How the Senate Worked Before It Turned to Cloture
The Senate did not always rely on powerful party leaders and cloture to pass legislation. Its older system was decentralized, with power spread across committees and rank-and-file members.
The Senate did not give party leaders control over every step. Senators crafted bills in committee, debated them on the floor, offered amendments, and settled disagreements by voting.
Party leaders mattered, but they did not decide a bill’s fate before the Senate considered it on the floor.
The Committee-Centered Senate
For most of the twentieth century, the chairmen and ranking minority members who controlled the Senate’s standing committees dominated the legislative process. The majority leader played a secondary role. He did not determine which bills the Senate debated or when it took them up. He did not decide which amendments senators could offer. His job was to take legislation already reported by committees, schedule it as the party directed, help chairmen manage floor debate, and secure the votes to pass it.
In short, the majority leader facilitated the legislative process. He did not control it.
Lyndon Johnson Changes the Majority Leader’s Role
Lyndon Johnson, D-Texas, changed how the majority leader operated during the 1950s. Before Johnson, party leaders had little power. Senators did not expect the majority leader to schedule bills for floor consideration on his own. They did not defer to him on how long the debate would last or what amendments they could offer. Committee chairmen decided what the Senate debated and managed the amendment process.
Johnson made the position more powerful by making himself useful to chairmen and rank-and-file senators alike. He learned from chairmen when their bills would be ready for the floor. He asked rank-and-file senators whether they planned to offer amendments and how they intended to vote. Then he shared what he learned, so senators could plan their schedules, prepare amendments, and be present for important votes. Johnson also told members when the chamber would be in session — information especially valuable on Mondays and Fridays, when they wanted to travel home for the weekend.
By supplying that information, Johnson became the point through which the Senate’s decentralized process increasingly ran. Members who wanted to know what would happen on the floor went to Johnson. So did chairmen who wanted to know what trouble their bills would meet there. He also gained influence over the Democratic Policy Committee, which helped determine what legislation reached the floor. He sometimes blocked minor bills and helped shape legislation before committees reported it.
He helped senators pass minor bills during the Senate’s Morning Hour and, through his close relationship with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, D-Texas, saw that they cleared the House. Rank-and-file senators who wanted a parochial bill passed learned quickly that Johnson was the person to see.
Johnson also widened rank-and-file access to desirable committee assignments. The Democrats’ “Johnson Rule” guaranteed that every Democratic senator received at least one good assignment before any senator received two. Republicans later adopted a similar rule. The change strengthened party leaders at the expense of the chairmen and senior senators who had dominated the committees.
Johnson also changed how the Senate thought about its work. He treated passing legislation as the chamber’s principal responsibility, and he saw the rules and extended debate as obstacles when they slowed it. He preferred to settle controversies privately before a bill reached the floor. Senators could still give speeches in public, but Johnson wanted the important negotiations concluded in advance.
The result was a faster Senate. It was also a Senate in which more decisions were made outside the formal legislative process, which set the stage for the next shift in Senate power.
Still, Johnson did not create the leader-controlled Senate that exists today. Committees remained powerful, and the majority leader still had to broker agreements among senators who did not divide predictably along party lines. But Johnson’s changes helped set the stage for the later shift away from committee control. His own power rested partly on his relationships with senior chairmen like Richard Russell, D-Ga.
The Rise of the Participatory Senate
The majority leader’s role changed again in the 1960s, and the distribution of power shifted further away from the old committee system.
A new generation of senators turned against the seniority system when it frustrated their priorities. Many were liberal northern Democrats first elected in 1958. They represented competitive states with diverse constituencies, and they were unwilling to wait years, even decades, to win committee gavels and shape legislation.
These junior Democrats challenged the conservative chairmen who controlled the committees. They looked to the floor, where the rules gave every senator the right to debate, offer amendments, and force votes. Power gradually shifted from chairmen to rank-and-file senators, and on major issues, the primary decision-making venue shifted from the committees to the floor.
Other developments pushed the shift along. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 gave rank-and-file senators the resources to hire larger staffs, so they no longer depended on committee-controlled staff for information about legislation. Reforms let a majority of a committee’s members schedule hearings over the chairman’s objection. They required committees to publish their rules, guaranteed the minority its own witnesses at hearings, and allowed the minority to file reports stating its views on committee-approved legislation.
Later reforms strengthened rank-and-file senators further by making the Senate’s work more visible to voters. The Senate opened committee meetings to the public in 1975 and began televising floor debates in 1986.
These changes opened up the Senate’s debates and made it easier for rank-and-file senators to join them. More senators involved themselves in more issues, in committee and on the floor. Interest groups, journalists, and constituents could monitor their actions more closely, and the Senate became more participatory as a result.
Floor amendments rose sharply in the 1970s and 1980s. Senators increasingly offered nongermane amendments on controversial subjects — abortion, school prayer, busing, and the death penalty. The majority leader responded by moving to table them, defeating the amendments without forcing an up-or-down vote on their substance. A motion to table is not debatable and needs only a simple majority. The Senate tabled amendments just three times in the 84th Congress, which met in 1955 and 1956. It did so 272 times in the 99th Congress, three decades later.
Majority Leaders Managed Participation - They Did Not Eliminate It
The Senate’s changing environment empowered the majority leader because he was already positioned to coordinate the work of every interested senator. But he used that deference to facilitate senators’ participation in floor debates, not to prevent it, continuing the more open pattern that had developed.
For example, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, D-Mont., believed the Senate should be allowed to work its will on legislation. He expanded opportunities for junior senators to take part in Democratic leadership activities and declined to dominate the party’s committee assignment process.
Republican leaders took a similar approach. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., did not define the minority’s role as reflexive opposition to whatever the majority proposed. His successor, Hugh Scott, R-Pa., promoted “shared leadership” by involving more Republicans in decisions about floor strategy. And Republican Whip Robert Griffin, R-Mich., began the now-standard practice of regularly informing senators about the floor schedule.
Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., brought greater order to the floor when he became majority leader. He relied on unanimous consent agreements to structure debate, schedule amendments, and set voting times. But those agreements required him to accommodate any senator who told him he wanted to take part. A single senator could object if a proposed agreement left out an amendment or cut off debate too soon.
The majority leader provided the structure, but senators retained leverage over what that structure would look like. They used holds and threatened filibusters to extract concessions, and the majority leader often threatened all-night sessions to overcome their obstruction. Still, he had to listen to rank-and-file senators, because they could use the rules to act on the floor.
Cloture existed throughout this period, but the Senate did not depend on it to pass legislation. It lowered the cloture threshold in 1975 from two-thirds (typically 67 senators) to three-fifths of senators duly chosen and sworn (typically 60 senators). It limited post-cloture debate in 1979 and again in 1986.
Those reforms made it easier for the Senate to use cloture. But the Senate still did not rely on it alone. Cloture was one tool among many. The majority leader kept negotiating unanimous consent agreements and making room for rank-and-file amendments. When senators obstructed, he used the rules creatively to circumvent them, threatened late-night and weekend sessions, and occasionally forced them to hold the floor and talk.
The Takeaway
That relationship is reversed in today’s Senate. The majority leader now uses cloture to shut down debate before it begins. He negotiates legislation, bypasses committees, blocks amendments, files cloture, and hands senators a choice between accepting the finished product or defeating it. And if he can’t find 60 votes for cloture before a bill reaches the floor, he moves on to something else, completing the shift traced above.
But that is not how the Senate always worked. Before it turned to cloture and closed-door processes, the majority leader helped rank-and-file senators participate in debates. Committees developed legislation. Senators debated bills and offered amendments on the floor. The majority leader did not determine what happened. He helped manage it.