunning (news, bio, voting record) recently cosponsored a bill on coal energy. But the Senate has become increasingly accustomed to party-unity votes. In 1970, about 35 percent of all bills in the Senate were decided on such votes, but in 2005, nearly 63 percent were, according to Congressional Quarterly.

And senators have increasingly been willing to use tools like the filibuster. In the 1950s, according to Barbara Sinclair of the University of California-Los Angeles, there was an average of less than one cloture vote each congressional session; so far this decade, that number has been over 50. "We might think senators are simply above the fray, or they're more statesmanlike than their House counterparts," says Steven Smith, Congress watcher at Washington University in St. Louis. "This is baloney. They are simply living under a separate set of rules."

That all complicates the future of the Democrats' agenda. Congressional observers looking for a historical comparison have harked back to the 1994 election, when Republicans swept 54 seats to regain control of the House for the first time in 40 years. In terms of sheer metrics, the analogy holds up pretty well: Democrats took 30 seats in November to recapture the House for the first time in 12 years. But the rest of the story is illustrative of the Democrats' challenges ahead. As the story goes, Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, careered into Washington with a bold 100 days-not hours that time-plan to reform Congress. And they largely succeeded-in the House.

In the Senate, though, several of their plans ultimately stalled despite Republican control. Ultimately, only four of their 11 initiatives were a considerable success; the rest had either significant modifications or failed entirely, according to the National Journal. "The predicament for House Democrats this time around is the same," says Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution. Put another way, even if the Democrats do succeed with their package of initiatives in the Senate and overcome vetoes from President Bush-several have been pledged-it won't be with any great speed. "You can be sure it won't pass in 100 hours," says Don Ritchie, the Senate's own historian. Majority Leader Reid expects lengthy debate on many of the Democrats' priorities-a hike in the minimum wage, for example-similar to the ethics and earmark legislation. Republicans, Reid grumbles, "are not wild about anything I've talked about."

Reid must reckon with another looming problem: a Senate full of presidential ambitions. Each election cycle, a handful of senators run; this year, though, it feels like two hand-fuls. "They always said we all looked in the mirror and said we're running for president," says former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux, a conservative Democrat. "But this time, it's probably closer to the reality." In fact, since 1960, sitting senators have run for president 50 times, but only five have won their party's nomination and only John F. Kennedy became president.

Still, the daily and weekly effects are daunting: Take a recent hearing with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for instance. The 21-member Senate Foreign Relations Committee has five possible presidential hopefuls, and they're all eager to press their case on Iraq policy. The bipartisan resolution proposed in the Senate last week to oppose Bush's plan to increase troops was sponsored in part by hopeful Sens. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat (and previous candidate in 1988), and Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record), a Nebraska Republican. As the primaries approach, Reid must deal with a basic problem as well. The senators won't all be in Washington; they'll be on the campaign trail. "These are people who are fiercely competitive. It's going to be tough for them to sit and not have different views and ideas on the same problems," Breaux says. "That problem [will make] the rest of Harry's hair go gray." With so many prospective presidential candidates to deal with, Reid may find those hairs losing color quickly. Nothing else in the Senate is likely to move that fast.

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20070122/ts_usnews/thesenatesrhythm [link]