Editors at the Washington Examiner seek more transparency in Congress’ upper chamber.
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, … 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.
