Two senators have proposed a series of modest but significant reforms of Senate rules to allow broadly bipartisan bills to move faster in that chamber.
In today’s Washington Post, Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana and Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon propose a series of modest but significant reforms of Senate rules to allow broadly bipartisan bills to move faster in that chamber.
They want to eliminate the requirement for cloture on some routine Senate work, including nominations, and to end the requirement for an entire day to pass between filing for cloture and voting on it. That would significantly speed up the Senate’s work on genuinely routine matters.
They would also create a kind of Senate version of the House’s process for suspension of the rules — a means of quickly moving bills that have cleared committee provided they can get a large supermajority on the floor. The idea is to allow such bills to move with limited debate and no amendments on the floor if they can get the support of two-thirds of senators. This is a bigger deal than the suspension of the rules in the House, though, because fast-tracking such bills in the Senate now requires unanimous consent, which gives individual senators serious leverage to stop broadly popular measures. Ending that would be a real change in the culture of the institution.
I think the most significant idea they propose is a kind of friendly amendment to the filibuster. They describe it this way:
Create a one-day fast track for robustly bipartisan bills. If a bill passes out of a committee with the support of the majority of both Democratic and Republican members, then the chair, ranking member and 16 senators — including at least three from each party — could bring it to the floor by a petition. This petition could provide for consideration of specific amendments, solving the current problem whereby calling up an amendment and agreeing to consider a slate of amendments require unanimous consent. Debate would be limited to six hours, and bills would be processed and passed by simple majority.
Senators Daines and Merkley then also propose a similar process, with a somewhat higher hurdle to clear, for appropriations measures that can meet these criteria.
This offers both a way around party leaders (though bills with such broad support and the backing of both the relevant chair and ranking member would probably be backed by party leaders) and a way around the 60-vote margin for cloture. But it offers it only for bills that have been negotiated in broad bipartisan terms. Unlike moves to eliminate the filibuster, and most ideas for constraining it, the incentive this creates is not for party discipline but for cross-partisan bargaining.
That distinction is essential. I think that every reform of Congress should be subjected to a simple question: Is this idea trying to make more legislation happen by making cross-partisan bargaining more likely, or is it trying to make more legislation happen by making cross-partisan bargaining less necessary? The first would be a way to help Congress perform its most essential function, facilitating negotiation among the factions that compose our politics. The second would be a way around that most essential function.
Most reforms of Congress over the past half-century, and most ideas for future reforms, are on the wrong side of that line. They have tried to make Congress more efficient, more centralized, or more parliamentary, but in the process have only contributed to the bitter polarization of our era and the dysfunction and weakness of the institution. But these ideas from Senators Daines and Merkley strike me as firmly on the right side of the line.
They don’t have any particular partisan valence, and so should appeal to both Republicans and Democrats. They are not a threat to the filibuster but rather advance its underlying purpose, which is to compel senators to deal with each other across lines of difference. They get at problems that genuinely frustrate senators and needlessly slow the work of the Congress. And they ought to appeal to both party leaders and rank-and-file senators.
These aren’t silver bullets. They wouldn’t magically fix all the Senate’s problems. But they do strike me as serious, worthwhile improvements.