The Forum
Volume 9, Issue 4
2011
Article 3
Governing through the Senate
Making Laws and Making Points: Senate
Governance in an Era of Uncertain Majorities
Frances E. Lee, University ofMaryland
Recommended Citation:
Lee. Frances E. (2011) "Making Laws and Making Points: Senate Governance in an Era of
Uncertain Majorities," The Forum’. Vol. 9: Iss. 4, Article 3.
DOI: 10.2202/1540-8884.1488
©2012 De Gruyter. All rights reserved.
Making Laws and Making Points: Senate
Governance in an Era of Uncertain Majorities
Frances E. Lee
Abstract
One of the most striking characteristics of the contemporary Senate is the regular transfers of
party control, with six shifts in the majority between 1980 and 2007. Continual uncertainty about
future control of the chamber has important consequences for congressional incentives. In this
environment, senators have adapted their behavior and institution to more effectively contest Senate
control. These adaptations include: the rise of “message politics” and the growing size, significance,
and outreach capabilities of party committees and leadership staffs.
KEYWORDS: Senate, leadership, congressional control
Author Notes: Frances E. Lee is professor of government and politics at the University of
Maryland. She is author of Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the US
Senate (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and her articles have appeared in the American
Political Science Review, Journal ofPolitics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and American Journal
ofPolitical Science, among others.
Lee: Making Laws and Making Points
This article was written about the 112th Congress that convened in
2011. Obama was president, the Democrats controlled the Senate,
but Republicans the House.
Just as the new Congress was convening in January, CO Weekly reporter
Fred Barbash (2011) began an article, “The 112th Congress is shaping up to be a
series of long, publicly funded campaign ads in which the parties frame the issues
and each other for 2012. . . . Much of the session will resemble political
advertising, with a script.” Looking back as the first session of the 112th Congress
draws to a close, Barbash could hardly have been more prescient. As the
Christmas recess begins, only seventy-three laws have been enacted, less than half
the number Congress has typically cleared by this point. Most of these laws were
minor matters, such as naming federal buildings and short-term extensions of
existing laws. One of the few ambitious initiatives, the creation of a “Super
committee” for deficit reduction, collapsed in abject, highly publicized failure.
Congress-watchers have been treated to news articles with titles like, “Senate Has
Become Chamber of Failure” (Farenthold and Kane 2011) and “Senate’s Slow
Pace Frustrates Newer Members” (Dennis 2011), along with a lengthy front-page
Washington Post story explaining quorum calls (Farenthold 2011).
Despite the lack of legislative output, the Senate has not been inactive.
The body has been in session 165 days this session, and it has held 235 recorded
votes. Yet much of that activity has been symbolic, oriented toward sending
messages to external audiences. Senate leaders have repeatedly staged votes not to
clear legislation but simply to demonstrate what cannot pass. No sooner had the
House of Representatives passed its budget in May, for example, than Majority
Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) held an unnecessary roll-call vote to kill it publicly.
Afterwards, Republicans immediately demanded and received a vote on President
Obama’s budget, to underscore its similar lack of viability.
One of the testiest confrontations between the parties occurred during
Senate consideration of a measure to punish China for currency manipulation, a
politically popular bill with no prospect of success in the Republican-controlled
House and little support in the White House. Even though cloture had been
invoked, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sought to offer a non­
germane amendment to force a vote on President Obama’s proposed American
Jobs Act. Given that the plan had not yet garnered majority support, the goal was
to underscore bipartisan opposition to the president. Democrats would not agree
to permit this amendment, because the intra-party divisions raised embarrassing
questions about their ability to govern on the central issue of the day. Heated
debate ensued as Republicans attempted a procedural maneuver to require a vote.
When the Senate parliamentarian advised that such a motion was within Senate
rules, Reid and 50 other Democrats voted to overturn the chair’s ruling and
established a new Senate precedent prohibiting such motions post-cloture.
From the vantage point of lawmaking, one can only be struck by the
futility of the whole endeavor. Republicans knew the procedural vote they sought
to force would have no effect on the legislation. Similarly, everyone knew that the
1
2
The Forum
Vol. 9 [2011], No. 4, Article 3
underlying bill itself had virtually no chance of becoming law. At the conclusion
of the fracas, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) observed bitterly, “What we have done
tonight ... is we have changed the rules of the Senate on a messaging bill, on a
matter that the majority leader had the votes on” (Cong. Record, October 6, 2011,
S6318). The whole confrontation was symbolic and aimed at generating campaign
messages. Toward the end of the debate, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) concluded
in frustration, “I wish I could fix the Senate. It is not functioning the way any of
us wishes—plenty of blame to go around” (Cong. Record, October 6, 2011,
S6280).
Partisan Uncertainty about Majority Control
Political scientists and journalists typically explain the difficulties of governing in
the Senate today by reference to the ideological polarization of the two parties
combined with the institution’s supermajoritarian procedures. Undoubtedly, these
are formidable obstacles to successful legislating in the contemporary Senate.
Polarization both encourages minority party senators to insist on their many
institutional prerogatives and makes the sixty-vote threshold harder than ever to
overcome. Even so, such accounts overlook another factor that generates
pervasive disincentives for bipartisan cooperation: sheer competition for
institutional power.
One of the most striking characteristics of the current era in American
politics is its prolonged, evenly matched contest for party control of national
institutions. Recent decades have seen narrow congressional majorities, repeated
shifts in party control of Congress and the presidency, near-parity in partisan
identification among voters, and close (and, in one case, contested) presidential
elections. Questions about control of the Senate have been at the center of this
national party competition. Between 1980 and 2007, there were six transitions in
party control of the chamber, with Democrats in control for six Congresses and
Republicans in the majority for eight. It is obviously an open question whether
Democrats will retain their current Senate majority beyond the 2012 elections
next year.
It is important to note just how remarkably competitive this period is.
First, the current era of continuous party competition for party control of the
Senate is unprecedented in its length. There is no other period in American history
in which there were six party shifts in the Senate over the course of 27 years. The
only other period that rivals the present is a 22-year stretch during the Jacksonian
party system (between 1823 and 1845), in which there were five switches in
Senate control.
Lee: Making Laws and Making Points
Second, the contemporary period stands as a clear departure from the
normal state of American politics during most of the post-New Deal era. For
many years after 1932, Democrats were viewed as the natural majority party in
Congress. Indeed, Democrats held Senate majorities for all but two Congresses
between 1932 and 1980, a length of many political lifetimes and seemingly a
settled fact about American politics. Throughout the 1960s, Democrats held two
Senate seats or more for every Republican. Throughout the 1970s, Republicans
would have needed to win 18 seats on average to gain a Senate majority. For
Republicans to capture so many seats in any given election year must have
appeared a remote prospect.
The 1980 elections began to destabilize this conventional wisdom.
Outperforming expectations, Republicans took twelve Senate seats from the
Democrats, claiming party control of the chamber. Majority control of the Senate
became an open question thereafter. The sense of party competition intensified
further after Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 1994,
putting party control of that chamber into question as well.
Competition is a powerful spur to party organization. When control of an
office or institution appears safe for one party, incentives for the opposition to
mobilize are weakened. In such cases, the prospects of success seem too poor to
justify the effort. At the same time, the lack of competition also undermines
motivation for the party in power to marshal resources to protect its holdings. A
seemingly safe majority party apparatus is likely to atrophy, simply because
organization appears unnecessary to ensure its continued success. Joseph A.
Schlesinger (1985, 1167) built an influential theory of party organization out of
this key insight: “The critical characteristic of a competitive party system is
insecurity, and ... [as that increases] I would expect all aspects of party
organization to develop more fully.”
Political science has not yet given sufficient attention to the ways in which
this partisan uncertainty is likely to affect congressional incentives. In 1974, when
David Mayhew proposed that we engage in a thought experiment by assuming
that members of Congress were single-minded seekers of re-election, Democrats
had been in firm control of Congress for a generation. Under such circumstances,
it made sense to theorize that lawmakers would be single-mindedly concerned
with their own individual careers. In such an environment, Democrats perceived
little threat to their majority status, and Republicans could envision little hope for
change. The fate of the congressional parties did not seem to be in much doubt.
In today’s environment of intense two-party competition for control of
Congress, the political stakes are higher. Members remain concerned about their
own individual careers, of course. But they are also far more likely to consider
how their actions might affect their party’s prospects for retaining or gaining
power in the chamber. Perhaps it is time to pose a new thought experiment on
3
4
The Forum
Vol. 9 12011], No. 4, Article 3
Mayhew’s model: If we assume senators are seekers of partisan majorities, what
kind of behavior would we observe? And if we assume that members create
institutions that serve that goal, what kinds of institutions would such senators
create?
The Rise of Message Politics
When Wicker complained during the 2011 debate on China currency
manipulation that Senate rules had been changed “on a messaging bill,” he was
using a term widely understood in today’s Senate. Senators regularly discuss
“message bills,” “message votes,” and “message amendments.” Political
scientists, for their part, have recently begun to investigate the phenomenon
(Evans 2001, Evans and Oleszek 2002, Groeling 2010, Malecha and Reagan
2012, Sellers 2010). “Messages” are often defined as communications strategies
designed to get all senators of a particular party discussing the same issues,
themes, and talking points. Indeed, message politics explicitly do entail this kind
of partisan coordination.
Yet partisan messaging on the Senate floor is not just a matter of
coordinated speech-making. Most importantly, what distinguishes “message”
bills, votes, and amendments from regular bills, votes, and amendments is that
they are not expected actually to shape or pass laws. The goal is communication,
not lawmaking. They are a precise equivalent at the level of the political party of
the “position taking” that David Mayhew (1974, 62) famously identified as one of
individual members’ main activities: “The congressman as position taker is a
speaker rather than a doer. The electoral requirement is not that he make pleasing
things happen but that he make pleasing judgmental statements. The position
itself is the political commodity.” With message politics, whole parties are
engaging in position-taking. They are “speaking” rather than “doing.”
This distinction is central to what senators mean when they talk about
“message” activity on the Senate floor. The point is clearly evident when one
examines senators discussing “message” votes, bills, and amendments in the
public record. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) offers one of many such examples:
Instead of working to pass necessary legislation like the 11 remaining
appropriations bills, which are now jammed up and waiting for movement
like the cars in a typical rush hour on the Washington beltway, we are
engaged in yet another leadership-driven message dance. These fandangos
feature bills which are meant to drive home political points to the
unsuspecting American voter. (Cong. Record, August 1, 2006, S8506)
Lee: Making Laws and Making Points
Byrd complains about the Senate engaging in a “leadership-driven message
dance” rather than “working to pass necessary legislation.”
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) draws a similar contrast between serious
legislating and messaging during a debate over an amendment to a 2001 tax bill:
“This is not real. This is a message amendment. ... It is not real legislation. . . I
am getting tired of message amendments. Mr. President, I want to legislate. I do
not want to give messages” (Cong. Record, March 26, 2004, S3217). Mitch
McConnell put the distinction between messaging and lawmaking pithily in a
recent colloquy with Harry Reid: “The exercise we are going to have later today
has nothing to do with making laws and making a difference. It is about making a
point. We both know how to do that. We both know how to make points and
make laws. What we are doing later today is not about making laws” (Cong.
Record, November 3, 2011, S7095). It is clear from each of these references that
senators see “message” amendments and bills as far more about communication
than actual lawmaking.
Another hallmark of message votes is that the proposals are often not the
product of hearings or committee deliberation. “Unfortunately, nobody has
discussed the substance of this amendment,” Baucus characteristically observed
during one such debate. “We are in message amendment time. Nobody has looked
at the substance. There have been no hearings on this” (Cong. Record, March 17,
2001, S5090). Bills and amendments devised for message purposes have not been
carefully vetted as legislation.
Most importantly, senators understand that message votes and bills are
expected to fail, often even designed to do so. “All we are doing today is having
what we call message votes, show votes,” remarked Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).
“They are set up to fail” (Cong. Record, May 25, 2011, S3342). Sen. John Kerry
(D-MA) made the same observation when the Senate considered the motion to
proceed to the House-passed budget during the 112th Congress:
Here we have the so-called Cut, Cap, and Balance Act that passed the
House of Representatives. Everybody understands it is nothing more than
an ideological message exercise. Everybody knows it is not going to pass
the Senate. We know even more that if it does pass, it is not going to be
signed by the President. (Cong. Record, July 21, 2011, S4774)
Not winning is central to messaging tactics. The usual purpose of a
partisan message vote is to put a politically attractive idea or proposal before the
public and then to demonstrate that it cannot pass, given the current composition
of the Senate or national institutions more generally. The structure of a “message”
is as follows: “Here is an appealing idea we have, one that our party and/or the
public supports. But we cannot enact it because of the majority party’s wrong
5
6
The Forum
Vol. 9 [2011]. No. 4. Article 3
priorities, the minority party’s filibuster, the House’s intransigence, or the
president’s opposition.” The goal is to crystallize a conflict for public
consumption in hopes of crafting an argument useful for political campaigns. At
base, that argument is: “We need a change in party control somewhere.” The
outcome of the message vote—i.e., the failure of the attractive proposal—offers
that reason for change.
Both parties engage in message politics. The Senate majority will take up
politically useful bills that it knows have no prospect of becoming law. It will
consider and call for votes on bills that members know (1) have no chance of
passage in the House of Representatives, (2) will be successfully blocked by the
president, or (3) will fail to clear the sixty-vote threshold for cloture. The primary
path open for the Senate minority party to engage in message politics is via
amendments. Message amendments are prime opportunities for the minority to
shift Senate floor debate to its preferred issues and priorities, otherwise a difficult
proposition for a minority party
Message politics has special value for the minority party. The majority
party is generally more interested in using its institutional power to make laws
than to make points, at least under those circumstances when it has some prospect
of being able to succeed in doing so. The majority needs to demonstrate that it can
govern; success in doing so will constitute a campaign argument that its members
should retain the majority. By contrast, one would expect the minority party to
prioritize messaging more highly than the majority, at least during periods when
party control of the Senate is in doubt.
The minority party is naturally less enthusiastic about the majority’s
legislative agenda and would prefer to legislate on other topics altogether. Even
when the majority brings up bills that the minority party supports (or at least does
not oppose), minority party members have less political motivation to prioritize
lawmaking over messaging, because it wins fewer credit-claiming opportunities
from the successful passage of laws. Given these priorities, the minority is eager
to exploit any means to communicate to voters how it would do things differently.
The upshot of the majority’s and minority’s different priorities is that
Senate negotiations over message politics will often take the following form: the
majority leader will bargain with the minority leader to arrive at some number of
minority-party-sponsored message amendments in exchange for the minority
agreeing to take up and hold votes on legislative proposals. Sen. Rick Santorum
(R-PA) explained the logic as follows: “We would be happy to give you a vote on
your message amendment in exchange for you giving us a vote on something that
is actually going to help people. . . . We have offered to the Democratic leader
that in exchange for a vote on your message amendment, you allow us to pass and
go to conference on a bill” (Cong. Record, April 1, 2004, S353O).
Lee: Making Laws and Making Points
The majority, naturally, does not enjoy taking the message votes devised
by the minority party. It would obviously prefer to avoid these votes, and it does
not want to endanger its members’ electoral prospects by agreeing to the
minority’s demands. However, it may be willing to risk some painful votes as the
necessary price for considering and passing its legislative priorities.
The negotiations over bringing the China currency bill to the floor in
October 2011 illustrate this bargaining process clearly. During the fight over
whether Republicans would be able to offer the amendment containing Obama’s
American Jobs Act, Harry Reid explained that he had agreed to seven Republican
amendments, which were “great message amendments, causing a lot of pain over
here,” but he could not get his members to agree to yet another (Cong. Record,
October 6, 2011, S6316). “The fundamental problem here is that the majority
never likes to take votes. That is the core problem,” countered Mitch McConnell,
“I can remember, when I was the whip in the majority, saying to my members
over and over again, when they were whining about casting votes they did not
want to vote, that the price of being in the majority is that you have to take bad
votes” (Cong. Record, October 6, 2011, S6317). Reid replied: “I agree with the
minority leader that the deal around this place is the majority sets the agenda and
the minority gets to offer amendments. That has been the rule since I got here”
(Cong. Record, October 6, 2011, S6319).
One can look to changing patterns in amending activity in the Senate for
some empirical evidence of the rise of message politics. If two-party competition
incentivizes parties to exploit the Senate floor for message politics, one would
expect to find more such messaging activity since party control of the Senate was
put into question in 1980. To get a systematic look at floor politics over the
decades before and after 1980, I collected data on the total number of floor
amendments receiving roll-call votes offered by each senator in each Congress
from the 86th-110th Congresses (1959-2008).
Figure 1 displays the difference between the mean number of floor
amendments receiving roll-call votes offered by majority and minority party
senators between 1959 and 2008. Prior to the 96th Congress (1979-1980),
senators’ majority or minority party status did not reliably predict their level of
floor activism. Although minority party senators were more active than majority
party senators on average in most Congresses between 1959 and 1978, there was
so much variability among senators of both parties that the relationship was only
statistically significant in one Congress (the 89th,/?<05).
Since the late 1970s, minority party senators have been strikingly more
active on the floor than majority party senators. In all but one Congress since the
96th, minority party senators have always offered more amendments on average
than majority party senators. (The exception is 107th Congress, which was split
50-50, with Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote
7
8
The Forum
Vol. 9 [2011], No. 4, Article 3
until Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont changed his party affiliation, giving
Democrats a 1-seat advantage). The relationship between senators’ party status
and floor activism is statistically significant for 12 of the 15 Congresses between
1978 and 2008. Throughout the 2000s, the average minority party senator was
almost twice as active as the average majority party senator (1.94:1). In short,
since the emergence of more intense two-party competition for Senate control, the
minority party has been distinctly more aggressive in amending activity than the
majority party.
Figure 1. Differences in Amending Activity of Majority and Minority Party
Senators, 1959-2008
*p<.05, t-test of difference of means
Figure 2 displays the difference in the success rate of majority and
minority party senators when their amendments are considered on the floor.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, there was virtually no difference between
majority and minority party senators in the likelihood that their amendments
would be adopted on the Senate floor. In some Congresses during the 1960s,
minority party senators even had a slightly higher rate of amending success than
majority party senators, although in no case was the difference statistically
significant. But over time, there has been a steadily growing divergence between
the majority and minority’s amending success rate.
9
Lee: Making Laws and Making Points
In the 1970s, majority party sponsors were 36% more successful than
minority party sponsors; in the 1980s, they were 54% more successful; in the
1990s, they were just over twice as successful, at 105%; in the first decade of the
2000s, they were 120% as successful. The gap between the majority and minority
party’s amending success rate is statistically significant in every Congress since
the mid-1990s. Recalling that senators describe message amending as proposing
amendments designed or anticipated to fail, it is clear from these data that the
minority party consistently proposes far more failed amendments than the
majority party in the contemporary period of two-party competition for Senate
control.
p
p
p
co
p
p
co
O
co
U
M
■
CO
CD
*
CO
4^
+
CO
CH
+
CO
o>
co
»
CO
o
*
II
c
s
CD
->■
O
K>
O
w
o
4^
107*
co
(0
106*
oo
00
O
00
O
CO
C
p
o
■ ■
oo
105*
LI
bd
CD
98
Difference in success rate (majority-minority)
cn
Figure 2. Differences in Success Rates of Amendments Sponsored by
Majority and Minority Senators, 1959-2008
*p<.05. t-test of difference of means
These shifts in senators’ floor amending behavior are undoubtedly, in part,
the result of partisan polarization. It would not be surprising to find that senators
in a more ideologically homogeneous majority party offer fewer amendments to
bills reported from committees controlled by their fellow partisans, or that
minority party senators in polarized contexts would have more amendments. It is
also not surprising that the minority party would have a poorer success rate in
amending when the two parties are more ideologically distant. More detailed
analysis is necessary to fully disentangle the etiology of these shifts.
Even so, it is important to note that these changes in senators’ amending
behavior are clearly consistent with the picture of “message politics” that emerges
10
The Forum
Vol. 9 [2011], No. 4, Article 3
from what senators themselves have to say about such tactics in the public record.
In recent years, senators themselves regularly refer to “message” votes that are
designed to highlight the differences between the parties. They distinguish these
votes from serious efforts at legislating. They describe explicit trade-offs in which
the majority party agrees to take the message votes demanded by the minority
party as the price of considering its legislative agenda on the floor.
Finally, and most importantly, these accounts of message politics are a
recent phenomenon. Searches in the Congressional Record indicate that “message
votes,” “message bills,” and “message amendments” are relatively new terms.
The first example of this usage I was able to uncover via Lexis-Nexis
Congressional Universe was in 1997, when Paul Wellstone (D-MN) commented,
“This amendment that I have offered isn’t going to win. Maybe this is what you
call a message amendment” (Cong. Record, September 10, 1997, S9055). The
second occurrence was Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) in 1999 imploring her
colleagues to “reach out to each other, think these issues through, and put aside
message amendments, put aside tactical advantages, put aside partisan lines”
(Cong. Record, October 20, 1999, S12885).
The earliest example of a senator explicitly discussing these tactics in
news reporting (that I have been able to find so far) was Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC)
complaining in 1982 about Democrats forcing votes on amendments to increase
social welfare spending during consideration of the Republican budget: “That’s
just what the Democrats call some of their proposals to increase spending—
November amendments,” he remarked. “They’re walking down the aisle
chuckling and saying ‘Well, we’ve got ‘em on the spot.’”1 This news article goes
on to report that “Democrats continued the strategy they began Wednesday of
forcing roll-call votes on proposals they expected to lose, in order to place the
spotlight on Republican candidates for re-election” (Tolchin 1982).
Taken together, the patterns in amending activity shown in Figures 1 and 2
reinforce the picture that emerges from senators’ discussions. Senators begin to
discuss “message” votes in the post-1980 period and did so with increasing
frequency in the first decade of the 2000s. Such discussions do not appear in the
Congressional Record of the 1960s and 1970s. Correspondingly, in the era of
more intense two-party competition, we find that minority party senators almost
always propose more amendments than majority party senators, whereas in the
1960s and 1970s the majority and minority party were not reliably distinct in their
behavior.
Also consistent with the rise of messaging tactics, the amendments offered
by minority party senators in the contemporary period are much more likely to
1 Searches in the Congressional Record for the term “November amendments” did not yield any
“hits” in which senators were describing message amendments. I have not been able to identify
any alternative terms that senators use to describe the tactic.
11
Lee: Making Laws and Making Points
fail than those offered by majority party senators. In the 1960s there was no
difference in the success rates of the two parties, and in the 1970s the differences
were comparatively modest. It is only recently that we can find evidence in both
the Congressional Record and in patterns in amending behavior that point toward
the systematic use of Senate floor politics for party messaging activity.
Party Institutions
Concurrent with the increase in party competition for Senate control, there has
been an enormous amount of growth and innovation in internal party institutions.
Figure 3 displays the staff levels in Senate leadership, member, and committee
offices for each year between 1977 and 2010, as compiled by the Congressional
Research Service from Senate telephone directories. The growth in Senate
leadership offices is remarkable. In 1977, there were 40 staffers employed by
Senate leaders; in 2010 there were 176, a 340% increase. This rate of increase far
exceeds overall staff growth in the Senate during the period. In fact, Senate
committee staff levels generally stayed flat, with a marked drop between 1991
and 1995 and only modest recovery and growth afterwards. As another point of
comparison, personal office staffs approximately doubled, from 2,068 in 1977 to
4,346 in 2010. The upward trajectory in personal office staffing generally was
broadly incremental, with the exception of one notable increase in 1987.
Figure 3. Senate Staff Levels by Category, 1977-2010
Source: Petersen, Reynolds, and Wilhelm, 2010
12
The Forum
Vol. 9 [2011], No. 4, Article 3
Growth in party leadership offices is more episodic than incremental. The
single largest boost in leadership staff occurred immediately after the 1980
elections, from 46 staffers in 1980 to 118 in 1981. There was then modest growth
of 7 percent over the 1980s, followed by a significant boost of 29% between 1989
and 1997. During the ferociously competitive first decade of the 2000s—a period
with narrower margins of Senate control than at any other point since 1960—
leadership increased by another 21%.
This growth in staff reflects increasing specialization, as Senate party
leadership institutions have evolved in form and function. Leadership offices are
engaged in many more activities today than in the early 1980s.
There has always been an electoral element to these offices’ work. As long
ago as 1958, political scientist Hugh A. Bone observed, “The policy committees
are an interesting paradox. Despite their title, they usually profess that they do not
determine policy. . . . Although they are presumably not concerned with
campaigns, they are definitely conscious of the role, both direct and indirect, they
may have in re-electing their own party’s senators” (166-7). As in the 1950s,
party leadership staffs continue to develop partisan talking points, carry out
research services, maintain vote records, and produce materials for senators’
meetings back in their home states (sometimes called “recess packets”).
But leadership offices do far more today. They organize retreats and
conferences among fellow partisans. They staff partisan task forces on key issues.
They strive to develop partisan agendas and platforms. Most importantly, since
the 1980s leadership offices have taken on an ever-increasing role in public
relations and outreach to external constituencies. They organize press
conferences, public hearings, television and radio bookings and appearances, and
other media outreach. They coordinate messages and generate graphics for
partisan floor speeches and events. They have sought to stay abreast of fast­
moving changes in communications technologies.
The two parties clearly watch one another and adopt organizational
innovations developed by their opponents. Anxiety about improvements in
Democrats’ communications capabilities, for example, induced Majority Leader
Bill Frist (R-TN) to revamp Republican communications (Malecha and Reagan
2012, 84). Taken together, the congressional parties’ growing capacities for
public relations and outreach provide an interesting counterpoint to a similar
transformation that began slightly earlier in the presidency, in which the White
House staff was reorganized with offices of public affairs, public liaison, and
political affairs.
One of the most important activities of the Senate leadership staff today is
to organize the weekly lunches of Republican and Democratic senators. Notably,
Democratic policy committee staffers only undertook this role in 1981, after
Democrats lost the Senate majority. Prior to that, meetings of the Senate
Lee: Making Laws and Making Points
Democratic caucus were rare, generally only once a Congress. For their part,
Senate Republicans had been holding weekly conference lunches since 1956, a
practice that began under Policy Committee Chair Styles Bridges (R-NH) as
Republicans waged a tough campaign trying (unsuccessfully) to win the two seats
necessary to retake a Senate majority in the elections that November. At that first
conference luncheon, Bridges articulated his purpose to “encourage a close
alignment of Republican senators, improve coordination between the senators and
the executive branch, and foster party harmony and unity in this very important
election year” (quoted in Ritchie 1997, 56).
Republicans continued their weekly meetings throughout their long
minority status between 1956 and 1981, but Republican Leader Howard Baker
(R-TN) and Policy Committee Chair John Tower (R-TX) are credited with
beginning to use the party lunches more effectively to organize Republican
senators around common legislative strategies in the late 1970s. Democrats
explicitly modeled their weekly lunches on those held by Republicans. “When
Democrats found themselves ousted from the majority in 1981,” recollects former
Democratic Policy Committee staff director Rob Liberatore, “Byrd adopted
[Republican Leader Howard] Baker’s model of weekly party lunches to forge
party discipline” (Liberatore 2008). Under Byrd, leadership staffers sought to
develop amendments that would force the Republican majority to take stands on
controversial issues. As a result, “in 1981 and 1982 there were repeated votes on
Social Security, which became an effective Democratic campaign issue in the
1982 congressional elections” (Senate Democratic Policy Committee 2007, 8).
Electoral defeats, in particular, seem to spark innovations in party
organization. After Democrats lost the majority in 1980, they shifted leadership
staff from legislative scheduling to message development, organized a press
office, and established new television and radio facilities. When Democrats were
returned to the minority again in 1995, they created a Technology and
Communications Committee to engage in more effective outreach. After losing
the majority in 2002, the Democratic Policy Committee began to orchestrate
public hearings on partisan issues and oversight investigations. After Republicans
lost the Senate majority in the 2006 elections, Mitch McConnell overhauled the
party’s public relations program, increased the staff, and organized the Senate
Republican Communications Center (Malecha and Reagan 2012, 85). In the wake
of the party’s heavy setbacks in the 2010 elections, the Senate Democratic Policy
Committee was reorganized and renamed the Senate Democratic Policy and
Communications Center, with the goal of providing services to help Democrats
communicate better in their home states (Drucker and Dennis 2011).
13
14
The Forum
Vol. 9 [2011], No. 4, Article 3
Implications
Since 1981, Senate behavior and institutions have adapted in numerous ways to
meet members’ new, more focused interest in winning and retaining majority
control of the institution. In 1974, when Mayhew observed that “the organization
of Congress meets remarkably well the electoral needs of its members” (81), that
was true only of congressional institutions’ capacity to serve members’ individual
electoral interests. Congress was not well-organized to advance members’
interests in majority control. Senate party institutions were at that time only a pale
shadow of what they are today. Democrats rarely even met in the same room!
Neither party had much by way of a leadership or communications infrastructure.
In an era when one party appeared to hold a permanent majority in
American politics, such underinvestment in party institutions made sense. But
over the past three decades of regular party switches and intense party
competition, members have built institutions that are much better suited to wage
and win battles for party control of the U.S. Senate. In this context, the emergence
of partisan message politics is an important behavioral adaptation. As is clear
from senators’ extensive discussions, messaging tactics are well understood in
today’s Senate.
Such tactics were not a subject of much comment or hand-wringing about
the Senate of the 1960s and 1970s. There were many concerns about how the
Senate of that period was operating, but an excessive focus on party messaging
activity was simply not one of them. Senators now widely acknowledge the
difference between serious efforts at legislating and message votes designed for
public relations. On all sides, senators concede that votes are staged on matters
explicitly designed to put the other party in a negative light. These efforts occupy
a considerable amount of Senate floor time today.
Senators note these developments repeatedly in talking about the problems
of the contemporary Senate. When asked why the 112th Congress has
accomplished so little, for example, Max Baucus remarked, “This place is so
partisan—when it’s more partisan, it tends to push messaging, which I think is not
good for the country. I think our country is better served with less messaging and
more substance and more legislation” (Raju 2011). It is by no means clear that
there actually is an explicit trade-off between legislating and messaging. The
Senate can surely do both. But it is at least worth considering how a focus on
messaging can stand in the way of governing.
Messaging is inherently adversarial; it is designed to draw clear lines
between the parties. Successful legislating, especially in the Senate with its
multitude of veto points, is about bridging differences. Differences can be bridged
by both logrolling and a genuine search for common ground. Messaging does
precisely the opposite, as senators look for just the right wedge points to clarify
15
Lee: Making Laws and Making Points
the obstacles to consensus. “Campaigning is about talking to win, not to learn or
teach,” observes Hugh Heclo (2000, 13). “Techniques of effective campaigning
are essentially anti-deliberative.”
It may be that differences between the parties are too wide to be bridged
today. American political elites, both inside and outside Congress, may be too
ideologically polarized to reach agreement on the most pressing problems facing
the country. However, it is worth reflecting on how intense party competition for
control of national institutions may make American politics appear more
polarized than it actually is. Political marketing is far more pervasive today, as
politicians seek to win power in a fiercely competitive environment. Since the late
1970s, presidents and congressional party leaders have developed highly
professionalized media and public relations operations. These operations devote
enormous effort to articulating and dramatizing the differences between the
parties and the superiority of one over the other.
This point has special relevance to the study of Congress. Most of our
measures of congressional polarization rely on roll-call votes. We lack other long­
term gauges to measure whether members of Congress have gravitated toward the
ideological poles. If party competition has altered members incentives as they
frame and request roll-call votes, the congressional agenda itself differs in
fundamental ways from previous eras. If senators are staging votes for the precise
purpose of ensuring that the parties will vote on opposite sides, a meaningful
share of the party conflict that occurs in the contemporary Senate is manufactured
for public consumption. In many cases, the high levels of congressional party
conflict today may well not represent genuine ideological polarization, a widening
disagreement between the parties on basic questions of public policy. Instead, it
may simply reflect the ways in which the permanent campaign has transformed
congressional floor politics.
References
Barbash, Fred. 2011. “Divided Government Could Result in Stalemate,” CQ
Weekly, January 10, 96-97.
Bone, Hugh A. 1958. Party Committees and National Politics. Seattle: University
of Washington Press.
Dennis, Stephen T. 2011. “Senate’s Slow Pace Frustrates Newer Members,” Roll
Call, May 31, 2011.
16
The Forum
Vol. 9 [2011], No. 4, Article 3
Drucker, David M., and Steven T. Dennis. 2011. “Friction Strains Senate War
Room.” Roll Call, June 14.
Evans, C. Lawrence. 2001. “Committees, Leaders, and Message Politics,” in
Congress Reconsidered, 7th ed., Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I.
Oppenheimer, eds. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 217-243.
Evans, C. Lawrence and Walter J. Oleszek. 2002. “Message Politics and Senate
Procedure,” in The Contentious Senate: Partisanship, Ideology, and the
Myth of Cool Judgment, edited by Colton C. Campbell and Nicol C. Rae.
New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 107-130.
Farenthold, David A. 2011. “In Senate, Clerk’s Droning Means Lot of Nothing
Going On,” Washington Post, June 10, 2011, Al.
Farenthold, David A., and Paul Kane. 2011. “Senate Has Become Chamber of
Failure,” Washington Post, October 13, 2011, A6.
Groeling, Tim. 2010. When Politicians Attack: Party Cohesion in the Media. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Heclo, Hugh. 2000. “Campaigning and Governing: A Conspectus,” in The
Permanent Campaign and Its Future, eds. Norman J. Ornstein and
Thomas E. Mann. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute and The
Brookings Institution, 1-37.
Liberatore, Rob. 2008. “Who Knew Lunches Would Lead to Gridlock?” Politico,
November 20.
Malecha, Gary Lee, and Daniel J. Reagan. 2012. The Public Congress:
Congressional Deliberation in a New Media Age. New York: Routledge.
Mayhew, David A. 1974. Congress: The Electoral Connection. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Petersen, R. Eric, Parker H. Reynolds, Amber Hope Wilhelm. 2010. House of
Representatives and Senate Staff Levels in Member, Committee,
Leadership, and Other Offices, 1977-2010. Congressional Research
Service, R41366, Table 7.
Raju, Manu. 2011. “How Hill Leaders Sow Dysfunction.” Politico, December 19.
Lee: Making Laws and Making Points
Ritchie, Donald A. 1997. A History of the United States Senate Republican Policy
Committee, 1947-1997. U.S. Senate Historical Office. Senate Document
105-5. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Schlesinger, Joseph A. 1985. “The New American Political Party.” American
Political Science Review 79:1152-1169.
Sellers, Patrick. 2010. Cycles of Spin: Strategic Communication in the U.S.
Congress. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Senate Democratic Policy Committee. 2007. A History of the Democratic Policy
Committee, 1947-2007.
Tolchin, Martin. 1982. “Senate Turns Back Efforts to Modify Tax Cuts for 1983.”
New York Times, May 21, Al.
17