Congressional scholars often emphasize procedural and agenda-setting differences between the House and Senate. The chambers' committee systems, however, are broadly similar. Moreover, the Senate majority party advantage at the committee stage is recognized – though not emphasized – as part of the conventional view of the Senate.

This chapter thus differs from those that follow inasmuch as it is not about presenting evidence contesting the conventional view. Rather, we provide an overview of Senate committee procedures and literature related to various aspects of committee behavior, then present data illustrating the legislative results of committee action. It is like the other chapters, however, in that it is focused on presenting the sources of the majority party's consideration cost advantage.

We begin by briefly summarizing the processes for making committee appointments and selecting committee chairs. The next section examines bill introduction and referral, and is followed by a section about committee action on bills, with particular emphasis on the powers of chairs. In the final section, we present data comparing the proportion of each committee's referred bills sponsored by senators of each party with the proportion of each committee's reported bills sponsored by senators of each party. We show not only that the majority party repeatedly sponsors proportions of referred bills greater than its share of Senate seats, but also that the proportion of majority-sponsored bills reported from committee is even more disproportionate to the majority's share of the chamber's seats.

By and large, the implications of the model hold even when we relax the simplifying assumptions. Nonetheless, in this appendix, we consider some small changes in outcomes that follow from relaxing two of our assumptions: that (1) k (and c) < ∣M – Mi∣ and (2) M and Mi are equidistant from F.

Expanding k and c

First, as k grows beyond ∣M – Mi∣ (i.e., as the minority's consideration cost becomes larger than the distance between the majority and minority ideal points), more status quos to the left of M become part of the minority no-offer zone, meaning that the majority party does not have to “defend” them with preemptive offers that reduce majority utility. Figure A.1 shows an example of this result. Here, k has grown, pushing the edges of the minority no-offer zone well beyond M and Mi. Under our normal assumptions, the status quo in this example – which is to the extreme side of M – would have been moved right by M, leapfrogging his ideal point with a proposal at NOL (see Figure 3.6a). However, with the expansion of k, the status quo in Figure A.1 will remain unchanged, as Mi can no longer make a proposal that will improve her policy utility enough to offset the consideration cost. Thus, M can simply leave the status quo where it is, avoiding paying a consideration cost himself to keep policy from leaving his side of the space.

The evidence and anecdotes in the previous chapters have, we think, established the plausibility of our model's key assumption – that the majority party pays lower consideration costs than the minority party (and other rogue senators) in trying to advance its agenda items – and grounded our theory in the procedure and agenda-setting stages of the Senate. They do not, however, test the model's predictive power. In this chapter, we turn to that task.

We focus on our model's predictions about the effects of changes in party control and changes in majority consideration costs on the direction of policy movement and the size of winning coalitions. In the first empirical section, we test our model's predictions against predictions from models that take no account of parties. We focus on the aggregate (i.e., Congress-level) direction of policy movement on final passage votes over a time series spanning 1949–2008, finding support for the prediction that Senate decisions predominantly move policy toward the majority party's side of the political spectrum.

In the second empirical section, we test predictions made by our model that are not made by other party models. We use vote-level data to examine variation in the direction of policy movement and coalition sizes on final passage, across sets of bills that have different majority consideration costs. We find that policy is more likely to move toward the majority party and coalition sizes are smaller on votes involving lower majority consideration costs than on votes involving higher majority consideration costs, as predicted by our model.

We began with a puzzle in the Senate literature: how do we square findings of party effects (Bargen 2003; Campbell, Cox, and McCubbins 2002; Crespin and Finocchiaro 2008; Den Hartog and Monroe 2008a; Gailmard and Jenkins 2007; Koger 2003; Koger and Fowler 2006) with Senate procedures that seem to preclude party effects? Applications of House-based theories to the Senate (Campbell, Cox, and McCubbins 2002; Chiou and Rothenberg 2003) are supported empirically but are not widely accepted as explanations of Senate behavior (Smith 2007), in large part because they assume, rather than explain, majority agenda-setting power. This assumption flies in the face of decades of literature arguing that individual senators and minority coalitions are powerful agenda-setting actors (Huitt 1961; Lehnen 1967; Matthews 1960; Ripley 1969; Sinclair 1989; Smith 1989).

Our solution to this puzzle centers on the idea that agenda setting is costly – meaning senators must sacrifice scarce resources, such as time, energy, staff, and political chips, to gain final consideration of their proposals. The distinction between getting a proposal to the floor and getting the floor to vote on the proposal is crucial to our take on the Senate – where, unlike the House, much of the significant agenda-setting action happens after legislation is initially proposed on the floor. In the absence of an analog to the House Rules Committee, the Senate majority must battle to get its proposals to the floor, to protect them on the floor, and to move them beyond the floor.

During 1997 and 1998, the United States Congress wrestled with H.R. 2646, the Education Savings Act for Public and Private Schools, a bill that proposed the creation of tax-free education savings accounts. Most Republicans favored the bill, while most Democrats opposed it (Hosansky 1997; Kirchhoff 1998). Republicans held 52 percent of the House seats (227 of 434 seats at the time the bill passed) and 55 of the 100 Senate seats.

The bill passed through the House quickly. It was introduced on October 9, 1997, reported from the Ways and Means Committee on October 21, and brought up, debated, and passed (without any amendments having been offered) on October 23. On the final passage vote, Republicans voted 215–8 in favor; Democrats voted 190–15 against.

In the Senate, however, the fight over the bill was much different. The chamber took up the bill on the floor by unanimous consent on October 29; but on October 31 and November 4, the Senate voted against invoking cloture, each time with 56 votes for cloture and a nearly perfect partisan split.

The bill was then set aside until the following March, when majority leader Trent Lott made a motion to bring the bill up on the floor. Republican Senate Finance Committee chair William Roth proposed an amendment – a bundle of changes designed to lure Democratic votes (Kirchhoff 1998) – and on March 17 the Senate voted 74–24 to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed, with all 55 Republicans and 19 of 43 Democrats voting in favor.

It sometimes seems that Senate observers perceive all (threats of) filibusters as similar to those of Huey Long, Strom Thurmond, Alfonse D'Amato, and Jimmy Stewart – that is, as insurmountable obstacles to the majority party agenda. Even from more moderate perspectives, scholars often characterize the chamber's legislative process as requiring 60 votes to pass any significant legislation, which is portrayed as a serious obstacle for the majority party that typically forces it either to give up on a proposal or to water it down so seriously that the resultant legislation does not clearly constitute majority party success.

We rethink this characterization. We agree that the filibuster presents the kind of obstacle just described under some circumstances; indeed, it is perhaps the most significant and consistent component of the majority party's consideration costs. We argue, however, that the filibuster does not present this kind of insurmountable obstacle under other circumstances. In many cases, the majority party is able to pay the consideration costs associated with breaking through or sidestepping a filibuster. We believe, moreover, that Senate literature focuses disproportionately on cases of the first type, creating a bias toward overestimating the extent to which filibusters undermine the majority party.

In the remainder of the chapter, we make our case by first analyzing the logic of potential filibuster fights, then presenting cloture and scheduling data consistent with our argument.

Congressional scholars widely believe that the majority party's influence over the agenda in the U.S. Senate is limited, due mainly to the chamber's supermajoritarian procedures and open amendment process. In this chapter, we present a spatial theory of agenda setting that incorporates these aspects of Senate procedure, yet leads to the conclusion that, although it is unable to dictate the agenda unilaterally, the majority party nonetheless influences the agenda to an extent largely unappreciated by prior scholarship.

One of the contributions of this model is to resolve the apparent contradiction in Senate scholarship discussed in the preceding chapter: recent studies conclude that the majority enjoys greater legislative success than the minority, but there is little understanding of how this could be the case. A strength of our model is that it incorporates conventional beliefs about Senate procedures and provides a clear analogy to Senate procedure.

The model's assumptions reflect the broad theoretical premises we discussed in the first chapter: first, agenda setting is costly; second, it is less costly for the majority party than for others; and, third, the majority party has a first-proposal advantage.

In a sense, our model is a one-dimensional spatial version of nonspatial bargaining models (Rubinstein 1982). One advantage of our model, however, is that it incorporates the effect of the status quo on bargaining outcomes (in bargaining models, the reversion in the absence of a deal is that each actor gets nothing, which is clearly not the case in the Senate).

Introduction to Part II

The purpose of Part II is to provide empirical support for our claims about consideration costs. To this end, we examine Senate decisions at the committee stage (Chapter 4), the scheduling stage (Chapters 5 and 6), and on the floor (Chapters 7, 8, and 9). We show that, at each stage except scheduling, majority proposals are disproportionately likely to move forward in the legislative process; that is, a majority-sponsored proposal that reaches a particular stage is more likely than a minority-sponsored proposal that reaches the same stage to move forward in the process.

We want to emphasize four points about the data analyses in this part of the book. First, the results are not meant to be taken as a series of independent tests demonstrating party effects. Second, the results are meant to establish that the majority party has a systematic (but not absolute) advantage when it comes to moving proposals to final consideration. Third, we do not argue that the majority wins at each stage on every bill that it gets to final consideration or that it needs to do so to pass its proposals. Senate agenda influence does not follow from repeated applications of the same approach, as with the House and special rules. Senate agenda influence is a more ad hoc affair. It tends to be cobbled together on the fly, in response to fluid and ever-changing circumstances.

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.

Discourse regarding the contemporary U.S. Senate bemoans the legislative paralysis that is perceived to be endemic to the chamber and the adverse effects of the paralysis on national policy making. The sources of this perception are plain to see. News coverage of the Senate is rife with stories of hostile speeches, petty bickering, and partisan warfare, and often emphasizes the role of filibusters and holds in facilitating deadlock. From another perspective, however, this characterization is puzzling; the current Congress (the 111th) has enacted several major, controversial policies, including a massive economic stimulus, a far-reaching health care overhaul, and a sweeping reform of the financial system. How could a Congress producing such major changes be seen as gridlocked? One goal of this book is to reconcile these disparate views by explaining how obstruction and policy making exist side by side in the Senate.

Another goal is to address a similar and closely related puzzle that exists among Senate scholars: we all know how easy it is for an individual senator or a small group of senators to tie the chamber in knots, and we all know that the majority wins divisive policy battles. But we do not know how to square these seemingly contradictory beliefs, which are at the heart of many debates about the Senate.

In a sense, our involvement in this debate began on May 24, 2001, when Senator Jim Jeffords announced that he was leaving the Republican Party to become an independent and would side with Senate Democrats on organizational votes.

Like many scholarly enterprises, ours revolves around a puzzle: how do we reconcile the Senate majority party's presumed inability to bias outcomes in its favor with empirical findings that the Senate majority party does bias outcomes in its favor? In this chapter we present our take on literature related to this question. We draw insights from traditional Senate scholarship and from the literature on House parties.

Conventional Views of the Senate

A long line of Senate scholarship either explicitly or implicitly assigns little significant policy-making influence to parties. Going back to the earliest and most influential postwar studies of the Senate, the literature focuses on questions regarding how the Senate makes decisions and how power is distributed within the chamber, but at least in passing, such works tend to minimize the role of parties. Though rich in contextual scholarship, this literature offers little in the way of general explanations of Senate behavior.

Matthews (1960: 8), for example, explicitly raises the question of power within the chamber: “Officially, all senators are equal. Yet if the Senate is similar to other groups, some have far more influence than others. What are the patterns of influence in the Senate? Who is influential and why?”