The U.S. Senate

From Deliberation to Dysfunction

Burdett Loomis

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781608717279
• eBook ISBN: 9781483305240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Gobierno estadounidense

With an avalanche of scholarship on the House, it can be tough to balance out coverage in a typical Congress course with appropriate readings on the "slow institution."

Offering top-notch research geared to an undergraduate audience, Loomis? new edited volume represents a broad picture of the contemporary Senate and how it came to be. While addressing issues of delay, obstruction, and polarization in a variety of ways, the scholars in this collection are not proposing a reform agenda, but instead, explore the historical and political contexts for how difficult it can be to change a non-majoritarian, highly individualistic institution. Students will come away from these chapters with a much greater appreciation of the Senate?s unique combination of tradition, precedent, and constitutional mandate.

1

The U.S. Senate in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Eric Schickler

The Senate at mid-twentieth century forms the backdrop for much of what people see as wrong with today’s Senate. The rampant individualism, incessant obstruction, and intense partisan warfare that mark the contemporary Senate are largely missing from our collective understanding of how the Senate worked at mid-century. To be sure, scholars have paid attention to the shortcomings of the Senate of the 1940s and 1950s. These include the ability of southern Democrats to block civil rights initiatives that were beginning to gain the support of a majority of voters and the generalized hostility of the institution to innovation. Regardless of how one weighs the strengths and weaknesses of the mid-century Senate, key features of today’s institution stand in stark relief, making the earlier Senate a useful point of contrast for important studies of the modern Senate (see, e.g., Sinclair 1989, 2001; Rohde, Ornstein, and Peabody 1985; Smith 1989).

One reason that the mid-century Senate continues to serve as a starting point for contemporary studies is that we have a rich information base for understanding it. The direct observations and systematic analyses of eminent political scientists such as Donald Matthews, Ralph Huitt, and Nelson Polsby produced a textured account of how the Senate operated as both a social system and as a policymaking body. Influential popular books depicting the Senate of the 1940s and 1950s supplemented this account. Leading examples include William S. White’s Citadel: The Story of the U.S. Senate (1957) and Rowland Evans and Robert Novak’s Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (1966). More recent scholarly studies—for example, those undertaken by Barbara Sinclair and Steven Smith—have provided time series data on specific features of Senate politics that provide systematic evidence of how Senate operations have changed since the 1950s. As a result of all this work, one might well assert that there are few periods in Senate history for which we have as coherent a portrait of how the institution operated as in its mid-century form.

This chapter will focus first on that portrait, providing a sense of what we have learned about how the Senate operated at mid-century. Much of the collective portrait of that Senate stands the test of time. However, the second part of this chapter will revisit some of the common assumptions about the coherence and stability of the mid-century Senate. In particular, I will argue that some features often associated with that institution were not consolidated until the early to mid-1950s—only to fade away soon thereafter—while other features were subject to significant exceptions and complications. Although the conventional portrait of the Senate as a social and political system continues to offer important insights into the Senate of the 1950s, the fragility and contradictions inherent in that system may warrant greater attention than they have received.¹

I. Prevailing Themes in the Study of the Mid-Century Senate

Several interconnected themes emerge when one considers the nature of the mid-century Senate. First, scholars have long highlighted the role of norms and folkways in creating expectations that shaped the behavior of individual senators. These norms gave rise to an environment of restraint in which senators—mindful of the need to maintain good relationships with their colleagues—did not push individual prerogatives to the limit. This restraint was especially evident in a second key feature of the mid-century Senate that contrasts sharply with today’s Senate: the limited use of the filibuster. A third key theme is the central role of an “Inner Club” of senior, institutionally oriented senators in enforcing norms and running the Senate. This club was largely composed of southern Democrats and Republicans, and thus is linked to a fourth key feature of the mid-century Senate: the power of the conservative coalition. Finally, Democratic leader Lyndon Johnson came to symbolize the core features of the mid-century Senate, so that it has often been referred to as “the Johnson Senate.”

Norms and Folkways at Mid-Century

The single most influential scholarly portrait of the mid-century Senate was that of Donald Matthews in his book U.S. Senators and Their World (1960). Matthews observes that “the Senate of the United States, just as any other group of human beings, has its unwritten rules of the game, its norms of conduct, its approved manner of behavior. Some things are just not done; others are met with widespread approval” (92). Matthews depicts the Senate as an inward-looking, relatively closed institution in which a set of norms—referred to as folkways—regulated behavior. These norms instructed senators on how they should view their job: new senators should wait a substantial amount of time before participating actively in policy debates (apprenticeship); each senator should specialize, focusing on a handful of matters that are under the jurisdiction of his committees or that have a direct impact on his state (specialization); and a good senator will focus on legislative tasks rather than seeking publicity (legislative work). These norms also governed how senators treat one another and the institution as a whole. Personal attacks on other senators should be avoided (courtesy); senators should show restraint in their use of individual prerogatives and should be willing to help their colleagues out when they are in need, with the expectation that they will be repaid in kind (reciprocity); and senators should protect the prestige of the Senate (institutional patriotism).² Matthews readily acknowledges that not all senators abided by these norms, but he argues that those who conformed tended to be the most influential, effective members (see also White 1957).

Empirically documenting the strength of norms is notoriously difficult, but considerable evidence supports the idea that apprenticeship and specialization were meaningful norms.³ Smith (1989: 136) shows that in the 1950s senators in their first term were considerably less likely than senior members to sponsor floor amendments. For example, the average first-term senator sponsored fewer than four amendments in the 84th Congress, while the average senator with more than six years of seniority sponsored more than twice as many. Smith argues that the apprenticeship norm started to fade after the 1958 election, with the influx of a number of ambitious but electorally vulnerable programmatic liberals. Indeed, by the time Matthews’ book was published in 1960, apprenticeship was “under severe, and apparently successful, challenge” (Smith 1989: 133). Smith shows that the senior-junior gap in amending activity had completely disappeared by the end of the 1960s.

With respect to specialization, Sinclair (1989) documents the extent to which senators focused their activity on a limited number of issues in the mid-century Senate, at least in comparison to the contemporary Senate. For example, she shows that only thirty-three senators in the 84th Congress (1955–56) offered and pushed to a roll call at least one amendment that concerned bills from committees on which the member did not sit. A mere six senators did so more than once. By contrast, non-committee amendments are now routine. More generally, Smith (1989) finds that committees faced far fewer floor challenges to their products in the 1950s than in subsequent decades, reinforcing the contention that norms of specialization and committee deference held sway in the 1950s. Again, both Smith and Sinclair attribute the shift away from these norms largely to the influx of programmatic northern liberals in the late 1950s and 1960s. These members believed that they had to move quickly and decisively to achieve liberal policy innovations—and to make a name for themselves with their constituents—in order to be reelected and to redress what they saw as the major policy problems facing the country (see also Rohde, Ornstein, and Peabody 1985). Norms such as apprenticeship and specialization stood in the way of achieving these goals and thus were increasingly ignored.

Sinclair (1989) adds that the transformation of the Washington policy community in the 1960s undermined mid-century norms of restraint. As the role of the national government expanded with the Great Society, the number and diversity of groups active in Washington exploded. With new, controversial issues on the agenda—and an attendant proliferation of groups eager to recruit senators as advocates for their causes—senators saw the opportunity to play a more active policy leadership role. Norms of deference and specialization were jettisoned as senators took advantage of these opportunities to take on a leading role in setting Washington’s political agenda and responding to the entreaties of issue advocates.⁴

The Filibuster at Mid-Century

The characterization of the mid-century Senate as an institution in which individual restraint was prized fits nicely with the limited use of the filibuster in that era. In their pioneering study of the filibuster, Sarah Binder and Steven Smith (1997) point out that the late 1930s through the early 1960s constitutes a “quiet period” in the use of minority obstruction. The frequency of filibusters in the 1940s and 1950s was well below that in the early twentieth century and in later periods. Drawing primarily upon data compiled by the Congressional Research Service’s Richard Beth, Sinclair (2001) notes that there was an average of just one filibuster per Congress in the period 1951–1960 and just two cloture votes in that period. By contrast, there were roughly twenty-seven filibusters and nearly forty cloture votes per Congress by the late 1980s (see Beth 1994). In short, the frequency of filibusters in the 1950s was far below the levels reached in the 1970s and 1980s, let alone the contemporary era in which little gets done in the upper chamber absent supermajority support.

Many scholars have attributed this dearth of obstruction to norms of reciprocity and specialization that discouraged floor activism (see, e.g., Sinclair 1989). Binder and Smith (1997) argue that these norms in large part reflected the underlying power distribution in the Senate: starting in the late 1930s the Senate typically had a relatively conservative floor majority, which meant that there was little need for opponents of liberal policy initiatives to make use of obstruction. Since conservatives had a relatively modest policy agenda of their own, liberals too had little incentive to obstruct business.⁵

Of course, the few filibusters that did take place in the 1940s and 1950s often focused on one of the central policy battlegrounds of the era: civil rights.⁶ Southern Democrats notoriously wielded unlimited debate to defeat several major civil rights bills in this era. In the public mind—and among political observers—the filibuster thus became fused with southern opposition to civil rights. Liberals led repeated efforts to use rules changes or parliamentary rulings to roll back the filibuster in this era. These efforts fell short, however, resulting in only modest compromise reforms in 1949 and 1959 (see Wawro and Schickler 2006). In this context, the only civil rights bills that could garner the necessary two-thirds super-majority to invoke cloture put forward weak policies with little or no teeth.

The Inner Club

The centrality of southern civil rights filibusters contributed to still another aspect of the Senate’s image at mid-century: that of an inward-looking, conservative institution dominated by senior members of an “Inner Club” (see Ripley 1969; White 1957; Davidson, Kovenock, and O’Leary 1966; Evans and Novak 1966). White famously argued in Citadel: The Story of the U.S. Senate that an informal group made up primarily of southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans dominated the inner life of the Senate. To White, the Inner Club included those members who had a primary allegiance to the Senate as an institution and did not seek excessive personal publicity. Politics was an insider game, in which longtime senators such as Richard Russell (D-Ga.), Lyndon Johnson, and William Knowland (R-Calif.) worked the levers of power through bargaining with their fellow “Club” members. The “outsiders” who refused to go along with the Club and instead sought personal publicity did not amount to much within the Senate. Johnson himself cultivated the image of an Inner Club running the Senate, going so far as to provide copies of Citadel—autographed by both White and Johnson!—to new senators (see Polsby 1969). Presumably Johnson believed that senators would be more likely to defer to his leadership if they believed that doing so was necessary in order to gain influence in the chamber.

The theme of an Inner Club found its way into both popular and academic accounts of the mid-century Senate. Robert Caro (2002) traces how Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) initially found himself ostracized by Senate Club members due to his outspoken advocacy of civil rights in the 1948 campaign. Humphrey arrived in the Senate determined to transform the institution, and his maiden speech criticized the Senate for being too cozy and conservative. The new senator brought an African American staff member to eat in the Senate dining room, insisting that the staffer be accommodated after being told that they could not eat together. Humphrey’s assertiveness was rewarded by poor committee assignments and overt snubs by his colleagues, both on and off the floor. Interestingly, the consummate insider, Lyndon Johnson, eventually reached out to Humphrey, viewing him as a bridge to the Senate’s growing liberal contingent (Caro 2002). White goes so far as to argue that Humphrey had become part of the Club by the mid-1950s, distinguishing him from other liberals who remained outsiders, such as Democrat Paul Douglas of Illinois and Republican-turned-Democrat Wayne Morse of Oregon (see also Clark 1963 on the idea of a “Senate Establishment”).

Indeed, the flip side of the Senate Inner Club was the idea that there were a handful of “mavericks” who did not abide by the Club’s norms and thus found themselves with little influence in the Senate. These mavericks—Douglas, Morse, Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.), and William Proxmire (D-Wis.) are often cited as examples—sought to make a name for themselves through appealing to “outside” groups. They did not defer to their more senior colleagues and instead spoke out on a range of issues early in their careers. White and Matthews both suggest that such individuals were aberrations and did not amount to much within the Senate.

While some critics challenged the idea that there ever was a Senate Inner Club (Polsby 1969; Huitt 1961b; see discussion below), the more common view emerging from the literature on the mid-century Senate is that the Club had been real in the 1940s and 1950s but then dissipated in the 1960s. For example, Randall Ripley (1969) argues that the Inner Club’s influence had only recently faded away as more liberals and ambitious junior members entered the Senate. Thus, the prevailing account of the Inner Club’s role in the Senate fits in with the more general view of the Senate as a relatively insular, conservative institution in which norms of reciprocity and restraint played a crucial role. It was only the influx of a generation of ambitious, programmatic liberals in the 1958 and 1964 elections that ultimately spelled the doom for not only the Club, but also other core features of the mid-century Senate.

The Conservative Coalition

While most accounts suggest that the Inner Club was not limited to conservatives, the senators typically identified as important Club members were either southern Democrats or conservative Republicans. Thus, the idea of a Club was closely linked to still another feature of the mid-century Senate: the centrality of the cross-party conservative coalition in Congress.

As David Rohde, Norman Ornstein, and Robert Peabody (1985) show, the 1950s Senate was in many ways dominated by conservative Democrats and Republicans. Committee leadership positions and the best committee assignments were concentrated in the hands of the Senate’s most conservative members (see also Sinclair 1989). Key committees, such as Appropriations and Finance, were generally more conservative than the Senate chamber as a whole (Rohde, Ornstein, and Pea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The U.S. Senate in the Mid Twentieth Century
• 2. U.S. Senate Elections in a Polarized Era
• 3. A Half-Century of Bicameralism
• 4. The Changing Careers of Senators, 1960–2010: Coming, Going, Choosing
• 5. Senate Parties and Party Leadership 1960–2010
• 6. Individual and Partisan Activism on the Senate Floor
• 7. The Senate Syndrome
• 8. The Filibuster Then and Now: Civil Rights in the 1960s and Financial Regulation, 2009–2010
• 9. Advice and Consent in the “Slow” Senate
• 10. Congress and Energy Policy 1960–2010: A Long Term Evaluation
• 11. The Senate and Foreign Policy
• 12. Looking Back to See Ahead: The Senate in the Twenty-First Century
• Index