The two preceding chapters show a majority party advantage in getting its bills through committee and onto the floor, consistent with our claim that the majority faces lower consideration costs. Of course, this advantage might mean little if, as is commonly suggested, floor amendments serve as powerful weapons that majority party opponents can use to gut majority proposals and to bring majority-opposed policies directly to the floor – thereby undermining majority party agenda-setting efforts. In this chapter and the two that follow, we argue that the amendment process constitutes a far more limited weapon than is often believed to be the case. We highlight the difference between offering an amendment and having the chamber cast an up-or-down vote on the adoption of an amendment, emphasizing that, although it is easy to offer an amendment, it is much more difficult to get an adoption vote on an amendment – especially if the majority party strongly opposes the proposal. Our findings in these chapters indicate that the amendment process is a less potent weapon than is sometimes supposed for exactly this reason: once offered, minority floor amendments still face substantial consideration costs. This allows the majority party to retain substantial influence over the chamber's agenda.

In this chapter, we use an original dataset with an observation for each amendment offered in the 101st through 106th Congresses (1989–2000) to examine the disposition of amendments – that is, what happens to amendments after their sponsors offer them on the floor.