🧵For all of my Congress nerds, the House Majority Leader's office has put out out Fun Facts about the 118th Congress. Let's begin: pic.twitter.com/23kiCFwuZN
— Michael Thorning (@ThorningMichael) December 18, 2023
And rounding it out with some membership info (just for @mollyereynolds), vacancies, votes, and vetoes: pic.twitter.com/u1RDtQ2IGb
— Michael Thorning (@ThorningMichael) December 18, 2023
Hard-right House conservatives derailed legislation scheduled for floor votes Tuesday in a rebuke to GOP leadership.
A group of House Republicans bucked their party to vote against a rule devised by GOP leaders to take up legislation that included measures to rein in the federal regulatory process and the Biden administration's ability to restrict gas stoves in particular. The rule was defeated on a 206-220 vote, as 11 GOP defectors joined all Democrats in opposition.
Another GOP "no" vote was Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., though he switched his vote in a procedural ploy to be able to bring the rule up again for consideration at a later date.
The dissenting Republicans said the vote was intended to signal their frustration with GOP leadership for cutting a deal last week on the debt limit they opposed. They also said leaders backtracked on a pledge to schedule a floor vote on gun rights legislation.
"We got rolled. It was a bad deal," said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, referring to the debt limit package. "We warned them not to cut that deal without coming down and sitting down and talk[ing] to us. So this is all about restoring a process that will fundamentally, you know, change things back to what was working."
Roy said the Republican conference headed by Speaker Kevin McCarthy must now decide how it will operate. “Is it going to be by consensus or is it going to be fiat?” he asked.
The surprise defeat of the House Republicans’ rule, typically adopted on a party-line vote, underscored the threat to McCarthy’s speakership as he tries to govern with a razor-thin majority.
It was the first defeat of a House rule on the floor since 2002, according to C-SPAN's Howard Mortman. At that time, anti-abortion Republicans rebelled against bankruptcy overhaul legislation over language Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., helped author that would bar protesters at abortion clinics from declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying court-ordered fines and judgments.
The rules of the House today still provide for a Committee of the Whole to process all revenue measures and bills that directly or indirectly appropriate money. However, until last week the COW had not been used since the first session of the 116th Congress in 2019.
So why was it suddenly back the week of July 18 to process an omnibus appropriations measure that combined six of the 12 regular money bills into one? The most obvious answer is to lend stature to the six, non-member delegates from D.C., American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marians, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Thanks to a rule change in 1993, they were allowed to vote in the COW, but not in the House, at least in those Congresses in which Democrats were in the majority and made the rules.
But, in 2020 they were shut out from any floor voting when the Democratic majority stopped using the Committee of the Whole. The delegates were obviously very upset and pressured for restoring their floor voting privileges in the COW. (They are still members of the standing committees and fully participate in those proceedings.)
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One of the more recent practices in the House has been to make a multitude of amendments in order to major bills – 650 to the defense authorization bill the week of July 11, and 190 to last week’s omnibus appropriations measure. The way the House has managed this gargantuan challenge is to give the bills’ floor managers authority to bundle multiple amendments into single, en bloc amendments. On the appropriations bill, for instance, 639 amendments were filed with the Rules Committee which then made 190 of them in order for floor consideration. The appropriations’ floor managers for the six-part bill then proceeded to bundle 188 of those amendments into eight en bloc amendments, five of which were adopted, and three rejected. The number of amendments in each en bloc varied from two to 45, with most averaging around 30.
The use of these massive, en bloc amendments, whether in the House, as with the DoD authorization, or in the COW, as with the appropriations bill, is not a shining example of deliberative democracy, let alone of comprehensibility. Whether the House continues to use the Committee of the Whole in the future or not, en bloc amendments are here to stay on mega-amendment bills. The best that can be said of it is that it is a time-saving device; the worst is that it is a mockery of democracy.
Despite deadlock on high-profile controversial bills, Congress does manage to pass legislation on lower-profile issues. Russell Berman in The Atlantic
The final two-plus years of the Trump administration, for example, began with a government shutdown and featured two presidential impeachments. But they also saw the passage of a major conservation bill, a new trade agreement, significant criminal-justice reform, and several pandemic-relief packages. Lawmakers banned surprise medical billing and raised the age for purchasing tobacco from 18 to 21. Sometimes Congress does get credit for its successes. The $2.2 trillion CARES Act, passed swiftly after the coronavirus shut down huge portions of the U.S. economy in March 2020, provided some form of relief to nearly every American, as did the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that Congress enacted a year later. (Not coincidentally, Gallup found that Congress’s approval rating peaked—at a still dismal 36 percent—around the time it was literally giving cash to most households.) More recently, the passage of a bipartisan infrastructure bill last year was a top story in the news.
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Last year, Simon Bazelon and Matthew Yglesias identified this dynamic as the “Secret Congress.” Perhaps a better term would be Shadow Congress, borrowing from the label recently affixed to certain “shadow docket” rulings of the Supreme Court. These new bills, after all, are public, but relatively few care to notice. One reason they draw little attention is because the president hasn’t been fighting for them, at least not publicly. Biden has spent no time campaigning for the passage of postal reform or the arbitration ban. He’s issued only a few statements on the Violence Against Women Act, despite the fact that helping write and pass the original landmark law was one of the president’s signature accomplishments as a senator, and something he regularly touted on the 2020 campaign trail.
Contrary to assumptions about the presidential “bully pulpit,” Biden’s silence might have helped these agreements come together. [Frances] Lee’s research has shown that presidential involvement in an issue tends to increase its partisanship, which in a divided Congress usually lowers its chance of passage.
At The Hill, Donald Wolfensberger notes that the House no longer operates under open floor rules:
I have recounted the evolution of the House and its Rules Committee in two books written since leaving the Hill: “Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial” (2000), and, “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays” (2018).
To summarize my findings from both books: The House has become much more partisan and more closed to broad member participation in the legislative process. This has two destructive consequences: (1) members are feeling increasingly marginalized and irrelevant due to rote party-voting pressures in committee and on the floor; and (2) their constituents are turned-off by all the partisan bickering and gridlock. Taken together, this is a major democratic disconnect.
In the appendices to my two books, I include Rules Committee tables that span several decades in support of my findings. Those tables are now updated to include the first session of the 117th Congress (2021). My tabulations are published every six months on the website of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) found here.
Six years ago, we started CalMatters with a bold mission to deliver strong public service journalism that empowers Californians to engage with their state government. I’m excited to share with you that we’re continuing this commitment with the launch of Glass House: California Legislator Tracker.
Our team has been working hard to create an accessible place where Californians can learn about their lawmakers and monitor their behavior. You can search for your lawmakers by entering your address and find information on your state Senator and Assemblymember.
Each lawmaker has a page that shares their key biographical information, how they lean politically based on their voting record, which committees they serve on, how special interest groups rate them, the politics of their district and their contact information so you can reach out to them.
Check out the tracker yourself, and let me know what you think. We will continue to add features that create more understanding about each legislator including where they get their money and key details about how they work within the policy making process. That’s why I’m asking for your support.
Nicholas Fandos at The New York Times:
When the House revamped its rules in the early days of the pandemic to allow lawmakers to vote remotely, Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina was among 161 Republicans who sued to block the arrangement, arguing that it “subverts” the Constitution.
But those objections were a distant memory by late June, when Mr. Norman and several other Republicans skipped town during a legislative workweek to rally at the southwestern border with Donald J. Trump. While they glad-handed with the former president, the lawmakers certified on official letterhead that they were “unable to physically attend proceedings in the House chamber” because of the coronavirus and designated colleagues in Washington to cast proxy votes in their places.
The arrangement might have attracted more notice had it not become so widespread since the House adopted rules last spring to allow members, for the first time, to cast votes without being physically present in the chamber. Once billed as a temporary crisis measure to keep Congress running and lawmakers protected as a deadly pandemic ripped across the country, the proxy voting system has become a tool of personal and political convenience for many House members.
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And data suggests that lawmakers regularly use the system to extend their weekends back home. According to outside experts who compiled and analyzed data on proxy voting in the House, its use often ticks up on days lawmakers are scheduled to fly in and out of town. The House returns on Monday after a two-week break; on its final day in session before the recess began, 39 members used proxies instead of showing up in person to vote.
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“Congress is like a small town — you miss the whole relationship,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the rules panel, calling the changes so far “the first step on a very slippery slope.”
Members who do not show up in person, he argued, are likely to miss the back-room conversations, face-to-face debate and arm-twisting on which Congress operates.
“As a whip, it’s much more difficult to whip somebody, to persuade them if they are in another place, distant and not part of the give and take,” said Mr. Cole, one of his party’s designated nose-counters, who has himself voted by proxy.
Just before adjournment on Monday, the House Clerk read a letter from the Sergeant-at-Arms declaring, after consultation with the Attending Physician, that the pandemic health emergency remains in effect, thereby extending to mid-August special rules allowing remote floor voting and virtual committee proceedings
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It’s not unusual for the House to adopt special rules to address special circumstances, and the pandemic shutdown has certainly been a special circumstance. But, once the crisis has mostly passed, members decide they liked the convenience of not having to fly in and out of Washington each week. They are much more comfortable staying at home, working their districts, helping their constituents with case work, looking after those special federal projects, and laying the groundwork for the crucial mid-term elections just around the corner in 2022. Never mind that members already have one or two district offices fully staffed with folks to do that work.
Yesterday’s emergency mandates become today’s convenient necessities (pardon the oxymoron). It might have some appeal to the more fiscally conservative citizens: think of all the taxpayer dollars being saved on roundtrip plane flights each week Congress is in session. I suspect, however, that most voters would like to know their representatives are actually earning their pay by being physically present in their committees and floor sessions in Washington. Isn’t the essence of deliberative democracy, after all, face-to-face deliberations between proponents and opponents of a particular bill or amendment?
The storyline today will be the markets and the stimulus.
Even in the best of times legislating over how to spend $2 trillion is a messy affair; lobbyists swarm like locusts, secret deals are cut, slush funds and precedents are conjured from imaginary dollars (it will all be debt), and we will have a national debate over priorities and values.
Now compress that into a few days and overlay it with PANIC.
The mood of the hour is Do Something. Go Big. Stop Squabbling, which is understandable considering the hit the economy is about to take.
But it is also the formula for bad legislation and even worse policy. The "squabbling" is what we do in a constitutional Republic; it's the way the system was set up. We're not supposed to give the federal government the power to essentially take over the economy in a mere weekend.
Conservatives used to understand the need for prudence. But conservatives also used to be against socialism too.
The stakes are high not just for the parties in DC, but for the rest of us as well, because we are about to explode the national debt in a one-shot effort to stave off depression. So it seems a good idea to get it right, and keep the sleaze to a minimum.
Nine out of 10 House members don't agree on much, but they do agree it's past time to make an array of modernizing changes to the place they work.
So the vote was 395-13 on Tuesday to implement 29 unanimous recommendations from a special bipartisan committee, with six members from each party, who worked on the package for almost a year.
Their work is designed to bring the technology, purchasing, travel, and human resources practices into the 21st century, at least on half of Capitol Hill. The ultimate goal is to help strengthen legislative branch muscles that have long been atrophying, for an array of political reasons, in hopes that Congress can perform a bit better in balance-of-powers matchups that presidents of both parties have been routinely winning for decades.
"Trying to solve 21st century problems with 20th century technologies is a disservice to the American people who rightfully expect timely action from their representatives," Derek Kilmer of Washington, the committee's Democratic chairman, said during the brief debate.
There is broad agreement that an essential step in making democracy work better is making Congress more functional, and an essential part of that is returning much more cross-partisan collegiality to the place.
To that end, the House voted to expand the orientation for new members, starting with the class elected in November, to introduce courses where Republicans and Democrats would study together the House's rules, parliamentary procedures and best practices for decorum and mutual respect.
Other parts of the package developed by the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress (as the panel is formally known) are designed to create more times and places on Capitol Hill where members from both sides can congregate. Such bipartisan socializing has almost disappeared in recent years, in part because of the pressure to spend so much time fundraising, even as there's a universal recognition that strong personal relationships are essential to policymaking collaboration.
Improving staff retention and increasing diversity, by making the House a better workplace, is also addressed in the package. While personnel policies are currently set by each of the 435 members, the House voted to create a human resources hub for all of them to use. And an Office of Diversity and Inclusion was formed to help committees and members recruit, hire, train, develop, advance, promote and retain more people who are not white men.
Hours after the vote, Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Kemba Hendrix, who runs a staff diversity program for the Democrats, to take on the job for the whole House.
The House vote took only a small step, however, toward addressing another major impediment to making Congress work better. The measure will pay for an outside firm to recommend whether the pay scale for aides should be increased along with the size of personal office and committee staffs. Salaries have not kept up with inflation in the past two decades, and staff rosters have shrunk as Congress has decided to apply more fiscal constraints to itself than to most federal agencies.
Low experience levels and high turnover, with the best talent heading to corporate or lobbying jobs, has been a consequence.
The House voted to extend the life of the committee through this year, and its members are mulling an array of additional ideas for improving the place's workplace culture and legislative clout.
Senators’ increased dependence on the parliamentarian, whether or not they are presiding over the chamber, suggests an erosion of procedural knowledge in the Senate. Today, senators members spend less time on the floor, observing the legislative process in action. During the limited time in which senators are in Washington, their schedules are dominated instead by committee hearings, constituent meetings, and fundraisers. More than in the past, senators return to their states at the first possible chance to spend time with families that remain behind or to engage in a permanent campaign to win reelection. Given all of this, senators have fewer incentives and less time to develop the procedural knowledge necessary to participate effectively in the legislative process. As Riddick concluded, “It was just natural that they had to begin to depend on somebody to do the procedural aspects for them, leaving to themselves the substantive matters to be put into legislation.”
HealthEquity, a leading provider of health savings accounts, said last week that it had "participated in drafting legislation" to significantly expand HSAs.
Why it matters: Most companies hide their behind-the-scenes involvement in bills, Axios' Bob Herman writes. And the bill the company says it helped write is one that would directly expand its profits.
- The bill, sponsored by by Reps. Ami Bera (D-Calif.) and Jason Smith (R-Mo.), would expand HSAs to the 57 million seniors and people with disabilities enrolled in Medicare.
Between the lines: HealthEquity is one of the largest companies that handles health savings accounts, which function as pre-tax savings funds for medical expenses. This bill would undeniably boost its top and bottom lines.
What they’re saying: HealthEquity did not address questions about how it shaped the bill or whether its involvement was a conflict of interest.
- HealthEquity manages HSAs for 4 million people, and it posts some of the highest margins in the industry.
- The company expects to register $340 million of revenue this year, with a 25% net profit margin.
- Opening Medicare up to HSAs would allow HealthEquity to collect a lot more money in interest, as it pools more health care cash, and a lot more in transaction fees as more people swipe their HSA cards at a doctor’s office.
- A spokesperson for Bera said HealthEquity “did not draft this legislation,” despite the company’s press release, and that Bera consults “with a wide range of stakeholders when writing legislation, including in this instance.”
Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks.
Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.
A two-year investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation.
USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law..
The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.
The phenomenon of copycat legislation is far larger. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.
House Democrats held an emotional debate behind closed doors Thursday over how to stop losing embarrassing procedural battles with Republicans — a clash that exposed the divide between moderates and progressives.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) took a hard line at the caucus meeting, saying that being a member of Congress sometimes requires taking tough votes.
“This is not a day at the beach. This is the Congress of the United States,” Pelosi said, according to two sources.
Pelosi also said vulnerable Democrats who had the “courage” to vote against the Republican motions to recommit would become a higher priority for the party leadership and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the superstar New York freshman lawmaker, suggested she would alert progressive activists when Democrats are voting with the GOP on these motions, said the sources.
In the end, Pelosi and other top Democrats didn’t agree to any rules change and will continue to study the issue. The motion to recommit offers the House minority one last shot at changing legislation before it receives a final floor vote. Typically, the motion is used to try to squeeze the majority party, but it rarely succeeds.
House Democrats have repeatedly faced surprise Republican floor attacks since taking control of the chamber, part of a bid by the GOP to target their most vulnerable members and fracture the party. Just six weeks in, the GOP effort has been an astonishing success — dividing Pelosi and her top deputies and pitting members of the freshmen class against each other.
At issue is a wonky procedural tactic that Republicans have weaponized to split Democrats on a range of thorny issues, from sexual abuse to anti-terrorism funding. Roughly two dozen Democrats have so far bucked their party and sided with Republicans on the votes, which offer the House minority one last chance to shape legislation on the floor.
As the GOP continues to peel off rank-and-file Democrats, party leaders have grown alarmed — and are increasingly engaged in finger-pointing about who is to blame for the disunity and what to do about it, according to interviews with nearly two dozen Democratic lawmakers and aides.
Freshmen Democrats in swing districts say they have no plan to stop voting with the GOP when they feel the need. They’ve even been given the blessing to do so by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), despite resistance from Pelosi.
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“Clearly you’re doing this as a ploy and not because you actually give a shit about the issue,” freshman Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.) said of House Republicans. “It makes it hard for those of us who do vote against the [GOP proposals], who are in similarly tough districts.”
Republicans have forced more than a dozen of these votes — known as a motion to recommit — on the House floor since January, with increasing numbers of Democrats voting for them each time.
GOP leaders scored their biggest victory yet with the maneuver on Wednesday after a dramatic moment on the floor in which Democrats were forced to add language condemning anti-Semitism to an unrelated bill. Eager to project unity, all Democrats voted for it — the first time since 2010 a motion to recommit was approved by the House.
Between its inception in January 2017 and its final day on Jan. 3, the GOP-led 115th Congress enacted 442 public laws, the most since the 110th Congress (2007-09). Of those laws, 69% were substantive (as judged by our deliberately generous criteria) – not much different from the 71% substantive share achieved by the 114th Congress, in which the Republican-controlled House and Senate faced off against Democratic President Barack Obama. (The 114th Congress passed 329 laws in total.)
Nearly a third of the laws passed by the 115th Congress were ceremonial in nature; it was the third Congress in a row in which the ceremonial share increased. Those ceremonial measures include 109 that renamed post offices, courthouses and the like – a fourth of the Congress’ total legislative output.
In our regular assessments of Congress’ legislative productivity, we’ve cast a wide net regarding what makes a law “substantive.” Basically, anything that makes a change in federal law (however tiny) or authorizes the spending of taxpayer dollars (however few) makes the cut. Besides the measures referred to above on building-renamings, we count laws as “ceremonial” if they award medals, designate special days, authorize commemorative coins or otherwise memorialize historic events. (We exclude entirely “private laws,” which typically exempt a single person from a single provision of general law.)
This article examines the origins and influence of ideological index scores—where liberal and conservative interest groups rate legislator performance on selected roll call votes. Two such groups founded in the mid-twentieth century—the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA)—were crucial to the development of this type of metric, transforming roll call analysis from detailed tabular scorecards into streamlined percentage scores showing how often a lawmaker voted “right.” ADA and ACA scores have been heavily utilized in political science as proxies for liberalism and conservatism and used to demonstrate the growing polarization of the congressional parties. Archival evidence suggests, however, that those scores were intended to create the very phenomenon they have been used to measure. They were deeply political rather than objective metrics, which the ADA and ACA used to guide their electoral activities in accordance with an increasingly partisan strategic plan. Each group directed campaign resources toward incumbent lawmakers they rated highly, but they did so unevenly—with the ADA favoring liberal Democrats over Republicans and the ACA showing a preference for conservative Republicans over time. By rewarding favored lawmakers in their preferred party, and using scores to highlight and discourage ideological outliers, they hoped to reshape the parties along more distinct and divided ideological lines—to create more “responsible” parties, as prominent political scientists then desired.Amy Melissa McKay has an article at Political Research Quarterly titled "Fundraising for Favors? Linking Lobbyist-Hosted Fundraisers to Legislative Benefits." The abstract:
Do legislators and lobbyists trade favors? This study uses uncommon data sources and plagiarism software to detect a rarely observed relationship between interest group lobbyists and sitting Members of Congress. Comparison of letters to a Senate committee written by lobby groups to legislative amendments introduced by committee members reveals similar and even identical language, providing compelling evidence that groups persuaded legislators to introduce amendments valued by the group. Moreover, the analysis suggests that these language matches are more likely when the requesting lobby group hosts a fundraising event for the senator. The results hold while controlling for ideological agreement between the senator and the group, the group’s campaign contributions to the senator, and the group’s lobbying expenditures, annual revenue, and home-state connectionsFrom the article:
There are other plausible explanations of fundraising behavior that do not imply a suspect link to legislative effort. Hosting fundraisers may help interest groups achieve solidary goals of group maintenance (Gray and Lowery 2000; Olson 1965; Salisbury 1969). Fundraisers also give attending lobbyists opportunities to keep abreast of what other lobbyists are doing and working on, as well as to get face time with the politician and the politician’s staff—a benefit that may increase the lobbyist’s subsequent access to legislative offices. For these reasons and others, I stop short of arguing that fundraising lobbyists are buying legislation. Still, the analysis suggests that fundraising activity by lobbyists does seem to encourage legislators to perform narrow legislative favors for the lobbyists that are helpful to them.
The first year of the 115th Congress mostly saw breakdowns in the legislative process and Congress’s ability to function. Neither chamber gave its members many opportunities to offer amendments to legislation. The Senate was not gridlocked by many attempts to filibuster legislation, but the cause seems to be more that the Senate considered few controversial bills that could be filibustered rather than any trend away from reliance on the filibuster. This may also explain the low utilization of conference committees to resolve differences between the chambers. Congress’s ability to carry out its most basic functions, the budget and appropriations processes, seem to have completely atrophied, and could be considered failures. Though the Senate spent ample time working in Washington, the House continued to lag behind in this area. Halfway through the 115th Congress, there is much room left for improvement.
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Members of the House were mostly closed off from offering amendments to legislation on the floor last year. In 2017, 53 percent of rules were closed rules, meaning no amendments could be offered. This is the highest percentage of closed rules among the years in the index.
Forty-seven percent of rules were structured, meaning the only amendments that could be offered were those pre-approved by the majority-controlled Rules Committee. When structured rules were in place, 52 percent were offered by Democrats, the minority, 41 percent were offered by Republicans, the majority, and 7 percent were offered on a bipartisan basis. Zero rules were open. Only one other comparative congress, the 111th Congress had zero open rules at the end of its first year.
Taken together, this is the most closed amendment process among the years in the index.
The majority leader blocks senators from offering alternative proposals by filling the amendment tree, i.e., offering the maximum allowable number of amendments to legislation before other senators have had a chance to debate the measure and offer their own amendments.
Once used sparingly in extraordinary circumstances, the tactic is now routine and well-documented. But less appreciated is the extent to which its normalization in recent years represents a radical break from the Senate’s past practice. Also, less understood is how precisely the tactic empowers the majority to pass its agenda, given that the minority can still filibuster the underlying legislation.
Recent research suggests that the amendment process gradually evolved to facilitate the orderly consideration of the Senate’s business. The direction in which it evolved was informed by the Senate’s effort to balance the need for order in its work with the imperative of legislative deliberation.
While the Senate’s first amendment trees only permitted two amendments to be pending at the same time, they were expanded in response to member demands by adding new branches. The result was to increase the number of amendments that could be pending before the Senate simultaneously.
Notwithstanding this increase, members maintained order by adhering to the principles of precedence first compiled for the Senate in Thomas Jefferson’s A Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate and still followed today. In general, those principles held that senators should have an opportunity to amend legislative text proposed to be stricken and/or inserted before the actual vote to strike and/or insert said text.
Analyzing how the Senate’s current amendment trees came to be underscores the extent to which using them to block amendments is a perversion of the Senate’s rules and practices. That is, the precedents underpinning the trees are now being used for a purpose fundamentally at odds with the one for which they were first created. Instead of facilitating the orderly consideration of amendments on the Senate floor, they are now being used to block the consideration of amendments altogether.
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The routine practice of filling the amendment tree in the Senate today, coupled with the cloture process to end debate, effectively prevents members from being able to perfect legislation before it receives an up-or-down vote on final passage. Instead of a deliberative process designed to discern the true sense of the institution’s membership on an issue, senators are confronted with a fait accompli. This practice is inconsistent with the longstanding rules and practices on which the amendment process is based.