The topic of this episode is, “What has become of the United States Senate and can it be revived?”
The Senate did not have a good year in 2024. The chamber did not pass a budget resolution, nor did the Senate enact any of the dozen annual spending bills. Its year-end calendar of business listed dozens of pages of bills on matters large and small awaiting votes. Lots of floor time was spent on presidential nominations rather than on debating policy or amending legislation and voting on it.
To help us get a better sense of what’s not going well in the Senate and what might be done to improve its functioning I have with me Professor Anthony J. Madonna. Tony is a professor at the University of Georgia. He is the author of many scholarly articles on Congress, and most recently published a piece for Political Research Quarterly titled, “Interbranch Warfare: Senate Amending Process and Restrictive House Rules.”
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
Tony, welcome to the program.
Anthony Madonna:
Thanks so much for having me, Kevin. Always excited to talk about the US Senate.
Kevin Kosar:
From where I sit, it looks to me like the Senate—once deemed “the world’s greatest deliberative body”—is not doing well. I see very little action on the floor, few debates of any consequence—if they’re even debating at all—and I don’t see any efforts to bargain over bills or amendments.
Am I being too dour?
Anthony Madonna:
We’ve talked a little bit about this in the past, but it’s always worth coming back to this. I was talking to students on this point the other day. I think all the attention right now has been on the House and we’re really kind of losing track of just how bad the Senate has been.
I think they’ve been adequate when it comes to confirming judges. Last I saw, Biden was on pace with other presidents in that area—although not drastically outpacing anybody, which is probably what he should be doing given the amount of floor attention that’s going to it.
As of mid-November 2024, the Senate of the 118th Congress has cast something like 542 roll calls. 362 of them were either on nominations or procedural votes on nominations, which is 67 percent. It compares to about 12 percent of all Senates since 1970, so it’s just a historic amount of nomination votes.
The drop in amendment votes has also been pretty well documented. Last time I checked, just about 10 percent of all roll calls have been on amendments, which compares to about 50 percent of all Congresses since 1970. As you and I have written, this has been dropping for a while, but largely because of leadership reacting to the rise in messaging amendments.
Still, it mirrors the drop in substantive bills being considered. Votes on actual substantive bills are down to around 5 percent of the record this Congress—far fewer than the 15 percent average. This isn’t great.
In terms of “Is there negotiating going on?,” it certainly isn’t happening on the floor. I do wonder just how much of legislative negotiations today are just all about what can we get into the one reconciliation bill we’re going to try and cram out. But it has not been great.
Kevin Kosar:
I would venture that the fundamental nature of the types of individuals who get elected to be US Senator has not changed drastically over the last 50 years. Sure, it’s a racially and more gender diverse chamber than it used to be, but these are fundamentally the same ducks we saw 20 years ago, 30 years ago, etc.
My memory is that in the past, senators were often quite gearless. They like to talk on the floor. They like to debate stuff, even if they didn’t come to an agreement.
What is going on? Why the change?
Anthony Madonna:
Just speculating. I do think American politics and especially the US Congress has always been an institution that’s impacted by path dependence-style change. I think members today are coming into a Senate that is leadership dominant. You’re not being mentored in a way that you would want to kind of buck leadership or buck nationalized partisanship.
As a result, you don’t get a lot of members that are necessarily cross pressured and would benefit aggressively from bipartisan negotiation. I also think we’re in a period where there’s a brighter light being shown on every element of politics. It used to be in the 1980s and 1990s, you would look at a bill and—if it was in an area that wasn’t getting a lot of attention at that time—you could legislate in that area and kind of get things out the door. Today, interest groups and campaigns are paying attention to almost every facet of American politics. There really aren’t as many low salience issues to move on.
That is just my guess. We don’t have data on that.
Kevin Kosar:
As a general point, we know all institutions socialize new members, and they could do it for the better or for the worse. The old system of new legislators in the House or the Senate becoming power brokers—of hanging back, attaching yourself to a committee chairman, and spending ten or twenty years learning the ways and developing relationships—has certainly eroded in both chambers.
I also wonder if the rising partisan competition for control of the two chambers. We had a period from late 1940s to the 1980s when Democrats always were in charge. And now you’ve got parties trading control of the chambers back and forth. And so that creates anxiety over how you behave on the floor and might encourage you to trade power upwards. Is that part of what’s going on?
Anthony Madonna:
Whether or not it’s the competition point, or it’s just the rise of campaigns, I think they probably do have something to do with each other.
I lead every one of my classes off by letting students know that I am a legislative scholar. I have an aggressive bias when I teach, and they should know that I absolutely detest campaigns. Students will often ask like, “How do we fix problems in American government?” And my solution is often kind of jokingly that you should find the nearest campaign consultant and punch him as hard as you can in the throat. And I say this as somebody who’s trained many campaign consultants, and I recognize the importance of their jobs.
But there’s a frustration if you talk to staffers and members who are convinced that every small vote is going to matter electorally—that every weird procedural vote is somehow going to play a role in the upcoming campaign when we know pretty definitively the general public isn’t paying attention to most of this stuff, and they’re be better off just doing what they’re entrusted with doing, which is to do whatever they think is going to be best for the country. So I think the rise of 24/7 campaigning and the attention that campaigning is getting plays a massive role, and I do suspect that that is related to the partisan competition point, although it might not necessarily be directly related.
Then kind of returning to the point about legislators stepping into an environment where they don’t have the independence that members might have had 20 years ago, so your temptation is to kind of tow the party line. It’s not to blink an eye when you look at the kinds of things you’re voting on today. I have a book coming out with Mike Lynch that’s looking at just the composition of the roll call record and what’s changed over time. It was a massive data collection project.
One of the stats that just blows my mind every time is we’re looking at major pieces of legislation and we saw maybe two process votes for per major bill from the 1910s to the 1970s. Today, it’s anywhere between eight and nine, which is a substantial increase in the number of weird types of things you’re voting on, that might not have a substantive hook, and I do think tend to confuse the general public.
Kevin Kosar:
I think this idea that there are a lot of senators who are running scared and overestimating the risk to them feels very real to me. In late 2024, for example, we had incoming president Donald Trump start talking about who he’s gonna name to various cabinet positions, who of course have to go through advice and consent in the Senate.
You got some picks that were within the band of generally acceptable, but then you had Representative Matt Gaetz—a notorious bomb thrower and under investigation for various possible criminal misdeeds—being named for Attorney General. And instead of this being laughed off and shot down within two days, a while went by before Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration. When these Senators are running for re-election—two, four, or six years from now—who’s going to remember?
Anthony Madonna:
Especially if you don’t even get to the vote stage, right? Presumably, it took them that long to realize that these “No” votes that were coming in behind the scenes were going to be firm ahead of time. And I do think, especially this early in a session, who remembers what vote you’re taking, what vote you’re casting. That’s a point we always come back to is, what is the mechanism for the public to be informed about that thing? Oftentimes it’s going to be attack ads, which we know have been waning in importance anyways. And there’s a pretty big incentive for campaigns to lie about the content of those attack ads.
So, I do think members have just drastically overestimated how much like they need to sort of be towing the line on these things.
Kevin Kosar:
Thinking about why Senators these days tend to defer to leadership and why we have this sort of leadership in a chamber, one factor that has changed in the last fifty years is the role of the Majority Leader. As a partisan fundraiser, I read that Mitch McConnell in this last year—in these elections—raised and spent $425 million, which is a colossal amount of money. You can see if members are thinking about their own re-election possibilities, it takes the pressure off them to raise money if they just lean on the leader and—in return—play along with what the leader wants.
Anthony Madonna:
Yeah, I think that does play a role. Actually, I recently met with one of my former students who was working for a leadership PAC on the House side, and she was kind of making a similar point about that level of deference. I also think about losing Manchin and Tester this cycle—two members that at least had an incentive to buck party leadership because it was going to play better in their home state. The bigger worry now—and we’ve talked about this in the past—is probably the primary. So there doesn’t seem to be as much incentive to go against leadership as you did in the past. It’s not, not clear.
I think again to the rise of omnibus reconciliation-type legislating incentivizes the members to play ball with leadership instead of going around leadership to push for a given bill. We’ve also talked about how some of this stems from campaigns pressuring leadership in both chambers that the public wants to see a unified and cohesive party. I have no idea why we would think that, given the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, where seeing things fail on the floor gave members the ability to show that they’re not just lockstep. It doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that the party is incompetent if they can’t get things through. If anything, it would send a signal that these are the votes or these are the members you need to kind of focus in on and kind of publicize that pressure.
But I think it’s been a problem. I don’t know how it’s going to get fixed. I really do think fixing Congress at this stage involves a lot of fixing on the electoral end and it’s going to be tough in many ways. I can sympathize with the members because this is how they got into the chamber, and they’re getting at best conflicting signals from the electorate.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, the only Senate they know is the Senate that they have experienced.
It’s also interesting that the kind of rise of partisan competition creates the pressures to play team ball. And we’ve even seen instances where members of the Senate decide to go rogue, but lose out on leadership’s money. Maybe it’s going to go to somebody else who might challenge you in a primary. The House is doing that on steroids. There’s all sorts of that sort of stuff going on there, but there is definitely a new dynamic going on.
It was a norm for a very long time that you didn’t mess with other Senators’ home state elections as an individual member, and you certainly don’t turn on your own member of your own party and try to get them out because they were insufficiently conservative or insufficiently progressive.
And that sets up a question I want to ask you about legislative functioning of the Senate. And let me start with an anecdote. So, late in 2024, which is such an illustrative period, outgoing Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, worked to get a number of judicial nominees confirmed.
It took forever for each one of those with roll call votes having to occur on procedures to get a vote. I mean, putting on C-SPAN, it was unreal, just a relentless intoning by the clerk of all the members of the Senate for each and every vote.
Are procedures part of the problem? Are the norms part of the problem? Are neither part of the problem? It shouldn’t take that many votes to confirm a judge who’s been reported out of committee, should it?
Anthony Madonna:
Yeah, you’re preaching to the choir on that. I think both are part of the problem.
Whenever I talk to people about ways to fix Congress, one of the first things I’ll tell them is in an ideal world, I shouldn’t exist. You shouldn’t have people who get a PhD in political science solely to explain how the legislative branch operates. We have way too many complex, weird procedural rules, and it does not enable the legislative branch to operate in a way that is inviting people to follow it. It is painful trying to explain how Congress works in both chambers to very smart people. I’ll often get foreign reporters during an election, trying to understand all of the different votes that they’re taking.
Again, I think that is reflective in that we went from two votes on process per important enactment to about eight votes on process per important enactment. An argument we make in the book is, in addition to making the chamber a lot more confusing and difficult to comprehend, it has also played a role in artificially increasing what we refer to as ideological polarization. In reality, I think what we’re seeing is procedural polarization combined with electoral positioning.
So I do think it’s been a problem, especially when you conceptualize the US government as being one with high transaction costs compared to other governments. We have a bicameral Congress, we have the filibuster, we have a president that is elected separately, we have a court system that exercises judicial review, and we have state governments and bureaucracies. It’s tough to get cohesive policy all the way through.
Kevin Kosar:
And to be clear, it’s not the case that these Senators are just bad people. When they’re forcing all these procedural votes, they’re behaving perfectly rationally. If you’re in the minority, the more time you waste on procedural votes—which you know how they’re going to turn out—the less time the other party has to spend on voting on other sorts of stuff. It’s a totally rational strategy. You’re following the incentives. It’s almost like these attorneys when they’re in court, and they’re like, just filing motion to do this motion to do that paperwork back and forth.
It’s just grinding the other side down, but the collective result is not great, and it’s a tit-for-tat that the chamber hasn’t figured its way how to get out of it. Normally in tit-for-tat situation, I smack you and you then punch me in the nose, and I’m discouraged from smacking you again. There doesn’t seem to be that sort of logic that’s able to pull them out of this.
And like we said at the beginning, if you’re dumping that amount of Senate time into nominations, you have a small amount to do legislation, it’s a dynamic that doesn’t have its own sort of way to play out other than people just finally saying there’s no way to win, let’s quit doing this.
Anthony Madonna:
No, I think that’s right, and I think a lot of it also stems from whenever we think about how do you reform Congress, the temptation is not to to simplify it’s to add—add a new rule or a new process as opposed to just stripping it down a bit. I think would help the amount of just utterly redundant roll calls that you’re seeing.
And as you point out, it’s not because of a sincere disagreement on process. One of my other favorite stats that we pulled out of the book—and this is a House point, but I think you’re seeing a similar kind of incentive in the Senate—is that they’re just not missing the opportunity to request the roll call anymore. Looking at previous question motions and special rule votes, it used to be that on the House side, if the rule was closed historically, they would force a vote—which makes sense because the minority doesn’t like closed rules. They want to be able to offer amendments. Now, even when you get open rules, you’re getting roll call votes, both on ordering the previous question and on the rule itself. Presumably the reasoning behind it is they want to be able to force that roll call on the previous question so they can build a point into an attack ad.
So again, they’re doing what they were taught to do, and it’s going to take a lot to kind of go back to the previous era.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, so much time being spent on procedural stuff that doesn’t really advance the ball. All it does is eat up a lot of clock. It’s too bad we can’t figure out how to create a shot clock like in basketball for the US Senate.
Tony, this has been enlightening, a little depressing, but ultimately helpful. We know that the Senate is not truly stuck. Legislators within it can’t prove the body’s functioning. They have full discretion over that. It’s not like it’s frozen in the Constitution or God says you can’t do it. They can do what they want. So, Professor Tony Madonna, University of Georgia. Thank you for helping us better understand the state of the Senate and possibilities for reviving it.
Anthony Madonna:
Thanks so much, Kevin, for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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