In 1830, a year before he died, lifelong legislator James Madison underlined the advantages of closed sessions during the writing of the Constitution. For him, privacy allowed members to approach legislation with a “yielding and accommodating spirit.” The same cannot be said for publicity. As one former US Congressman claims, open sessions bring little but “combat and drama.” Such observations have led us to introduce the notion of weaponized transparency.
Weaponized transparency is a form of legislative antagonism brought about by increased legislative transparency. It is sometimes known as messaging, bomb-throwing, spotting, forcing embarrassing votes, or buncombe. This sunshine-based warfare converts the amending process (and other open legislative channels) into proving grounds for ideological purity instead of productive legislation. And it is the principal driver of the surge in closed rules.
Here we present citations (with links to original sources). Each refers to examples of how transparency is weaponized and how this weaponization leads to chaos, gridlock and rancid partisanship. Recently scholars have noted that weaponization is also a principal driver of closed rules, and some of the following citations reflect this dynamic.
For a fuller description of this process of weaponization, check our articles via the menu above or browse this page here. For general citations on the pitfalls of legislative transparency and how it benefits lobbyists, click here. To see more on the general link between transparency and partisanship, click here or dig into the other menu items on this page, where we also collect academic citations on the power of secret ballots, brubery (the opposite of bribery), perverse accountability and citizen engagement (or lack thereof).
A huge percentage of time is spent on how to use the political process to create a vote that will embarrass the other side. You basically have people working to make each other look as bad and stupid as possible.Rep Eric Fingerhut Inside Congress (by Ronald Kessler 1997)
The number of restrictive rules rose partly in reaction to heightened Republican efforts to devise floor amendments that would force Democrats to cast embarrassing votes.Steven Smith 1987 O’Neill’s Legacy for the House
What is Weaponized Transparency?
Political-message bills have sprouted like weeds... Elected officials have to show that they’re doing something, so they propose bills designed only to create a talking point against the other side.Editorial Board N.Y.Times 2012 The Bills to Nowhere
The point is not that transparency is bad or good, but rather that it cannot be an end in itself. It is a tool that is often indispensable for democratic decision making, but it is a tool that can also be used as a weapon.Steven Aftergood 2019 Transparency vs. Good Government
We’ve lost out a lot with the camera (televised proceedings), because it emphasizes combat and drama rather than a thoughtful analysis of issues.Rep. David Obey 2010 Obey surveys House then and now
Senator Frank Murkowski 1996 - On the Weaponization of the Amendment Process via “Sense of the Senate“ Amendments
In the Constituent Assembly and during the first years of the Convention (1792-95), the radical left successfully developed the rhetorical strategy of using roll calls as a weapon of intimidationJon Elster 2013 Securities Against Misrule
Behind closed doors...buncombe is not worthwhile. Only sincerity counts. Publicity would lessen the chance for concessions, the compromises, without which wise legislation cannot in practice be secured. Men are averse to changing their positions or yielding anything when many eyes are watching.Robert Luce 1926 Congress: An Explanation
Had the deliberations been open while going on, the clamors of faction would have prevented any satisfactory result; had they been afterwards disclosed, much food would have been afforded to inflammatory declamation. Propositions made without due reflection, and perhaps abandoned by the proposers themselves, on more mature reflection, would have been handles for a profusion of ill-natured accusation.Alexander Hamilton 1792 The Papers of Alexander Hamilton
The need to generate materials for negative commercials also produces an ugly blame game in Washington. Posturing for their next campaigns, elected officials sometimes introduce legislation designed to embarrass the opposition. This sort of behavior has heightened the gridlock in Washington over the past decade.Stephen Ansolabehere & Shanto Iyengar 1995 Going Negative
Wall Street Journal 2021 - McConnell announcing that the Republicans will write amendments designed solely to put Democrats on the record – not to produce good legislation. What he doesn’t admit is that these tactics also push moderate Republicans to the edges as well.
The Republicans think that Reid has tyrannically limited their ability to offer amendments to legislation. Reid, on the other hand, would argue that Republican amendments in recent years have been generally nothing more than political grandstanding – proposals with no chance of passage, introduced with the sole purpose of making Senate Democrats take politically embarrassing votes.Rob Garver 2014 Insurance Bill Hits Political Snags
Business groups allied with Republicans had demanded a roll call vote on full repeal, even if the effort lost. They wanted to put senators on the record and planned to use the votes opposing the bill as a political weapon against vulnerable incumbents in November.Congressional Quarterly 2006 Opponents of Estate Tax Fall Short
For nearly a century after becoming a standing committee, the Rules Committee reported mostly open amendment rules... That began to change when amendments offered in the Committee of the Whole became subject to rollcall votes beginning in 1971. Minority Republicans seized on the new sunshine rule to offer politically sensitive amendments.Donald Wolfensberger 2015 Why Are Restrictive Rules Ratcheting Up?
What happens when you’re in the majority is that your members don’t want to take any tough votes, so they’re always beating on the majority leader to file cloture or fill up an [amendment] tree. Harry has filled up the tree 35 times, which is as many as the last five leaders combined. I’ve got members that won’t vote cloture unless they get amendments.Mitch McConnell 2010 (in Chaddock) Partisan Efficiency in an Open-Rule Setting
Lawmakers are consumed with trying to trap one another with hot-button votes that don’t have much to do with real legislative business.Carl Hulse 2019 Weaponizing Hot Button Votes
Publicity, first of all, can be used as a tool of injustice and manipulated to skew public opinion. Administrators who leak personal information about political opponents or publish documents to sabotage peace negotiations use publicity in a way that is far from neutral.Sissela Bok 1982 Secrets - On the Ethics of Concealment
Party leaders might also request roll-call votes to showcase an issue of concern to their voters or to embarrass opponents by forcing them to take an unpopular public stance on a vote.Carrubba, Gabel & Hug 2008 Legislative Voting Behavior
[Sometimes under an open & transparent process] you bring a bill to the floor, the partisan bomb throwers come out, right. They start offering their poison pills and eventually so many politically painful votes pile up that the bill just sinks under its own weight.Peter Hanson 2017 Legislative Branch Capacity Working Group on Regular Order
Republicans in Washington are adept at designing legislation with the goal of embarrassing Democrats.Linda Fowler 2006 Sanders’ vote on Amber Alert
Shortly after television had entered the House chamber, Democrats found themselves on the receiving end of a daily barrage of Republican verbal jabs during the morning hour and special order periods. One House Democrat, in reference to the practice, complained that the periods were being used “to bludgeon us to death each day on nationwide TV.”Ronald Garay 1984 Congressional Television
Are members out there using the open process to offer poison pills amendments – to grandstand and embarrass the other party, or maybe embarrass their own members – you know some extreme member of the majority party who want to embarrass leadership? Our evidence suggests that there’s a lot of that kind of activity…
Our takeaway point then is that when you open the floor to debate you get a lot of legislating by more ideologically extreme members of Congress and probably amendments that are designed to embarrass the other side or perhaps embarrass their own members. [Looking at the] ideologically extreme members who are offering a lot of amendments, they’re also not winning support even from their own party. [Their] amendments are designed for press releases position taking maybe embarrassing other members. This is not what we would define as productive legislating
To avoid tough questions and politically embarrassing votes, the House and Senate have even refused to consider a budget even though they are required by law to adopt one.Stan Collender 2018 Trump’s Path to Fiscal Ruin
For an explainer on weaponized transparency click here.
Members of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress seem universally disgusted by the cameras’ impact, specifically how they’ve been weaponized for made-for-TV partisanship now feeding a divided country and 24-hour news cycle. The panel’s hearing in March devolved into personal tales of camera-bashing. John Lawrence, a former chief of staff to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said the decision four decades ago to open Congress to the cameras created the “unintended consequence” of fueling partisanship. Geoff West 2019 Cameras as Cash Machines
House members feared that television could be used against them in upcoming elections. Republican Whip Robert Michel (R-IL ) took to the floor in October 1977 to warn his colleagues that the House should carefully consider the political impact of broadcasting the House proceedings… Both parties began gathering an arsenal of damaging clips of opposition party members in a “video version of mutually assured destruction.” Each party knew that if it sanctioned the use of such clips, the opposition would up the ante by unleashing its own clips. There was little question that virtually anyone could be made to look foolish by a careful editing of comments.Stephen Frantzich & John Sullivan 1996 The C-SPAN Revolution
Powerful committees like the House Rules Committee, which schedules legislation, were very hesitant to allow the cameras in. The Republican minority regularly complained that the Democrats closed such meetings out of fear of political embarrassment.Stephen Frantzich & John Sullivan 1996 The C-SPAN Revolution
The leadership also missed key opportunities to set legislative traps for the GOP, Burton told Rennert. O’Neill and Wright should have forced the Republicans to cast recorded votes that pitted their own region’s economic interests, especially in farm areas, against Reagan’s budget cuts. For example, Burton said the leadership should have forced a roll-call vote when the House passed a Reagan bill to reduce dairy price supports. Even if a recorded vote would not have changed the outcome, he said, dairy Farmers at least would have known who voted against them. “We must put Republicans on the spot,” he said. “It’s time for them to show their true colors – whether they’re Reagan zealots or whether they’re more sensitive to their own constituents.John Jacobs 1997 Rage for Justice - Phillip Burton
Senate Democrats and Republicans Thursday are breaking out their well-trod strategy of forcing each other to cast politically difficult votes, this time on amendments to a budget “reconciliation” bill that would repeal Obamacare. The amendments stand virtually no chance of being adopted, but they'll make for great campaign attack ads.Katy O’Donnell 2015 Senate Votes Designed to Exact Political Pain
He dedicated the next few years to comprehending the California Public Records Act, the Brown Act mandating open meetings and civil procedures. “For those who think the Brown Act has no teeth, they are wrong,” said McKee. “It provides us with the ability to embarrass public officials.” And that’s just what he did.Christine Brownell 2002 Letting the Sunshine In
After a debate in the Commons on the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, in which a clause offering commercial reciprocity to France was defeated by 196 to 187, a handbill was put out to publicize the division list (legislator’s votes) with the obvious intention of damaging the electoral interest of the minority.J.R. Pole 1983 The Gift of Government
During the controversial governorship of William Cosby in the 1730s, the Morrisite opposition learned techniques of party warfare that left their mark on the conventions of legislative procedure. The Morrisites contributed to the use of the press as a weapon of political opposition. More than this, they saw that capital was to be made from opening the debates of the legislature to the public, and on at least one occasion they got the House to vote to throw open its doors. They wanted, moreover, to place their own votes as well as those of their opponents on the record, and in June 1737, the assembly voted to record the names of members voting “aye” and “nay” in divisions.J.R. Pole 1983 The Gift of Government
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is part of the basic weaponry of modern regulatory war, deployable against regulators and regulated alike. It differs, however, from other weaponry in the conflict, in that it is largely immune from arms limitation debate.
It is apparent that something went wrong. The act and its amendments were promoted as a means of finding out about the operations of government; they have been used largely as a means of obtaining data in the government's hands concerning private institutions. They were promoted as a boon to the press, the public interest group, the little guy; they have been used most frequently by corporate lawyers.Anton Scalia 1982 The Freedom Of Information Has No Clothes
Bach and Smith (1988) were the first to emphasize the role that special rules play in managing uncertainty in the House. They argue that an unintended side effect of the 1970s House reforms was to make floor action more volatile and less predictable. The introduction of roll-call voting on amendments in the Committee of the Whole led to a large increase in floor amendment activity, especially among minority party members. Republican legislators systematically offered amendments designed to force Democrats to cast politically difficult votes. Reductions in the prerogatives of full committee chairs likewise made floor action less predictable. As a result, the Democratic leadership, via its control over the Rules Committee, began to restrict amendment opportunities on the floor. On major bills, the percentage of open rules fell from over 70% in 1977-78 to under 14% in 1985-86.C. Lawrence Evans 1999 Legislative Structure
Since in our model the president wants to appear moderate to voters, while Congress wants him to appear extreme, Congress sometimes writes a bill that it knows the president will veto. Thus, despite Congress and the president being completely informed, an uninformed third party causes the outcome to be Pareto inefficient.Tim Groseclose & Nolan McCarty 2001 The Politics of Blame - Bargaining Before an Audience
Our third result is consistent with Gilmour’s notions of stalemates and bidding wars. In each, the opposition members of Congress pass an extreme bill, which is intended to force the president to veto the bill so they will have a campaign issue in the upcoming election. Our fourth result where Congress and the president reject compromises that they would both prefer to the status quo is consistent with Gilmour’s notion of strategic disagreement, a phrase which Gilmour adopts as the title of his book. In such cases “politicians frequently reject compromise because the political advantages of maintaining disagreements outweigh the benefits of a modestly better policy achieved through compromise (1995, 3).” Tim Groseclose & Nolan McCarty 2001 The Politics of Blame - Bargaining Before an Audience
Despite the encroachment on his power, Mills stayed one step ahead of the posse. He told the Rules Committee he preferred no rule at all to a modified closed rule. He would take the bill directly to the House floor and dare anyone to amend it, in effect scuttling it. Mills knew Democrats could not restrain themselves if presented with such a rare and inviting target. Chaos likely would ensue. Bolling, who agreed with Burton on this issue, said the chairman’s tactic was like offering a drink of water to a person coming out of the desert and then immersing him in a tub of water. Such “open” rules, Bolling said, “made the House look idiotic and totally ineffective.”John Jacobs 1997 Rage for Justice - Phillip Burton
Democrat Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri lamented how members routinely use the floor to just “insult everybody” and that such incivility is rewarded. He pointed to the example of Republican Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who was reprimanded by the House after yelling “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during his 2009 health care speech to Congress but more than doubled his typical fundraising on the way to winning re-election the next year. Wilson is still in office.Geoff West 2019 Cameras as Cash Machines
The two parties have been battling for months over amending Senate legislation. Democrats say Republicans are only interested in forcing politically embarrassing votes, while Republicans say Democrats are autocratically shutting down the chamber’s amendment process.Alan Fram (AP) 2014 Iran Sanctions Dispute
We conclude by considering the use of roll-call votes as a political weapon, either to punish one’s adversaries or to terrorize them.Jon Elster & Arnaud Le Pillouer 2015 Semi-Public Voting in the Constituante
Nelson alleged that, behind the scenes, GOP caucus leaders offered to withdraw the 60-percent rule if Democrats would back off their threat to force roll call votes on gender equality and climate study amendment bills.John Stang 2018 Lawmakers debate 30-plus budget amendments
As [scholar Sarah] Binder points out, Democrats imposed barriers against minority dilatory tactics “continuously from 1975 through 1979” so that by the early 1980s they had fine-tuned House rules to eliminate most minority obstructionism. At that point, Binder continues, “Democratic majorities turned to procedural innovations to limit minority influence over the agenda,” mostly in the form of restrictive special rules from the Rules Committee.
The early tipoff to this new direction came in the form of a letter sent in 1979 by Representative John LaFalce (D-N.Y.), and cosigned by over forty colleagues, to Speaker Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill and Rules Committee Chairman Richard Bolling (D -Mo.) requesting more “modified open” rules “limiting the number of... amendments” that can be offered, “and the time permitted for debate” on them. They conceded that some might cry “gag rules,” but they claimed to be interested only in greater institutional efficiency “for the good of the House, its membership, and the country.” However, it was obvious to most observers that they were reacting to politically embarrassing amendments being offered by Republicans who took full advantage of the rules authorizing recorded votes in the committee of the whole and establishing a new House television broadcasting system that had gone live to the public earlier in 1979.
Bolling, who some said had put LaFalce and friends up to writing the letter, was more than happy to oblige and, shortly thereafter, restrictive amendment rules were being granted on more than just tax bills as had previously been the case.Donald Wolfensberger 2017 Changing House Rules
Paul Fabrizio & Donald Frazier 2019 - Forcing ‘Uncomfortable’ Roll-Call Votes
There was the concern voiced earlier by members of the Rules Committee – if the bill were overloaded with amendments, the whole package would be endangered. Dealing with this problem was more difficult than might be imagined. With an open rule, it is virtually impossible to prevent any member who wants to propose an amendment from doing so, and the reform coalition included many “bomb-throwers” – members who desired sweeping changes and who were viewed by their compatriots as less than pragmatic…[and who] pushed for less compromise and more action. In this instance, the chief concern of the coalition leaders was Representative Rees (the initiator of the “beeper” experiment). He was an important actor in the teller vote struggle, but he had also drafted a large number of other possible amendments to the bill and publicly expressed his intention to introduce all of them, although many (such as a negative pension plan) had no chance of passage. Norm Ornstein and David Rohde 1974 The Strategy of Reform - Recorded Teller Voting
I discuss how particular tactics by the minority party have developed since the 1970s, then use case studies, aggregate data, or both to explain why the minority uses them. Intent is seldom obvious. For instance, a legislative act (say, an amendment) might be offered in order to alter a bill, make a political point, compel a vote that embarrasses or discredits the other party, or a mixture of these things. Floor statements, news stories, legislative text, and other clues are used to infer the motivation behind minority party activity whenever possible. Matthew Green 2015 Underdog Politics
Messaging is very important. So now amendments aren't necessarily offered to influence a bill but rather to send a message. Roy Blunt, who is, when he was in the House of Representatives, after the 2006 elections and the Republicans were in the minority, he wrote a memo to Republicans saying look, we need to offer key amendments or motions to recommit, which is the guaranteed amendment to the minority party, that will either win, they'll pass, or they'll make Nancy Pelosi and Democrats look bad. Either way, we win, right. So messaging becomes central to what the minority party does with the more classic legislative tools that are at its disposal.Matthew Green 2015 From the Library of Congress
The best examples that I could find are from times when new messaging tactics were first developed. So the use of one minutes in a partisan fashion, which really came about in the late 70s, Republicans started doing it. That really, really, Democrats really didn't know what to do about that at first. And said why are you so angry at us and talking about Ronald Reagan all the time?Matthew Green 2015 From the Library of Congress
So what’s going on here? Both Democratic and Republican representatives told me that O’Brien and his allies used roll call votes as a political weapon. They introduced bills and demanded roll calls to get someone on the record on an issue and then used it against them in a political campaign. They used it as a tactic to win power and tried to use it to keep power. Votes that could have easily been determined by a simple voice vote were put to roll call to try to create “gotcha” moments, they said….State Rep. Tim Copeland, R-Stratham, said this tactic was used by Republicans to attack other Republicans who didn’t toe the party line. “They end up putting out these political notices in people’s mailboxes and do snapshots of the vote,” he said. “They try to argue you’re not Republican at all.”Howard Altschiller 2014 Roll Call Votes as Political Weapons
I was a little surprised that in discussing messaging tactics, you didn’t include amendment as a possibility. Certainly, putting up an amendment... that you’re either going to have to vote in favor of or look bad. That's essentially the message,Question posed to Matthew Green 2015 From the Library of Congress
Walter Oleszek on Transparency as a driver of Partisanship 1999
Lawmakers also have made many issues more difficult to handle because they want to use legislation to make political statements – for themselves or for their party, as Senate Democrats sought to do on the crime bill.Richard Cohen 1990 Crumbling Committees
[Writing about 1937] Further study is needed to elucidate when the winning side will seek a roll call vote. We conjecture that, in this time frame, Republicans were generally reluctant to seek roll-call votes because their ties to southern conservatives depended in part on downplaying partisan divisions. Forcing roll calls solely to embarrass the Democratic leadership would have made partisanship more salient. During the court-packing fight of 1937, Republicans generally kept quiet and allowed President Roosevelt’s Democratic critics to take the lead; they strategized that such discretion would make Democrats less likely to see the issue as primarily partisan and thus reduce the pressure on wavering Democrats to stick with their party (Patterson 1967). Eric Schickler and Kathryn Pearson 2005 Agenda Control, Majority Party Power, and the House Committee on Rules, 1937-52
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate launched a final marathon session on healthcare reform on Wednesday, with Republicans forcing Democrats into a series of politically tough votes before senators can pass the last changes to the landmark law. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid ridiculed the Republican attempt to force Democrats into politically embarrassing stances. “How serious can they be?” Reid said of Republicans. “Offering an amendment dealing with Viagra for rapists?”John Whitesides & Donna Smith 2010 Vote Marathon on Healthcare
At a minimum, filling the tree stalls the amendment process, which may be all that the majority leader expects and wants. He may want to buy time to negotiate an agreement to limit or order amendments, or he may need time to find additional votes for cloture and the bill. In the meantime, filling the tree allows the leader to delay consideration of unfriendly, irrelevant, or embarrassing amendments and to avoid the exposure of divisions within his party to public view.Steven Smith 2014 Senate Syndrome
Over the past few years, [Harry Reid] is a Majority Leader who has acted tyrannically to restrict the rights of all senators to debate and offer amendments. He has used a parliamentary tactic called “filling the amendment tree” to block a free-flowing amendment process and used a procedure to eliminate amendments after the conclusion of debate... Reid showed his true motivations when argued that he will continue to prevent votes on “same-sex marriage and abortion” because “I mean, the American people aren’t interested in that.” This is further evidence that reforming the Senate’s rules is merely a means to stop difficult votes for the majority party on revenue-neutral tax reform, gun rights, entitlement reform and traditional family values.Brian Darling 2012 “Filibuster Reform” Is Power Grab
Democratic reformers are now pledging less rigid controls... That sounds meritorious, but a more open process might well conflict with former (and possible future) speaker Nancy Pelosi’s promise of a floor based on “civility, fairness and transparency.”
In a highly polarized and competitive House, an open floor has been an invitation to unrelenting political warfare. Those Democrats of the 1970s discovered as much when GOP strategists, as one recalled, “took advantage of” loose rules to target vulnerable Democrats. The number of recorded votes skyrocketed from 177 in 1969 to 661 in 1975 and over 800 the next year, many imbued with political, rather than legislative, motivations...
Narrow margins, unrestrained special interest money, inflammatory issues and social media reward those who devise crippling and embarrassing amendments. As a result, both parties have circumscribed the amendatory process lest members be subjected to recorded votes designed to injure rather than improve.John Lawrence 2018 Democrats Should Be Careful What They Wish For
Republicans had ample reason at times to filibuster; on many bills, to preempt the GOP or simply to avoid embarrassing amendments, Reid has “filled the amendment tree,” a tactic to deny the minority any amendments on the floor. Filibustering those bills, as a protest, is understandable.Norm Ornstein 2014 Yes, the Filibuster Is Still a Huge Problem
In the same vein, majority-party leaders are expected to protect their people from having to cast unpopular votes by keeping politically difficult issues off the agenda. The minority's strategy is to force votes on issues that will either embarrass majority members back home or force them to vote against their party's position. A great deal of the maneuvering in Congress is aimed at forcing or avoiding such votes, particularly during election years.Gary C. Jacobson 2005 Institutions of American Democracy
Majority status brings with it new responsibilities to pass the party’s priority legislation in a timely and successful fashion, and that often entails severely restricting the amendment process on major legislation to avoid minority party obstruction and weakening or politically embarrassing amendments. Donald Wolfensberger 2015 Why Are Restrictive Rules Ratcheting Up?
Congress’s work on the 12 annual appropriations bills ground to a halt in July, when House lawmakers became embroiled in a contentious battle over the confederate flag… Rather than risk a series of politically embarrassing votes on the subject, House Speaker Boehner halted debate on the Interior spending bill, and said there would be no further action on appropriations bills…at least for now.Tom Steiger 2015 Health Policy Report
A motion to recommit, or MTR, is one of the few procedural tools the minority party has to get its message across. While the procedure can be used in a way that actually makes substantive changes to legislation, most often the minority’s goal is to send a political message, not improve the bill.Lindsey McPherson 2019 Democrats Struggle with Messaging Votes
At the end of the 20 hours, any amendments that have not already been voted on will be literally stacked into a pile and voted on with very limited debate in what is known as a “vote-a-rama.” The number of amendments is unlimited, at least up until the time votes begin.
Democrats will file many, many amendments designed to force Republicans to take difficult or politically embarrassing votes.
Republicans may interrupt all the Kabuki theater with actually significant amendments aimed at influencing the ultimate bill. In other cases, Republicans may, for symbolic purposes, offer amendments they know will be ruled out of order by the chair on the advice of the Senate parliamentarian because they violate the rules limiting budget bills to items strictly affecting federal spending and revenues, or violate the budget resolution that set up the whole process.Ed Kilgore 2017 Procedural Madness Ahead
There is more party-line voting in the contemporary Congress in part because floor votes have been enlisted as a weapon in the battle for party control of Congress.Frances Lee 2016 Insecure Majorities
Forcing (transparent/public) votes on divisive “hot-button” issues provides campaign ammunition to party colleagues and supporters back home.Walter Oleszek 2015 Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process
It really is true that too much business in Congress is determined by whether members are willing to take politically motivated messaging votes. Thus, other members – particularly in the minority – deploy messaging votes whenever they don’t like said business. My favorite example of this was when Senator Tom Coburn tried to derail health care reform in 2010 by introducing an amendment that would’ve prohibited exchange health plans from providing Viagra and other erectile dysfunction to convicted sex offenders. As it happens, Democrats were determined enough to pass Obamacare to vote down many of these kinds of amendments. But the threat of similar, less outrageous poison pills has deterred them from pursuing lower priority legislation in the Senate since they lost the House in 2011.Brian Beutler 2014 Mitch McConnell Strategy to End Senate Gridlock
The majority uses its control of the Rules Committee to limit amendments by the minority and avoid politically embarrassing votes.Thomas Mann 1993 Testimony - House Congressional Record
Brian Beutler writes today about the recent Republican practice of gumming up the Senate by deluging every bill with a tidal wave of awkward, superfluous, or just plain dumb amendments designed to force Democrats to cast politically embarrassing votes (“Is Senator Catnip really opposed to free flag pins for all vets?”):
To deny Democrats even symbolic victories, Senate Republicans have flooded each legislative debate with amendments – some pertinent, some absurd – that Democrats didn’t want to vote on, or that threatened the legislative coalition behind the underlying bill. When Reid has stepped in to protect his members from these votes, McConnell has used it as a pretext to filibuster.
So… I’d put this in the general category of generic blather that switches sides whenever the parties trade majorities. For the past few years, McConnell has been for filibusters and against limitations on amendments. Starting in January, some alleged Democratic perfidy will quickly give him cover to switch his position, and Harry Reid will switch his too. Life will then go on exactly as before. You heard it here first.
Amendments are opportunities to weaken bills or embarrass the opposition, not to improve the legislation. And votes on complicated bills become fodder for thirtysecond campaign ads.Bruce Cain 2016 Is our government too open?
Pretty soon vulnerable Republican incumbents like Kelly Ayotte and Rob Portman will be asking McConnell to shield them from tough votes themselves.Brian Beutler 2014 Mitch McConnell Strategy to End Senate Gridlock
The increase in transparency brought two marked changes: a substantial increase in the number of issues debated, and a seismic increase in what is euphemistically known as “messaging.” Some mistakenly claim this onslaught of weaponized amendments was an unforeseen consequence of sunshine. But the dynamic was investigated by the Framers. Alexander Hamilton insisted on secrecy specifically to limit animosity. Had members crafted legislation in sunshine, he wrote, “much food would have been afforded to inflammatory declamation.” James Madison agreed. To limit partisan anger, the Framers employed rules of secrecy in the Constitutional Convention and placed a right to legislative secrecy in Article I. But in the hearings and debates leading up to the 1970 sunshine reforms, the ideas of the Framers were overlooked. Worse, the spirit of the Constitution was scorned. Future Speaker Tip O’Neill brandished legislative secrecy like a form of profanity, calling the secret amending process a “cowardly system.” And no one references the Constitution. But think of the difference. Unlike the 1970 reformers, Hamilton spoke from experience. In debates over the Articles of Confederation, he suffered through heated sessions of public debates. Contrast this to O’Neill who had spent his early career sheltered by a process permitting calming secrecy.
Good government reformers have made a decades-long push to make the activities of members more transparent to the public so that members can be held accountable for their decisions. Some political scientists say these efforts have been too successful, and that the deal-making needed for orderly government is now too difficult because members are criticized the moment they stray from an established public position (Binder and Lee 2013). One option would be to return to an earlier system in which total vote tallies – rather than the votes of individual members – are reported for appropriations bills. Members might be more willing to cast tough votes, and there would be a reduced incentive for “gotcha” amendments aimed only at causing members political harm. The path of appropriations bills through the floor would likely be smoother.Peter C. Hanson 2015 Restoring regular order in congressional appropriations
Senators prefer regular order, but turn to omnibus packages because the Senate’s individualistic rules permit appropriations bills to be delayed or used to force votes on politically painful amendments.Peter C. Hanson 2015 Restoring regular order in congressional appropriations
Packaging bills together (via omnibus - which is driven by weaponization) has the dual effect of broadening the coalition of support for the bill and reducing opportunities for amendment relative to the regular order. It trades an open legislative process for one that is closed and restrictive. Political scientist Matt Green has argued that the advantage of regular order is that it allows members to challenge problematic provisions in open debate and strike or amend them. Unwise policies can be adjusted and wasteful spending can be removed. Abandoning regular order “risks enacting substandard legislation” because it eliminates this natural check in the legislative process (Green and Burns 2010). Omnibus legislating moves lawmaking behind closed doors. Rank-and-file members are given few if any opportunities to change the final package. More errors, mistakes and waste may creep into the final legislation as a result. Peter C. Hanson 2015 Restoring regular order in congressional appropriations
The opening up of the process fosters messaging politics and contributes to the harsh partisanship characteristic of the contemporary Congress.Frances Lee 2019 Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress
It really is true that too much business in Congress is determined by whether members are willing to take politically motivated messaging votes. Thus, other members – particularly in the minority – deploy messaging votes whenever they don’t like said business.Brian Beutler 2014 Mitch McConnell Strategy to End Senate Gridlock
Today, most hearings are merely scripted partisan theater, in which both sides present witnesses not to persuade anyone, but to generate sound bites; everybody’s mind is already made up. In the current climate, party branding and messaging dominate congressional decisionmaking.Lee Drutman 2017 Congress Wasn’t Always This Awful
Since the time of Newt Gingrich’s speakership, wedge issues have been a significant part of partisan efforts to use House debates not just to advance legislative policy but to drive a wedge between a congressperson of the other party and his or her constituents by forcing votes on amendments on which the views of constituents and party leaders are at odds. Before the 1970s, votes on amendments were generally not recorded – House members voted by voice, by raising hands, or by walking down the center aisle to be counted. When small groups of members began to insist that votes on amendments, even those that reflected intentionally divisive wedge issues, be “on the record,” Congress became more transparent and its members became more accountable, but at the cost of turning the House into a battleground for partisan advantage.Mickey Edwards 2012 Parties Versus the People
When congressional majorities share the party of the president, committee chairs are reluctant to conduct regular oversight hearings for fear of dredging up embarrassing information that may harm the White House politically. When government is divided, congressional leaders are more likely to use oversight as a political weapon against the president, and federal agencies are less likely to share information that committees request in oversight investigations.Democracy Fund 2017 Congress and Public Trust
November Amendments: Senators turn up the political heat on colleagues as the November elections get closer. A senator pointed out that amendments were being offered to one measure “with only one and only one purpose in mind. Let us be realistic. [This] is an opportunity for Senators on either side of the aisle, whether it be Democrats or Republicans, to develop ammunition to be used in some 30-second spot ad in the next political campaign. These votes are not about substance. They are strictly about politics, positioning, window dressing, and so forth.” The reverse approach is to work to avoid troublesome votes. A Democratic minority leader complained that the majority leader was protecting Republicans who had close November election contests from having to cast votes on issues that might cost them support back home. “They don’t want to have votes on anything but naming airports,” declared the minority leader. The majority leader’s spokesman replied” “The Democrats are just frustrated because we aren’t voting on the things they want to vote on. Welcome to the Minority.” Both parties allow senators in tight election contests to offer popular amendments that could win them votes back home.Walter Oleszek 2015 Congressional Procedures
‘November Amendment’ is but one of the many terms for weaponized amendments.
We also expect that the majority party will attempt to bring up and pass “signature” legislation that enhances its reputation, and both parties will attempt to force roll call votes on issues that pit the opposing party against the preferences of most voters.Gregory Koger & Matthew J. Lebo 2017 Strategic Party Government: Why Winning Trumps Ideology
November amendments are particularly important in the contemporary Senate because party control of the chamber can flip rather quickly. As a result, majority and minority leaders craft amendment strategies whose basic purposes are, if in the majority, to hold power by demonstrating the capacity to govern effectively, or, if in the minority, “to build a political case against the majority’s legislative program” and majority members up for reelection. Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, Mo., who faced a tough but successful 2012 reelection, exclaimed, “For the past two years [Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell has been trying to figure out what amendments he could put on the floor to make my life miserable. There have been so many gotcha votes.” McConnell has been trying, she said, to devise “some way to put something on the floor that would get me to vote against my own mother.”Walter Oleszek 2015 Congressional Procedures
‘November Amendment’ is but one of the many terms for weaponized amendments.
To meet the “100 Hours” target, none of the bills went through committee. In addition, they were all brought up under closed rules allowing no amendments. House Democrats had promised a more open and bipartisan legislative process and Republicans complained bitterly about these departures from “regular order.” Democrats argued that all of the measures had been frequently debated, but they clearly feared that, were amendments allowed, consideration might stretch on and on and that Republicans would likely propose amendments that confronted their vulnerable freshmen with difficult votes.Barbara Sinclair 2008 Leading the New Majorities
The reforms of the 1970s helped to facilitate stronger partisanship in Congress, as members used the more open process to score political points against their opponents. By making it easier to force roll-call votes, the reforms made it possible for members to design amendments to embarrass members of the opposing party. Such votes on hot-button issues could then be shared with the campaign committees, so members could claim that their opponents had voted against a balanced budget, for forced integration, and other matters. Similarly, the televising of the House and other transparency reforms of the 1970s were also very useful to a minority party seeking to force its issues into public view. As Republicans seized these opportunities, Democrats adopted more creative procedures to clamp down and restrict opportunities to participate. The feedback loop worked in favor of increasing centralization of power in the leadership. House leaders now govern the House floor with a much heavier hand than they did in the 1970s. In the words of forty-year Republican Congressional staffer Don Wolfensberger, “Every time you have a change in party control, the party in the minority says, ‘If we get in the majority we're going to be more fair and open.’ They get into the majority, and it's even more restrictive than it was.”Casey Burgat 2015 Order in the House?
In the 1980s, Democratic House leaders had developed the rules that govern floor consideration into flexible and powerful tools for managing floor time, focusing debate, and sometimes shaping choices. When in the minority, Republicans had labeled restrictive rules dictatorial and illegitimate, and had promised not use them if they took control. Yet the new Republican majority in the 104th Congress had promised to deliver on an ambitious agenda, much of it in the first 100 days. And, in the mid-1980s, House Republicans had given their leader the authority to appoint Republican members of the Rules Committee, as the Democrats had a decade earlier; thus the committee remained an arm of the majority party leadership. When Republicans brought one of the early Contract items to the floor under an open rule, Democrats behaved just as the minority Republicans had when they had been given the opportunity by an open rule: they offered multitudes of amendments, many designed to force vulnerable Republicans to cast difficult votes. In response, and despite their promise, Republicans began to bring most major legislation to the floor under complex and restrictive rules. The proportion of all rules that were restrictive did go down from 70% in the 103d Congress to 55% in the 104th (Rules Committee, Survey of Activities 1996, 92-97). On major measures, however, 77% of rules were restrictive in the 104th-compared to 82% in the 103d and 72% in both the 100th and 101st Congresses. On this major legislation, the restrictions, by and large, were more substantial than just time limits on the amending process, or the requirement that amendments be “preprinted” in the Congressional record; according to the Republican Rules Committee’s own classification, 63% of the rules were either modified closed or closed.Barbara Sinclair 1999 Transformational Leader or Faithful Agent
Whether or not a rule limits amendments, the motion to recommit with instructions, in order just before the passage vote, gives the House minority an opportunity to amend the bill. When Republicans were in the majority, their leaders defined that vote as a procedural vote which all party members were expected to oppose. When Republicans began to use the motion to recommit (MTR) as a weapon against the new majority, the Democratic leadership decided that asking all their members to vote against every MTR no matter its content would endanger some of the members they most needed to protect. Of the 61 MTRs that Republicans offered between January and the August recess, 16 won. (Democrats averaged less than two wins per year during the 12 years of Republican control.) Those Democrats who approve of their leaders’ permissiveness argue that none of those were substantively significant. Others, however, worried that once a MC voted for an MTR, she lost the protection of being able to claim votes on MTRs as just procedural not substantive – and that Republicans were setting up Democrats for more difficult and destructive MTRs in the future.Barbara Sinclair 2008 Leading the New Majorities
[In 1974], facing numerous embarrassing amendments from Republicans, beleaguered Democratic leaders tried to increase the number of members required to generate a recorded vote on an amendment from 20 to 40.Eric Schickler, Eric McGhee and John Sides 2003 Remaking the House and Senate - The 1970s Reforms
Note: In this citation, we see that Democrats – in 1974 – were already attempting to defend themselves from the rise in messaging votes on embarrassing amendments. And unlike later reformers (like LaFalce) the legislators in 1974 understood the cause for the rise and they addressed it directly – they sought to limit the ability for minorities to call for recorded votes.
Another important outcome of the sunshine reforms was the rise of so-called show votes, or messaging votes. These votes, often on amendments to unrelated bills, are designed not as constructive efforts to improve legislation but as pieces of political theater. Sometimes, the goal is simply to make certain members look good to their constituents. At other times, it is to force rival legislators to take a stand on a difficult issue or entrap them into a vote that will serve as fodder for negative campaign ads that make extreme claims about a candidate’s voting record. Frequently employed for partisan purposes, these votes also give rise to unique forms of legislative dysfunction.
As with lobbying and partisanship, the surge in show votes dates precisely to the rise in transparency. With legislators more frequently voting publicly, the temptation to pin them down, on the record, proved irresistible. As the congressional scholar Donald Ritchie has written, Jesse Helms, a conservative Republican senator from North Carolina, “pioneered the tactic of repeatedly proposing controversial amendments and demanding roll-call votes, even though his side would likely lose.” Soon, other members joined in, demanding repeated recorded votes on hot-button issues, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and school prayer. The number of these weaponized amendments skyrocketed, gumming up the legislative process.James D’Angelo & Brent Ranalli 2019 The Dark Side of Sunlight (Foreign Affairs Magazine)
Gingrich’s strategy was to use the new openness on the House floor, including the television coverage now provided by C-SPAN, for political advantage. Soon, dissident Republicans were offering regular floor amendments to bills designed to put Democrats in embarrassing positions whereby their votes could be used as campaign fodder; and Republicans began to take to the deserted House floor after regular business, using a procedure called “special orders,” to orchestrate colloquies that bashed the majority.Norman Ornstein & Thomas Mann 2006 The Broken Branch
One additional property of the shift to electronic voting in the United States is worth noting. Minority-party members – those most likely to be dissatisfied with overall legislative outcomes – were inclined to push amendments that, when subject to recorded votes, would be politically uncomfortable for the governing majority.John M. Carey 2009 Legislative Voting and Accountability
Imagine how much more productive Congress might be if the legislative process could no longer be co-opted to force politically embarrassing votes. If both sides could no longer spend their time in office attacking each, might they find common ground? Get things done? Come up with bold solutions to our nation’s problems?Jennifer Hoelzer 2013 How Not to be Partisan
We have not had a return to regular order. We had some initial testing of the waters by the Democratic leadership and they got belted politically… And the more Republicans took advantage of opportunities for amendments to offer sort of wedge issues and politically embarrassing votes, Democrats said we could be fair and open and have nothing to show from our substantive agenda or we could operate more like the Republicans have in recent years, and they have largely opted for the latter… The backdrop is so poisonous and the need to sort of deliver on an agenda versus the need to dramatize the differences and the possibility of embarrassing the majority party has kept the reins pretty tight in the Congress.Thomas Mann 2007 Is the Broken Branch on the Mend?
Members of Congress from both parties, along with their families, would routinely visit our home for dinner or the holidays... This type of social interaction hardly ever happens today and we are the poorer for it. It is much harder to demonize someone when you know his family or have visited his home. Today, members routinely campaign against each other, raise donations against each other and force votes on trivial amendments written solely to provide fodder for the next negative attack ad. It’s difficult to work with members actively plotting your demise.Senator Evan Bayh 2012 Who Stole the American Dream?
Democrats forced Republicans to cast politically embarrassing votes against such gun control measures as trigger locks and background checks at gun shows — votes that Goodling tried to head off with repeated scoldings that the measure “is not a gun bill.”CQ Quarterly 2000 Back to Appropriations
Much important legislation will be put off until election, too. The reason, to avoid putting Congressmen on record with politically embarrassing votes on the war and other vital issues. Politicians, above all else, must survive to serve. That's why the maneuvering.Associated Press 1970 Back to Appropriations
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R Alaska) canceled all subcommittee mark-ups this week because he does not want them to be open to criticism over the summer break, and there’s not enough time to get them through committee and to the floor before the Democratic Convention in late July. With this in mind, the education appropriations bill may not ever make it to the floor as a separate bill, because the leadership wants to avoid a series of politically embarrassing votes to increase education funding.Stephanie Glesecke 2004 Week In Review
Representative Emanuel was one of the early adapters of a weaponized motion to recommit and considered it a form of psychological political warfare. “Obviously, they are ‘gotcha’ amendments designed to give people political problems,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader. “And by the way, that’s what we did. So this is not a new, you know, invention of the Republicans.”Carl Hulse 2019 Weaponizing Hot Button Votes
The Democrats’ attempt to portray its opponents as extreme is probably one of the most common tactics in American politics. Senate Republicans, for instance, tried to do essentially the same thing when they offered President Obama’s budget, which the Upper Chamber soundly defeated. Similarly, it’s also like offering “poison pill” amendments, which one party offers to force votes on politically unpalatable positions. This gives rise to “November Amendments” – or amendments whose entire purpose is to embarrass an opposition amendment by forcing a vote on something that will make a pithy, if misleading, 30-second campaign ad in the next election.Mark Strand & Tim Lang 2013 Voting Present as a Legislative Tactic
At the same time, the Democrats’ greater use of restrictive rules responded to a minority party that had been demanding increasingly more roll-call votes on floor amendments in the wake of the 1970s reforms. A couple of the interview subjects for this project referenced the ironic way that the reforms of the 1970s wound up over time redounding to the Republicans’ electoral benefit. “The reforms of the 1970s [were] an important precursor” to the strategies pursued by the COS, noted one veteran Republican staffer. By making it easier to force roll-call votes, the reforms made it possible for COS members to “design embarrassing amendments. The votes on them would then be fed to the campaign committees, so you could say, ‘Jack voted against the balanced budget,’ or something like that.” The televising of the House and other transparency reforms of the 1970s were also very useful to a minority party seeking to force its issues into public view.Frances Lee 2016 Insecure Majorities
Open rules may facilitate productive debate but also open the door to problems that make effective deliberation more difficult, such as dilatory tactics or efforts to politically embarrass members... Regular order permits the minority party to offer amendments that may roll the majority party and potentially damage its reelection interests.Lee Drutman & Peter Hanson 2019 Can America Govern Itself?
Note: the authors leave out transparency as the potential driver of these problems they address.
The blame was pointed at this amendment (2016 Democratic amendment to preserve order) for having injected partisan politics into appropriations. So we see two kinds of patterns here then, amending activity which actually strengthens bipartisan coalitions and amending activity which takes the bill that was viewed as likely to pass and then injects a new issue and that disrupts the coalition of support for that bill. So our our key takeaway point here then again for those calling for regular order is to recognize what they are calling for is a double edged sword. It is not simply opening the door to productive debate, it’s decentralizing power right and in particular it’s opening the door to minority party legislative activity that might not be in the majority’s interest.Peter Hanson 2017 Legislative Branch Capacity Working Group
Note: the authors (Lee Drutman and Peter Hanson) leave out transparency as the potential driver of these problems they address. And this tactic is a major reason why the issue base in Congress increased dramatically from the 1970s on. New and hot button issues can be weaponized.
We demonstrate that majority party extremists refrain from offering amendments despite the relative open floor setting. Nevertheless, chamber majorities cannot restrict minority legislators from offering amendments designed to force them to cast uncomfortable votes and delay the legislative process… Minority party senators claim the use of restrictive amendments led them to engage in more obstructive behavior and force more cloture votes. At the start of the 112th Congress, Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) came to a “gentlemens’ agreement,” in which Reid would not block amendments and McConnell would not force cloture votes on non-controversial measures (Sanchez 2011). The agreement was quickly broken. Democrats alleged this was due to Republicans abusing their right to offer non-germane “message” amendments, which increased delay and could weaken or harm the underlying legislation (Sanchez 2012). McConnell countered that Reid wanted to protect his members from casting “tough votes.”Carson, Madonna, Owens 2012 Partisan Efficiency in an Open-Rule Setting
Amendments are also sometimes used to force senators to go on the record, usually on highly emotional issues such as abortion and busing. The senators who offer such litmus test amendments hope the results can be used by their ideological allies to defeat senators who vote incorrectly. Using roll call votes to create campaign issues, while certainly not new, was perfected in the 1970s and 1980s by members of the New Right.Barbara Sinclair 1989 Transformation of the US Senate
The limited scholarly work on the topic suggests that [the first recorded votes in legislatures] originated in early American legislatures. It appears to be one of the few parliamentary devices where its regular usage in the United States predated its employment by the British Parliament… The first known instance of this occurred in 1641, after a vote ordering the execution of Thomas Wentworth, the 1st Earl of Strafford. The names of those who voted against the bill of attainder were publicized as “betrayers of their country (Luce 1922, 355).” The vote passed and Strafford was eventually beheaded.Michael Lynch, Anthony Madonna 2019 Pre-publication (History of Congressional Transparency)
What this citation suggests is that the very first recorded votes in legislatures were weaponized.
A number of observers of early American politics have argued that the lack of a sufficient second clause led to an abuse of calls for the yeas and nays in the Continental Congress. Joseph Story (1833, 303), for example, argued it had been “used to excess” by members of a “dissatisfied minority, to retard the passage of measures, which are sanctioned by the approbation of a strong majority.” In a letter published under the pseudonym “Leonidas,” Benjamin Rush assailed the Congress for taking far too many “yea and nay” votes, which he suggested led to them failing the people on substantive issues (Butterfield 1951).Michael Lynch, Anthony Madonna 2019 Pre-publication (History of Congressional Transparency)
What this citation suggests is that the very first recorded votes in legislatures were weaponized.
Senators also play games. The Senate Democrats, resentful at being assailed by Republicans for supporting a debt limit extension when Jimmy Carter was President, all voted against a debt limit extension sought by President Reagan. Then they changed their votes after a majority of Republicans, including the most conservative in the chamber, had gritted their teeth and voted for the new debt limit themselves.Martin Tolchin 1983 Time to Vote: The Sound and the Fury
The change in Senate styles, and the impact of that change upon how the institution functions, has, however, also created problems for the Senate as a legislative body. The Senate finds it more difficult to get its essential legislative business done. The Senate's slowness in passing legislation and its difficulty in making decisions are, in part, the result of senators’ broader participation. When more senators representing a greater diversity of interests and opinions take part in legislative battles, decision making will be more difficult. Narrow partisan margins, conflicts with the president, and the constraints imposed by huge budget deficits have contributed to this difficulty. So too have the ability and willingness of senators to pursue their own agendas at the expense of the institution’s agenda.
Senators’ unrestrained pursuit of their own agendas can be highly divisive. When Senator Jesse Helms and his like-minded colleagues force other senators to go on the record over and over again on such emotional issues as busing, school prayer and abortion, resentments are created. That the point is often not to win but to provide ammunition for future electoral opponents of senators who disagree with Helms makes rhetoric that much more divisive. When Senator William Armstrong keeps the Senate in session most of the night with an amendment to repeal a tax deduction for members of Congress, Senate comity is severely strained. When Senator Howard Metzeobaum uses publicity and the Senate rules to kill large numbers of special interest, constituency-oriented bills, the mutual accommodation that contributes to smooth working relationships is disrupted.Barbara Sinclair 1989 Transformation of the US Senate
[If President Kennedy] suffers the normal off-year election losses his hands will continue to be tied at least until 1964… and therefore, the most useful thing to do during this session would be to concentrate on painting the Republicans, and particularly the Republicans in the House, in the worst possible light. This might well make the current session even less productive than it otherwise might be, but if it results in a victory in November it will make his first term as a whole a good deal more productive than it otherwise might have been. The tentative plans to force roll-call votes in the House on a federal scholarship plan and on medical care for the aged are other steps in this direction.Howard Margolis 1962 Kennedy's Politics: How To Make the Republicans Look Nasty
Debate on matters such as the budget, gas rationing or a new Department of Education has been stalled for days or even weeks by the proposal of a rash of amendments. Many of these amendments have had little chance of passage, but were submitted in order to obstruct the progress of legislation or to make rhetorical points. At one point, the House even found itself voting on a conservative-backed amendment mandating that the new education department be called the Department of Public Education and Youth (DOPEY). “We don’t have time for dopey amendments,” said LaFalce.Louis Peck 1979 ‘Inviting anarchy’ into the House
While many see LaFalce’s recent initiative as aimed at the increasingly cohesive group of hard-line conservatives who serve up amendment after delaying amendment, the New York Democrat said his suggestions are aimed at the liberal end of the spectrum as well. For example, one liberal congressman recently threatened a virtual filibuster-by-amendment if the House approved a bill reinstituting the draft. He was planning to introduce such spurious measures as a solar-powered MX missile, and a requirement that any congressman who voted for the draft be required to serve in the armed forces. “The problem is being caused by the fringes of both the conservative and liberal wings more than anybody else the ideologues,” LaFalce said. Louis Peck 1979 ‘Inviting anarchy’ into the House
“The free debate in the Senate will have to go if the television comes in.” “Television will kill it,” Senator Russell Long argued, “for the simple reason that television will make such a complete demand for unnecessary speeches for the benefit of the constituency back home that you won’t have free debate any more”. The sheer increase in speech making would necessitate a whole new set of rules “to accommodate it,” including “a closed rule… similar to that in the House,” he prophesied.Richard Fenno 1989 The Senate through the Looking Glass - The Debate over Television
Roll-call votes provide an obvious means by which party leaders can monitor compliance with their voting instructions...Legislative parties may use roll-call votes specifically to discipline their members. Roll-call votes allow legislative party leaders to monitor their members’ behavior, which is essential for accurately doling out reward or punishment.Carrubba, Gabel & Hug 2008 Legislative Voting Behavior
Former House Parliamentarian Asher Hinds wrote that the procedure was “greatly abused” by members who would draft resolutions “of no practical standing in the House, sometimes so artfully worded as to be political traps, condemning many members to political dangers in their districts, whether they voted for or against them.”Donald Wolfensberger 2002 Suspended Partisanship in the House
The 1980s marked a major procedural change from past decades in House floor amending practice. Whereas previously most important bills had been considered under a relatively open amendment process (closed rules on tax bills being the exception), that began to change in the 1980s as the House became more partisan and some members saw the amendment process as one place to draw bright lines of distinction between the parties. This in turn led to a counteraction by those who resented the long hours spent considering amendments, not to mention the politically embarrassing votes they were being forced to cast.Donald Wolfensberger 2002 Suspended Partisanship in the House
(Because of the sunshine laws) more constitutional amendments have been offered in the past 32 years (5,449) than in the first 173 years of our history, virtually all of them ill-conceived, trivial and politically driven. To the Senate's credit, not one has been approved by the required two- thirds vote in the past 24 years…(But we Senators) have all come to reflexively calculate on every vote, significant or insignificant, (1) what 30-second television spot our next opponent can make of it, (2) the impact it could have on contributions, and (3) what interest group it might inflame or please.Senator Dale Bumpers 1999 How Sunshine Harmed Congress
The motion to recommit with instructions creates significant challenges for House majorities. As a result of a past reform effort, in the early 1970s procedures were implemented for conducting recorded votes in the Committee of the Whole – the parliamentary device through which amendments are considered on the House floor. One unintended consequence was a dramatic increase in the number of amendments, which in turn made deliberations within the chamber less predictable and more politically risky for lawmakers. Increasingly, members were forced to take positions on controversial floor amendments that could damage them at home with constituents.
The consequence was considerable pressure within the majority caucus of the day to clamp down on amending opportunities, and the percentage of legislation considered under open procedures began to fall. Indeed, the proportion of open rules has plummeted from nearly 85 percent during the 1970s to 44 percent in the early 1990s to less than 10 percent in recent years. During 2017- 18 (under Republican management) and so far in 2019 (with Democrats in the majority), roughly half of the special rules reported by the House Rules Committee were closed – effectively precluding amendments not proposed by the reporting committee – and about half were “structured” – limiting amendments to only those referenced in the rule or accompanying report.
As the ability to offer amendments during the Committee of the Whole has been sharply restricted, the importance of the motion to recommit to House minorities has grown. Often, it is the minority party’s only guaranteed point of access into the floor decision making process.C. Lawrence Evans 2019 House Procedure Reform
In the privacy of closed-door sessions, lawmakers are better able to reason on the merits of public policy without fear that their enemies will turn their words against them.Joseph Bessette & John Pitney 2011 American Government and Politics
Members still have incentives to strategically manipulate the recorded voting record to gain a variety of political advantages. They do this by strategically adding “frivolous” votes to the record – votes that provide a political message to constituents but are not representative of the lawmaking process. They also do this by strategically omitting votes from the roll call record that may send a political message to constituents that members would rather not have them receive.Michael Lynch, Anthony Madonna & Alice Kisaalita 2018 Broken Record - Transparency, Position Taking and Recorded Voting in the US Congress (from upcoming 2019 book)
Men would prepare resolutions on subjects of no practical standing In the House, sometimes so artfully worded as to be political traps, condemning many members to political danger In their districts, whether they voted for or against them. Members, therefore, did not naturally like to run risk of such pitfalls, or to be on record upon questions not of a practical moment to the United States, or which might involve local prejudices In their homes and thus destroy their usefulness, without any compensating good. Hinds 1908 Is the Code of the House Limber Enough
*NOTE: This is the first known case of weaponization, though we exepect it to have occurred right from the beginning of Congress. Stanley Bach (2001) finds numerous examples in the early 1900s of this problem, which were called buncombe legislation. And they were based on the roll calls around suspension of the rules.
According to James Madison’s notes, Rufus King argued that a record of votes would be “improper as changes of opinion would be frequent in the course of the business and would fill the minutes with contradictions.” George Mason seconded King's objection, stating that a record of the opinion of members “would be an obstacle to a change of them on conviction,” and, when promulgated in the future, “must furnish handles to the adversaries of the Result of the Meeting.” The rule was subsequently dropped by unanimous consent.James Madison 1787 Madison Debates
Majority Leader McConnel clearly tried to hold an amendment vote on a Sanctuary Cities amendment to put the Democrats on the spot and force them to vote on it, clearly with the idea of using that amendment as a way to put people on record, and then to show it off this summer and fall in preparation for the elections.Matt Glassman 2018 Budget Deal, DACA and Blood Orange
Parties in Congress routinely try to force recorded votes on issues that will cast their opposition in an unattractive light. When these votes work as intended, they elicit party conflict and foreground party differences. The quest for party differences cuts against bipartisan collaboration on legislative issues. An out party does not win a competitive edge by participating in, voting for, and thereby legitimating the in party's initiatives. Instead, an out party angling for partisan advantage will look for reasons to withhold support and oppose.Frances Lee 2016 Insecure Majorities
By incorporating the role of an audience and of Presidential approval ratings, [Groseclose and McCarty (2001)] showed that it is possible for vetoes to occur even with perfect information exchange between the President and Congress. Effectively, the game adds a new dimension: now, even if Congress would benefit from striking a compromise from a policy standpoint, they benefit even more by causing the President to look extreme or look weak by having to veto a bill.Wesley Sheker 2019 The Observer Effect: the Impact of an Audience on Political Negotiations
The subtext of most leadership negotiations is protecting members from tough (weaponized) votes. Majority leaders do it by using Senate rules to block the minority from offering amendments; minority leaders do it by refusing to support procedural votes unless they can offer those amendments. “What happens when you’re in the majority is that your members don’t want to take any tough votes, so they’re always beating on the majority leader to file cloture or fill up an [amendment] tree. Harry has filled up the tree 35 times, which is as many as the last five leaders combined,” McConnell said. “I’ve got members that won’t vote cloture unless they get amendments…”Gail Russell Chaddock 2010 Mitch McConnell Predicts more Bipartisanship
Party leaders fueled polarization by seeking roll call votes on the very issues that are likely to divide the parties....(and) the roll call agenda now focuses on the sorts of economic issues that will likely produce cleavage between the two parties... In this way, party polarization is a vicious cycle. Party leaders have more power in a polarized Congress and have incentive to pursue roll call votes on issues that strengthen party polarization. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that the national agenda gravitates toward economic matters that divide the parties.Neal Devins 2011 Party Polarization and Congressional Committee Consideration of Constitutional Questions
The national policy agenda may well be tied to the incentives of party leaders to take roll call votes on the very issues that divide the parties. (For example) In 2007, Democrats sought to embarrass the Bush Administration through oversight hearings that did not seek to shift power away from the President to the Congress.Neal Devins 2011 Party Polarization and Congressional Committee Consideration of Constitutional Questions
In the 1970s, Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) pioneered the tactic of repeatedly proposing controversial amendments and demanding roll-call votes, even though his side would likely lose. The conservative Helms aimed to put liberal lawmakers on record on such social issues as AIDS funding, abortion, court ordered school busing, and federal financing of the sometimes tasteless arts. “I wanted senators to take stands and do it publicly. I was willing to leave it to their constituents to decide what would happen next,” Helms said, defending his actions. “When senators had to run on their record instead of their rhetoric, things really began to change.”
To counteract such tactics, majority leaders have resorted to “filling the amendment tree.” Normally, senators lose the floor as soon as they file an amendment, but under the “right of first recognition” the majority leader is always called on before anyone else. Therefore the majority leader can file an amendment and immediately seek recognition to add an amendment to the amendment (known as a “second-degree amendment”), and keep on filing amendments. Until the Senate votes on these amendments, no other amendments will be in order. A diagram of how such amendments branch out resembles a tree, so they are called “amendment trees.” The objective is to prevent opponents of the bill from securing the first vote on an amendment of their choosing, perhaps something that would create political problems for the majority or would significantly alter the bill.Donald Ritchie 2010 Congress: A Very Short Introduction
Anxious to know the probable outcome of a vote, party leaders deploy their whips to serve as “head counters.” In the House, deputy and regional whips will determine how members are leaning and then stand in the doorways to the chamber to encourage members to vote with the party. “If you really are a good vote-counter, you don’t let something come up that you can’t win,” said a former House majority whip, Tony Coehlo (D-California). Good vote-counters save information about the members and use it to trade, cajole, lean on, and threaten them.Donald Ritchie 2010 Congress: A Very Short Introduction
The restriction of calls of the yeas and nays to one fifth is founded upon the necessity of preventing too frequent a recurrence to this mode of ascertaining the votes, at the mere caprice of an individual. A call consumes a great deal of time, and often embarrasses the just progress of beneficial measures. It is said to have been often used to excess in the congress under the confederation; and even under the present constitution it is notoriously used, as an occasional annoyance, by a dissatisfied minority, to retard the passage of measures, which are sanctioned by the approbation of a strong majority. The check, therefore, is not merely theoretical; and experience shows, that it has been resorted to, at once to admonish, and to control members, in this abuse of the public patience and the public indulgence.Joseph Story 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution
Party leaders in both the House and Senate also sought to centralize leadership by using party caucuses, task forces, and other techniques to shape the party’s agenda. These efforts are often tied to “message politics”—party efforts to use the (transparency of the) legislative process to make symbolic statements to voters and other constituents. Rather than allow decentralized committees to define Congress’s agenda, Democrats and Republicans alike see the lawmaking process as a way to distinguish each party from the other.Neal Devins 2011 Party Polarization and Congressional Committee Consideration of Constitutional Questions
Lindsey Graham was pissed. The whole thing was “crap,” “a charade” and “despicable,” the South Carolina Republican said. By the fifth day of Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Graham was done with Democrats harping on what he considered to be a slanderous sexual assault allegation. “This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics,” Graham said, pointing a finger across the dais of the Judiciary Committee. The clip went viral. Fox News ate it up. And for Graham, the soundbites paid off handsomely. During the next month, his campaign received $319,000 in large donations (more than $200) – or five times what he raised the previous month. More than 80 percent of the money came from people outside Graham’s home state. For the senator, who’s seeking a fourth term next year, the takeaway is clear: Full-throated histrionics, when broadcast live for millions and replayed for days on cable news, can turn into easy money. But for those focused on how Congress is stymied by partisanship and consumed by fundraising, the moment delivered this counterintuitive message: While putting Congress on TV has brought transparency to the legislative process, it has also created a prime venue for the sort of grandstanding that galvanizes a political base, divides a country and raises a whole lot of money.Geoff West 2019 Cameras as Cash Machines
When leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.Edmund Burke 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France
Minority party Republicans, increasingly frustrated by decreasing opportunities to participate, responded with an increased appetite for dramatic ways to disrupt the House majority, to dramatize procedural abuses by the majority, and to offer embarrassing amendments. In turn, the majority party’s response to such dramatic acts was to limit further still their prospects for participation by using the Rules Committee, which after reform was dominated by the party leadership, to further restrict debate and amendments on the House floor. In addition to increasingly frequent use of restrictive rules, the leaders would also engage in more aggressive efforts to structure special rules or self-executing rules designed to further advantage the majority party at the expense of the minority, as well as to limit the minority party’s right to offer a motion to recommit with instructions - a long-standing procedural safeguard for the House minority. Increasingly aggressive both procedurally and politically, the majority party was looking to govern with minimal minority consultation and, as a result, increased restrictions on minority participatory rights.Douglas B. Harris 2019 Robert H. Michel: Leading the Minority
After 1971 it became relatively easy to demand a recorded vote on amendments... Such rules changes have complicated the lives of members and reinforced some of the more troubling aspects of the permanent campaign... Opposition researchers pore over members’ voting records in an attempt to find a vote contrary to – or a vote that can be (mis)construed as contrary to – the preferences of their constituents. Every vote a member casts must be considered a potential campaign issue. Indeed, some bills and amendments are offered only as a vehicle for forcing a vote that will provide a campaign issue.Norman Ornstein & Thomas Mann 2000 Permanent Campaign
[To Representative Dan Lungren] the tactics of pushing for embarrassing roll call votes on the House floor, using the votes to attack targeted Democratic incumbents, and employing harsh and personal rhetoric to provoke Democratic responses and engage C-SPAN viewers were legitimate hardball tactics. . . . But the Democratic tactics, including, he believed, regular short counts of Republican votes, abuse of proxy voting, the indignity of the McIntyre affair, and unfair committee and subcommittee assignments, were out of bounds…It was clear that Lungren’s feelings were in substantial part rooted in minority status; in the House he was a second-class citizen, and he couldn’t stand it. He wouldn’t abide Democrats who rubbed that in through petty abuses of parliamentary procedure.Norman Ornstein & Thomas Mann 2006 The Broken Branch
We decried a series of internal weaknesses in Congress…including institutions for debate that put a premium on cheap shots and devalue discussions…and the use of procedure and symbolism to embarrass the opposition in a quest for partisan advantage.Norman Ornstein & Thomas Mann 2006 The Broken Branch
In 1971, recorded votes in the Committee of the Whole were instituted, which allowed Republicans to offer their proposals during the amendment stage and obtain recorded voles, making the motion to recommit less significant and often duplicative. Still, Republicans insist that the motion, as one of their few prerogatives, should be left to them to determine appropriate use.
The majority has increasingly taken the view that the motion has been used as a vehicle to harass the majority and obtain floor voles on potentially embarrassing subjects, rather than as a legitimate tool for presentation of serious legislative alternatives. And because Republicans can usually offer major amendments during debate in Committee of the Whole, this “two bites of the apple” argument has been a standard response to Republican complaints about restrictions placed on the motion to recommit.
This resulted in institutions for debate that put a premium on cheap shots and devalue discussions that could either develop agreements or help the public choose among competing positions. It also resulted in the use of procedure and symbolism to embarrass the opposition in a quest for partisan advantage.Norman Ornstein & Thomas Mann 1992 Renewing Congress
transparency that one person considers indispensable is often deemed to be unnecessary, inappropriate or even threatening by someone else. Current congressional demands for testimony and documents amount to “constant harassment,” said Attorney General William Barr.Steven Aftergood 2019 Transparency vs. Good Government
As soon as an important bill comes up, if the vote count indicates an embarrassing setback on a Republican amendment or the chance of an even more embarrassing setback on the vote on the bill itself, will Democratic leaders submit to the embarrassment or find tools, such as closed rules or extended votes, to help them prevail? If Democrats do succumb to those temptations when they recapture the majority – if they do not follow through on their pledges to run Congress more fairly and openly and to assert Congress’s prerogatives – we will be all over their case.Norman Ornstein & Thomas Mann 2006 The Broken Branch
'Postcard votes'– Lawmakers on the receiving end of negative attacks say it's difficult to explain to some voters why the attacks are false or misleading. Conrad Sen. Llew Jones, one of the leading Republican opponents of this kind of electioneering, dubbed the term "postcard vote" during the last legislative session. Jones said some lawmakers, at the behest of special interest groups, introduce bills during the Legislature that have little to no chance of passing and becoming law. Jones said the sole purpose of some of those bills is to set up situations in which lawmakers are forced to cast votes on ideological issues. Those votes are later used against legislators come primary election season. Jones said bills often have multiple votes during the tedious legislative process, and any one of those votes — whether it be on an amendment, a procedural motion, etc. — can and will be used against some lawmakers come primary election time... Republican lawmakers who cast votes based on their conscience and constituents, and do not always go along with certain special interest groups or other members are their party, are most at risk of attack come primary season.John S. Adams 2019 Negative mailers crowding mailboxes
Republicans accused Democrats of abusing the open rules by seeking to score political points rather than legislating: “I know some of my colleagues are going to express concerns about procedure and the fact that this is a structured rule,” observed Rules Committee member Bradley Byrne (AL-1). “Well, regular order means that the House works. Regular order doesn’t mean chaos. Regular order doesn't mean that Members get to offer poison pill amendments just to kill a bill.” Democrats countered by accusing Republicans of unfairly shutting down debate in order to avoid painful votes. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (MD-5) responded: “ As soon as it became clear… that House Republicans might have to take an up-or-down vote again on whether to ban discrimination against LGBT Americans, they shut the open process down.”Lee Drutman & Peter Hanson 2019 Can America Govern Itself?
If transparency is not reduced to what it is, a means, it is a threat, so that democracy has realized the dream of totalitarianism. The demand for excess transparency is no longer the quintessence of democracy, but rather its direct opposite.G. Carcassone 2001 Le Trouble De La Transparence
Among Senate procedures, the “vote-a-rama’ is second perhaps only to the filibuster as a campaign tool. The stretch of roll call votes on amendments offers members a chance to bring pet issues to the floor and show up members of the opposite party, virtually risk-free. Consider them press release votes. Take an amendment from Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to extend federal funding for Medicaid expansion. His office styled it as a move to “protect more than 600,000 Ohioans who gained coverage through the state’s Medicaid expansion from Republican attacks on Medicaid." It’s certain to pop up in a campaign advertisement against Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who is facing a tough reelection fight this cycle — even though it stands no chance of being attached to the legislation.Katy O’Donnell 2015 Senate Votes Designed to Exact Political Pain
Roll-call votes…actually provide a distorted view of legislative voting behavior in general. First, for many legislatures, only a subset of legislative votes is executed by roll call. Several studies indicate that this subset is not a random sample of all votes and so may suffer from significant selection bias. Roll-call votes are typically not requested randomly by a disinterested party; they are selected by a purposive actor (such as a party leader) with a vested interest in what the vote will reveal about legislative behavior to a particular audience. Thus, we cannot be confident that we can infer behavior on the unobserved (non-roll-call) votes from the roll-call votes. This disjunct has negative implications for the use of roll-call votes to estimate legislators’ ideal points, the dimensionality of the policy space, and party influence on legislative voting. Second, legislative parties may use roll-call votes specifically to discipline their members. Roll-call votes allow legislative party leaders to monitor their members’ behavior, which is essential for accurately doling out reward or punishment.Clifford Corrubba, Matthew Gabel & Simon Hug 2008 Legislative Voting Behavior, Seen and Unseen: A Theory of Roll-Call Vote Selection
Outing a fellow member to “take a difficult vote” even has a uniquely Beacon Hill term of opprobrium. It’s called “spotting,” and is considered an unfriendly act.Robert Kuttner 2023 Massachusetts Blues
A Republican lawmaker accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats of "shutting down the process" in the House of Representatives. Democrats say the restrictions are needed to ensure Congress has the time to pass a dozen individual spending bills in the next few months to fund the government, while lawmakers also deal with health care and energy reform. Mr. King and other Republicans charge the rules violate the House's traditions for debate and are meant to protect Democrats from politically embarrassing votes.David Sands 2009 Dems Shut Down Debate in House
Putting individual spending bills on the floor also forces senators to take politically difficult votes that potential opponents could highlight and challenge come the next election season. To help their own members avoid such scrutiny and to reduce the number of times they need to attract minority votes , majority party leaders take the omnibus route instead.Monkey Cage 2017 This is Why the Budget Process is Broken
And perhaps most important, the partisan character of amending activity changed suddenly with the advent of recorded electronic voting. With new voting procedures in the 1970s, [the minority party] could force [the majority party] to go on the record, often repeatedly, on divisive amendments. [The minority] actively sought ways to challenge committee products, raise ideologically charged issues, and force recorded votes...in order to compel [the majority] to take politically dangerous public positions. The effect, quite naturally, was to heighten the personal and partisan conflict on the floor.Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
Electronic voting made possible the full exploitation of floor amendments as political tools by the rank-and-file membership.Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
The agitation about the volume of amending activity in the 1970s suggests that committees and the majority party did not see the counter-amendments as sufficient protection from unfriendly amendments. Secondary amendments are not always successful, they usually do not protect members from politically embarrassing votes, they seldom reduce uncertainty about floor outcomes, they probably compound scheduling problems and increase the frequency of obstructionism in the Senate, and they do little to preserve a special status for committee recommendations. Efforts to expand the use of suspension motions and restrictive special rules in the House and the continuing interest in some germaneness and debate restrictions in the Senate reflect the limits of secondary amendments as a means for preserving committee power. Thus, for a variety of reasons, no conclusive interpretation of the observed pattern of secondary amending activity is possible.Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
Beyond their immediate effects on policy outcomes, restrictive special rules have advantages for committee and party leaders that other sources of negative power cannot replicate… much of the time and effort required to be on the lookout for unfriendly amendments can be saved when amendments must be printed in the Congressional Record or presented to the Rules Committee in advance. Moreover, these are times when a committee's reputation within the chamber hinges on its ability to protect agreements with colleagues from floor amendments and embarrassing public exposure on the floor.Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
The parliamentary arms race of amending activity, filibusters, cloture, and scheduling tactics feeds upon itself. Senators seeing colleagues reap political payoffs for employing last-resort tactics tend to follow suit. If that is not impetus enough, outsiders, the administration, interest groups, constituents, expect their legislative champions to exploit the full complement of parliamentary tools on their behalf. Innovation begets imitation; move begets countermove. By the 1980s, Senator Thomas Eagleton could report, without too much exaggeration, that his colleagues “are prepared to practice the art of gridlock at the drop of a speech or the drop of an amendment. The birds do it, the bees do it, all Senators in a breeze do it.”Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
NOTE: This isn’t a quote that talks directly about transparency, but note that Smith mentions that “outside groups, the administration, interest groups and constituents expect” action. Well these groups can‘t expect or demand this action if they can’t see it.
On many vital issues, such as civil rights, policy outcomes were controlled by a conservative majority or at least a sizable obstructionist conservative minority. The conservative coalition also controlled decisions on several key committees and so was in a position to block committee action on legislation important to many Democratic liberals. Norms of committee deference and apprenticeship served to reinforce the power of the conservative oligarchy. For his part, [Lyndon B.] Johnson attempted to avoid open intraparty splits by refusing to bring up highly divisive legislation to the floor until he had the votes, and even then he worked to avoid amendments and recorded votes on which party factionalism would surface. Thus, much to the dismay of some liberal Democrats, Johnson's deliberate strategy reduced the number of controversial bills brought to the floor, the number of filibusters, and the volume of amending activity. Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
*NOTE: What Smith is saying here, is that even before the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 there was a conscious effort by some to avoid divisive roll call votes. And so, to pass the civil rights bills and avoid partisan pressures, Johnson increased the level of secrecy.
Limitation riders were used disproportionately by Republicans and Democratic conservatives who lacked votes in the committees. Riders on such highly controversial issues as abortion, school busing, schools, and job safety regulations forced members to cast recorded votes, often repeatedly, on politically sensitive matters.Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
But “both sides have abused” the amendment process he said. “They'll take the opportunity to file amendments... that are not serious legislative attempts,” but are instead just trying to send a political message. It takes hours of floor time to dispose of the amendments, which never had a chance of passage anyway. “Some people blame C-SPAN,” LaTourette joked, because the lawmakers are simply grandstanding for the TV camera.Rep. Steve LaTourette 2005 Amendments are Nearly Extinct in the House
The most notable use of the floor (recorded votes), and House television, was the 1984 effort by a group of conservative Republicans, who had dubbed themselves the Conservative Opportunity Society (COS) the previous year. In the face of restrictive special rules and a truncated congressional agenda, conservative Republicans sought ways to raise their own issues and exact a price from Democrats for placing obstacles in their path. Their effort had two components. The first was to pursue obstructionist parliamentary tactics at every turn, including repeated unanimous consent requests to take up controversial legislation and demands for recorded votes on normally routine procedural motions. They hoped to build a record of opposition to their causes among marginal House Democrats who might be vulnerable to charges of support for liberal leadership positions.Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
Members in both houses seem to offer a lot of floor amendments with nothing accompanying them except speeches. An interview (May, 1971) with Senator James L. Buckley (R., N.Y.) shortly after he took office (he was still a political innocent and for that reason a good observer) contained this comment: “He has been surprised, he said, to discover that so many things happen in the Senate ‘for symbolic reasons’ rather than practical reasons, such as the practice of Senators offering amendments that they know have absolutely no chance of passing.” David Mayhew 1974 The Electoral Connection
House Republicans forced a vote Wednesday on a resolution to express support for ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement – enraging Democrats who complained the measure was a political stunt intended to embarrass Democrats who have called to abolish the embattled agency.John Parkinson 2018 GOP forces House Democrats into ‘Gotcha Vote’
The minority party often proposes amendments that, although virtually certain to be defeated, raise issues that the minority wishes to highlight or on which they want to force senators in the majority to go on record with a roll-call vote. Such votes can play very prominently on 30-second TV commercials during political campaigns. Richard Arenberg & Robert Dove 2012 Defending the Filibuster
All of this was troubling enough when the modern wave of transparency laws were enacted in the 1970s, but these problems have worsened over time. Today’s more contentious political environment has fundamentally altered the way American government now operates. Partisan polarization has risen to levels reminiscent of the late 19th century. When obstruction is the goal, every step in the legislative process is a potential opportunity for delay and obstruction. Hearings become showcases for partisan viewpoints, not opportunities for fair-minded investigation. Amendments are opportunities to weaken bills or embarrass the opposition, not to improve the legislation. And votes on complicated bills become fodder for thirty-second campaign ads.Bruce Cain (Stanford) 2016 Is our Government too Open?
Many GOP senators and aides concede that Lott is taking extraordinary procedural steps to keep vulnerable Republicans from having to vote on difficult issues such as gun control or the minimum wage. “He is trying to protect his members,” Daschle said. When Daschle offered the gun control amendment May 16, Lott tried unsuccessfully to have the Senate declare it non-germane. But Daschle threatened Lott with a filibuster of the underlying spending bill, so Lott reluctantly agreed to a vote the next day. The next day Lott stoked the battle with a procedural move that will prevent Democrats from offering other sense-of-the-Senate amendments to spending bills, the existing rule that bans legislative amendments on such bills.CQ Almanac 2000 Juvenile Justice Bill Gets Hung Up
McCarthy blasted that move Tuesday, telling reporters it amounted to an unprecedented delegation of legislative powers to a small panel of party leaders. "It's something Congress has never done before," he said. "What the Democrat majority is doing is, they're trying to get to impeachment without having their members actually vote upon it. They're trying to protect members from not taking a difficult vote."Staff Reporters 2019 House panel OK'd to raise heat
Leaders, and members too, often had to face unanticipated amendments on controversial issues, sometimes deliberately offered to force them into politically dangerous votes.Walter Kravitz 1990 The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970
With each party coveting the allegiance of the country's 22 million veterans and their families, Republicans and Democrats blamed each other for turning the effort into a chess match aimed at forcing politically embarrassing votes.Associated Press 2014 Senate Blocks Dems' Bill Boosting Vets’ Benefits
The recorded teller vote, he recognized, is in principle good for democracy, but even this has another side. ‘The amending process became a ‘gotcha’ process rather than a legislative process. It enabled all of these single-issue groups to get a roll call on everything and run a TV ad against you financed by special interests’Rep. David Obey 2014 Schudson (Rise of Right to Know)
I got to the Senate in January 1977 and we had our party caucuses then, and they were reasonable affairs. But beginning in my last couple of years in the Senate, they changed, and they became basically schemes to embarrass the Democrats. And I take it that it was pretty much the same on the other side, and it’s easy to do it. The way you try to embarrass the other side is you concoct amendments for members of the Senate to vote on that will put them in a bad light. This is not a new strategy. When Ronald Reagan was first elected president, he put in place with the help of Congress what was popularly called Reaganomics, which was essentially, “Let’s cut taxes and trim back some of the spending programs.” The Democrats offered a series of floor amendments that we Republicans had to vote on, and basically they were to the effect of, “Let’s restore money for the disabled and the veterans and so forth,” and not give tax breaks to the rich, and that was the kind of thing we had to vote on. The other side has done it to Republicans. And so these Tuesday meetings became increasingly “gotcha” meetings, where members of my party would stand up with real glee on their face – “Make em vote on it” – something that would make the Democrats look bad. Now, my understanding is that instead of the parties meeting once a week on Tuesdays for lunch, they now meet Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday for lunch, just as parties. And all of these meetings are in the same vein, namely, let’s do the other guys in and set ourselves up for the next election. So everything has to do with, how am I going to gain advantage for my party in the next election?Sen. John Danforth 2015 America’s Broken Politics
I don’t directly cover the Ways and Means Committee but people whose opinion I trust make a good case for the process and the product being better when the doors are closed.Jaqueline Calmes CQ Press 1987 C-SPAN: Open or Closed Committees
Rep. David Obey (D -WI) offered a colorful description of the growth in message votes: “I always tell people this [place] used to be 50 percent legislative and 50 percent political. Now it’s 95 percent political because you didn’t have these ‘gotcha’ amendments… When you turn every damn bill into a gotcha vote, and when the parties are feeding every roll call to the campaign committees within the hour so they can blast facts to people in the marginal districts and distort what the hell the votes were, it just makes members far more ditzy and makes it harder for them to cast rational votes.”Rep. David Obey 2010 Rogers - Obey Surveys House Then and Now
Last year, hyper-partisanship, especially in the House of Representatives, helped push the federal government to the brink of a shutdown four times. And since Democrats took control of the Senate in 2007, Republicans have employed the filibuster 360 times to tie up legislation–an astonishing rate by any historic measure. Meanwhile, to avoid politically embarrassing votes, Senate Democrats have refused to author a budget resolution for the last three years, contravening the intent of the 1974 Budget Act.Michael Lubell 2012 Inside the Beltway
Finally, when the Appropriations bills do reach the floor, they are inundated with hundreds of amendments, many intended to tank the bill by forcing the majority to cast politically embarrassing votes. Multiply by twelve separate measures in the House and the Senate and it’s clear that the regular order vehicle has careened into the ditch.Gary Andres 2017 Fixing the Congressional Appropriations Process
Losing Is Winning: When the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives after the 1994 midterm elections, passing a balanced-budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution was tops on their legislative agenda. Republicans had long criticized Democrats for profligate government spending and high deficits. Getting a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget would be a powerful legal weapon they could use to cut government programs drastically. Early in 1995, it looked like both houses of Congress would pass the budget amendment easily. As time got closer to a Senate vote in March, however, the Republicans didn’t seem to have the 67 votes necessary to pass a constitutional amendment. Senator Bob Dole, the Republican majority leader, kept postponing the vote, hoping to pick up more support, but eventually he brought the bill to a vote without having 67 votes lined up. Why would he bring the matter to a vote, knowing that the Republicans would fail to pass it? On the eve of the vote, he explained: “We really win if we win, but we may also win if we lose.” After the vote, the headlines were unanimous: “Senate Rejects Amendment on Balancing the Budget; Close Vote is Blow to GOP, went the New York Times’ verdict. “GOP is Loser on Budget Amendment,” echoed the Boston Globe. What did Dole mean by claiming that a loss could be a victory? Politicians always have at least two goals. First is a policy goal – whatever program or proposal they would like to see accomphshed or defeated, whatever problem they would like to see solved. Perhaps even more important, though, is a political goal. Politicians always want to preserve their power, or gain enough power, to be able to accomplish their policy goals. Even though a defeat of the balanced budget amendment was a loss for Republicans’ policy goal, Dole thought it might be a gain for Republicans’ political strength. (So, apparently, did the New York Times, whose sub-headline read “Risk to Democrats.”) Republican leaders acknowledged that they had lost a constitutional device that would have helped them immensely in redeeming their campaign pledge to enact the “Contract with America.” But they also saw some important political gains. Senator Orrin Hatch, the chief sponsor of the amendment, called the vote “a clear delineation between the parties.” A Republican pollster explained how the vote might help Republican candidates in the next Congressional election: “It lays out the differences as sharply as we could want them: We want to cut spending, and they don’t.” Dole, already campaigning for the Presidency, used the occasion to lambaste President Clinton for “abdicating his responsibility” to control federal deficits, while Republicans in both houses talked about making Democrats pay at the polls in the next election. “As far as I’m concerned,” Newt Gingrich crowed, it’s like a fork in chess. They can give us a victory today; they can give us a victory in November ‘96.” Deborah Stone 1997 Policy Paradox (Losing is Winning)
Bauman even entertained requests for recorded-vote amendments from Republican challengers to Democratic incumbents in order to compel Democrats to take politically dangerous public positions.Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
The Speaker of the House, Carl Albert of Oklahoma, was furious over the action and got the bill resurrected and passed a few days later, but only after Mr. Bauman forced a final roll‑call vote. Last year he also raised enough parliamentary objections to force a rollcall vote on a bill giving members of Congress a 5 percent pay rise. “They desperately didn’t want a roll‑call,” Mr. Bauman said. “As a result,” he added, “a lot of members will be embarrassed when they go hack and run for re‑election.” Mr. Bauman’s tactics have led to complaints from other representatives that he is being an obstructionist or is showboating. Representative Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. of Massachusetts, the Democratic majority leader, once denounced Mr. Bauman’s tactics as a “cheap, sneaky, sly way to operate.Richard Madden 1976 A New Gadfly Keeps and Eye on the House
On any given day he can be seen jumping up, demanding an explanation of some bill that is being rushed through without debate, raising parliamentary obstacles to other legislation he deems to be a boondoggle, or forcing roll‑call votes on measures that many Representatives would just as soon not be recorded as voting for. It is Representative Robert E. Bauman, a conservative Republican from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, engaging in what he calls “a sort of guerrilla warfare.” Richard Madden 1976 A New Gadfly Keeps and Eye on the House
But there were other reasons for the change in strategy, according to members of the committee and the Democratic leadership. One was that the Democrats were having trouble agreeing on a budget. Another was that they wanted to draw the Republicans into the process so they could get some support or at least force Republicans into some politically embarrassing votes. But when the Republicans countered this move with the tactic of voting present instead of yes or no to various proposals on Thursday, the Democrats saw a need to reassess their strategy. For one thing, in an open session with just Democrats voting, the division within their own ranks would become clear, possibly making it more difficult to get support in the full House for the ultimate committee plan. For another, public votes could give campaign ammunition to future Republican opponents.Jonathan Fuerbringer 1987 Budgetary Rhythms
When the law was approved, he notes, much of its support, especially among Democrats, was almost entirely political - a
reluctance of members to be recorded voting against a budget mechanism that promised to balance the budget in five years
... Few senators enjoy going alone against their colleagues, especially when the tactics disrupt the work of the Senate or force
Reid postponed the vote to buy time for building support. In the meantime, he was forced to allow Republicans to offer a series of amendments requiring Democrats to cast politically painful votes. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., for example, successfully demanded a vote on an amendment to eliminate automatic cost-of-living increases in congressional salaries. Senators of both parties knew these votes would figure in future ads against Democratic candidates. “This is all about developing campaign commercials,” said Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska. “Democrats effectively used the pay raise issue against several Republican candidates in past cycles,” noted a National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman, “so I don’t think they should be at all surprised if this emerges as an issue in some of their own campaigns.”Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2013 Congress & Its Members
Amendments are not always intended to enact policy changes. They can instead be used as a tool of obstruction or to derail legislation. They also can serve political purposes by putting members on the record on specific issues. For example, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who won reelection in a tight 2012 contest, exclaimed that in the lead-up to the election, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, R -Ky., had been “trying to figure out what amendments he could put on the floor to make my life miserable.” McConnell’s goal, she said, was “to figure out some way to put something on the floor that would get me to vote against my own mother.” House majority leaders, who control the floor agenda, regularly employ special rules to limit the amendments that members can offer to particular bills. By so doing, the leaders often can engineer favored policy outcomes, expedite floor action, and prevent politically difficult issues from being raised on the floor.Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2017 Congress & Its Members
Senate amendments are often designed to force members to declare themselves on issues that command public attention. Sen. David Vitter’s, R-La., amendment to an omnibus appropriations bill to end automatic cost-of-living increases in congressional salaries is an example. Lawmakers who vote for salary increases, especially during hard economic times, risk having the voters tum them out of office.Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2017 Congress & Its Members
Amendments can be taken up and voted on after the fifty hours but without debate. This circumstance often leads to “vote-a-ramas” over several days, when senators may “cast back-to-back votes on a dizzying array of dozens of amendments,” often with the two Congresses in mind. As national policy makers, members of Congress may have to cast tough but responsible votes, which will “serve as valuable campaign fodder” for opponents in the next election.Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2017 Congress and Its Members
Rather than pass any of the other bills that would likely receive bipartisan support on the floor, the House leadership scheduled the one bill that divided the parties completely. The moral of the story is scheduling votes is often a partisan act. As Frances Lee illustrates, party leaders have several incentives to wage partisan war.Huder 2013 How Congress Polarizes America
The problem with the Freedom of Information Act is different. It was meant to serve investigative journalists looking into abuses of power. But today a large number of FOIA requests are filed by corporate sleuths trying to ferret out secrets for competitive advantage, or simply by individuals curious to find out what the government knows about them. The FOIA can be “weaponised”, as when the activist group Judicial Watch used it to obtain email documents on the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 attack on the US compound in Benghazi.Fukuyama 2015 Why Transparency Can Be a Dirty Word
Castaldo also refers to a demand [in 1790] by two right-wing deputies for “a roll-call with inscription and a list of the names, so that we can distribute them in the provinces.” We cannot assess the importance of these tactics, bur it seems safe to say that the demand for roll-call voting was mainly the weapon of the left.Jon Elster & Arnaud Le Pillouer Semi-Public Voting in the Constituante
The one predictable result of televising the House and Senate floor is that it has produced an increase in non-legislative speeches (one-minute and special order speeches) by members wishing to speak on subjects of their own choosing for home or national consumption. Not only have these speaking venues resulted in longer sessions each day, but they have been the source of coordinated political attacks on the other party’s policies as well as on individuals of the other party – especially those accused of ethical problems in the Congress and the administration. The partisan wars...deteriorated into bitter personal attacks.Donald Wolfensberger 2000 Congress and the People
While the suspension procedure is most often used for minor and relatively noncontroversial bills, there is a parallel trend in the House towards a greater reliance on restrictive, special rules from the Rules Committee which limit what amendments can be offered on major legislation. Increasingly, modified closed rules that allow just one amendment—a minority party substitute—have become the favored procedure of the Republican majority (though not officially condoned by the minority leadership). There are a number of explanations for these two developments toward more restrictive legislating ranging from the personal convenience of shorter work weeks to the political convenience of having to vote on fewer controversial matters. Both processes also provide near maximum protection for the legislative product of committee majorities.Donald Wolfensberger 2002 Suspended Partisanship in the House
‘Gotcha’ Amendments, Electronic Voting and Television in the House --> I always tell people this used to be 50 percent legislative and 50 percent political. Now it’s 95 percent political because you didn’t use to have these “gotcha” amendments on the floor. Why? The rules didn’t allow for roll calls. The Republicans will squawk about not having open rules now — “In the good old days, they had open rules.” They had open rules because there were no votes. You could not get a roll call vote in the committee of the whole (during House floor debate). It didn’t exist. If you wanted to vote on something, you either counted votes with people standing: “the yeas, please stand; the nos, please stand.” You counted them — but not by name. Or you had teller votes. You’d have two tellers in the center aisle. ... The speeches on the floor were actually aimed at trying to sway a few people who might be on the margins.Rep. David Obey 2010 Obey surveys House then and now
In this environment, members are less likely to forgo credit-claiming opportunities that require them to force blame-generating choices on their colleagues. If their colleagues do not like to take an open stand on such classic blame- generating issues as congressional pay raises, federal funding of abortions and a balanced budget amendment to the constitution, that is just too bad.Kent Weaver 1986 The Politics of Blame Avoidance
Republicans refashioning Medicare and Medicaid have learned many lessons from the death of President Clinton’s health care legislation. Their approach reflects a sense that the legislative system is so poisoned by partisanship, sloganeering and 30-second spots that it cannot do anything serious, complex and emotional in a direct and thoughtful way. Which is to say, in order to pass anything major these days, they just might have to sneak it through. The approach may be essential Gingrich, the sort of thing he condemns in Democrats but then imitates, like procedures to prohibit embarrassing amendments from being offered. In March 1994, [Gingrich predicted the] Democratic health care tactics: “The Democratic leadership will try to ram through a secret Clinton plan because they can’t pass an open Clinton plan.“They will try to come to the floor before anybody can read it,” he said, “and they will say send it to conference to keep the process alive. And people will be pressured very intensely to vote yes.”…That may be the only way to get things done on Capitol Hill these days.
When Samuel F. B. Morse in 1842 asked Congress for an appropriation of $30,000 to finance the first real experiment with his electric telegraph, the proposal was hooted at with derision by at least some of the members of the House. The House adopted an amendment to the bill to spend half of the money on making experiments in mesmerism, an amendment later removed from the bill; and the House finally approved the appropriation only after defeating another “joke” amendment to use the money to build a railroad to the moon. In 1846, the gift of $500,000, which had been willed to the nation by James Smithson to use to build what became the famed Smithsonian Institution in Washington, was greeted by some members of the House with outraged chauvinism. John S. Chipman of Michigan expressed his indignation that the United States government would accept this gift from an Englishman, a foreigner, and said it was “a stain on the history of the country” and “an insult to the American nation.” Neil MacNeil 1963 Forge of Democracy
If the bill seems destined to fail anyway, the Republicans won’t want it to get past that first step: the vote-a-rama will be the Democrats’ chance to force them to vote on all sorts of potentially embarrassing amendments.
The Democrats sought (and the Rules Committee approved) a rule that would have forced separate votes on five sections of the bill. The result was, as David Stockman put it, that ‘Republicans – and Boll Weevils – were going to be forced to vote against food stamps and Medicaid and Social Security, out loud and one at a time’ (Stockman, 1986: 2I8). The administration and House Republicans, on the other hand, sought a single up-or-down vote on the entire package. This proposal would disguise votes to cut individual programs. It thus maximized the prospects of winning blame-motivated support from wavering Democrats who, in Stockman’s words, ‘weren’t even remotely genuine fiscal conservatives...[but rather] simply muddle-minded pols who had been scared by the President’s popularity in their home districts’ (Stockman, 1986: 207). A closed rule was adopted in a House floor vote, ensuring passage of the administration-backed package.Kent Weaver 1986 The Politics of Blame Avoidance
So long as there is a majority government, opposition parties in parliamentary systems can do little other than generate blame, for they cannot hope to have an effective voice in formulating policy… [And] this blame-generating process has become highly institutionalized. The opposition seeks to embarrass the government, and the government seeks to dodge the questions, obfuscate or counterattack. Although the opposition can embarrass the government and attempt to force it to consider issues of the opposition’s choosing, the government can virtually monopolize the actual legislative agenda. It can refuse to bring up legislation when it does not wish to, and attempt to bury controversial issues.Kent Weaver 1986 The Politics of Blame Avoidance
Rules changes enacted in 1970 made it easier for House members to gain floor consideration of amendments. Thus issues like indexation, which might not have reached the floor in prior years because they did not fit the ‘credit-claiming’ interests of the specialists, are reaching the floor. And once non-specialist legislators are forced to take a position on indexation, they find it very difficult to vote no, even if they might prefer to do so. The institution of recorded teller votes in the House of Representatives in 1970 (followed by electronic voting in 1973) dramatically increased the number of issues on which Representatives were forced to take recorded positions, further intensifying the pressures for ‘blame avoiding’ behavior (Oleszek, 1984: 140-142). And because legislators often know little about the precise amendment they are voting on, and cannot predict which issues may be raised and cast in a blame-generating light by a challenger in a future election, they search for politically safe solutions.Kent Weaver 1986 The Politics of Blame Avoidance
The cause of the breakdown of the regular order is the oh-so-clever political tactic of putting the opposing party on the spot by forcing votes where members on the other side would take unpopular positions. Both parties have used the tactic, but in recent years it has grown from an occasional trick to the normal way Congress does business. In the first year of the Reagan presidency, Democratic senators offered a series of emotionally charged floor amendments to budget resolutions. The proposed amendments attacked the basic principle of Reaganomics, which was cutting both taxes and government spending. The proposed amendments paired programs for veterans, children, and the disabled with tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and made Republicans who supported the president seem callous about their most vulnerable constituents. Especially in my last term in the Senate, Republicans used the same tactic on Democrats. At our weekly luncheon of Republican senators, members would often rise with diabolical schemes to embarrass Democrats, usually adding with a smirk, “Make them vote on it.”
Jesse Helms of North Carolina was a master of concocting embarrassing amendments, especially to bills that funded the National Endowment for the Arts. His favorite target was the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which, said Jesse, was obscene and blasphemous. He brought stacks of Mapplethorpe photos to the Senate floor to shock members. I must say that while I opposed the overly broad and politically contrived Helms amendments, the photos were not the sort I would hang on my living room wall.
In the years leading up to the 2014 election, then Senate majority leader Harry Reid understandably concluded that he would prefer to spare members of his party from voting on amendments that would be used against them in campaign advertising. He accomplished his aim by using his power to control the flow of action on the floor so that difficult amendments would not be in order. Bills did not reach the floor that he did not personally approve, and amendments could not be offered without his agreement. The result was that the normal process of the Senate was aborted, and the opportunity for senators to have a meaningful role in policymaking was nonexistent. Committees could hold hearings, but they did not adopt amendments or report bills of which the majority leader disapproved. The same applied for action on the floor. If a senator wanted to raise an issue he thought would improve a bill, that was too bad unless the majority leader consented.
The result of Senator Reid’s strategy was that the Senate did very little. Budget resolutions often draw controversial amendments, so four years passed before Congress finally enacted a budget in late 2013. Think about it. The government taxed trillions of dollars and spent much more than that with out the discipline of a budget to control what it was doing. Each year, Congress is supposed to pass twelve appropriations bills, each governing spending on specific areas such as the military, public works, and education, but fearing difficult votes on amendments, Congress took a less threatening course. It passed continuing resolutions, lumping what would be specific bills together in one package and adopting the spending decisions of earlier years. The continuing resolution strategy had two negative consequences. One was that while government’s spending priorities change from year to year, appropriations did not change. For example, the military may decide that it needs a certain weapons system, but that doesn’t mean that it needs the system every year at the expense of new priorities. Adopting continuing resolutions year after year allowed for no congressional flexibility in funding the evolving needs of government. The second was that combining all appropriations into a single resolution increased the threat of a government shutdown. It made it possible to defund not just part of government but all of government that requires appropriations.
Of course, Republicans shared the blame, perhaps most of it, for the stalemate in Washington. Their delight in offering legislation designed to cause political problems for Democrats was the majority leader’s rationale for not allowing bills to reach the Senate floor.
Then there was the filibuster, real or threatened, with the effect that nothing proceeded without the approval of a good number of Republicans, and if it did proceed, progress could take days. The result of Democratic fear of casting politically difficult votes and Republican delight in offering politically charged amendments and threatening the filibuster was summed up by a current member of the Senate who told me, “We don’t do anything.” Sen. John Danforth 2015 The Relevance of Religion
In short, legislative process enables the parties to wage partisan wars, not just policy wars. This not only helps explain why the parties diverge more in eras where process empowers party leaders, it also explains the votes taken during the current stalemate on the debt ceiling and CR. It makes political sense even if it doesn’t make policy sense. Legislative process is arguably the backbone to today’s polarization.Josh Huder 2013 How Congress Polarizes America
As the party’s congressional leader, the Speaker has a responsibility to his partisan members. And it is important to note, not all legislative goals are policy goals. In many, if not most cases in the current Congress, votes taken on the floor are political. In other words, they are meant to distinguish the two parties rather than create good public policy. In other words, opportunities to make the opposition party look bad are just as likely to receive votes as those that create good policy.Josh Huder 2013 How Congress Polarizes America
Instead, as in the case of restrictive special rules, Democratic majorities strategically crafted temporary floor rules to reduce Republican opportunities to force votes on divisive or potentially embarrassing amendments.Sarah Binder 1997 Minority Rights, Minority Rule
It was not unusual for members (in the early 1900s) to craft politically embarrassing motions and to bring them up under suspension of the rules – “condemning many Members to political danger in their districts, whether they voted for or against them” (Hinds 1909:587 as quoted in Bach 1990:52). That minority use of the suspension rule proved noisome to the majority party is evident in the 1847 rule change that permitted suspension motions only on Mondays and at the close of the session. Not only did the suspension rule provide an opening for individuals to hijack the legislative agenda, but it also at times posed an insurmountable barrier to majority parties unable to muster a supermajority.Sarah Binder 1997 Minority Rights, Minority Rule
As Figure 1 (above) reveals, an avalanche of recorded votes on amendments followed the adoption of electronic voting...It appears that the ease of voting electronically, perhaps combined with the possibility of putting oneself and others on the record, generated a sharp increase in the number of amendments offered in the COW. Minority party [members] were responsible for a disproportionate share of the increase in amending activity, much of which was repetitve and deliberately designed to force [majority members] to cast embarrassing votes. Soon thereafter, [the majority] began to employ special rules in creative ways to restrict amendments.Roberts & Steven Smith 2003 Party Strategy in the US House
The composition of the roll-call record changed nearly instantly with recorded electronic voting. During the five pre-1971 Congresses, amendments constituted only 10.3 percent of all recorded votes on average. During the first five post-reform Congresses, amendments averaged 34.0 percent of all recorded votes. Over 90% of the amendment votes were cast in the COW...A legislator, faction, or party seeking to force the opposition to cast embarrassing votes may find amendments [with public voting] are a flexible tool for doing so.Roberts & Smith 2003 Party Strategy in the US House
When asked about Sessions’ reputation for bomb-throwing, (Orrin) Hatch chuckled and said, “Well, so do I. So does everybody on the committee, on both sides. They’re really good blockers, I tell ya. That’s a tough committee. It’s a partisan committee, as it should be.”Jay Newton-Small 2009 Sessions Could Make Obama’s Supreme Court Fight Tougher
[During the 1970s] the House adopted sunshine rules, which opened the legislative process to greater public scrutiny. Recorded votes became possible – and easy to force – in the Committee of the Whole, where the amending process takes place. Most committee markup sessions and conference committee meetings were opened to the public. The greater visibility of congressional decision making increased members’ incentives for activism.Barbara Sinclair 2006 Unorthodox Lawmaking
Dole attempted unsuccessfully to attach an amendment on homosexuals in the military…His purpose was to embarrass President Clinton.Barbara Sinclair 2006 Unorthodox Lawmaking
In the 104th Congress Majority Leader Dole and most Republicans would have dearly loved to keep off the floor the issue of open hearings on the ethics case involving Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore. But Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., offered it as a floor amendment to the defense authorization bill and forced a recorded vote.Barbara Sinclair 2006 Unorthodox Lawmaking
Committee and party leaders know that the Senate’s permissive amending rules give disgruntled senators a potent weapon...As the Senate became more partisan in the 1990s, the Senate minority party became increasingly adept at using the Senate’s loose amending rules to force its issues onto the floor. In 1996 Senate Majority Leader Dole and most Senate Republicans did not want to vote on a minimum wage increase that most opposed but that was popular with the public. Senate Democrats were prepared to offer the minimum wage increase as an amendment to every important piece of legislation brought to the floor and, to avoid a vote, Dole was forced to put off votes, bringing the legislative process to a standstill… Controversial legislation stimulates amending activity as opponents attempt to alter or even kill it, or at least to place supporters on the record on controversial provisions.Barbara Sinclair 2006 Unorthodox Lawmaking
Republicans and dissident Democrats [in the late 1970s] had become adept at using floor amendments to make political points and confront mainstream Democrats with politically difficult votes. Compromises carefully crafted in committee were picked apart on the floor, and floor sessions stretched on interminably.Barbara Sinclair 2006 Unorthodox Lawmaking
After three months of futile negotiation and with time running out in the session, proponents decided to force the issue. Minority Leader Byrd offered the Grove City legislation as a substitute amendment to a continuing appropriations resolution. (Orrin) Hatch responded by offering proposals on school busing, gun control, and tuition tax credits as perfecting amendments to the substitute. As Hatch had intended, forcing senators to vote on those highly controversial matters, especially so soon before an election, plunged the Senate into a parliamentary morass. At several points, the chamber came close to abandoning its rule requiring that amendments considered after cloture is invoked be germane, a course that both Baker and Byrd warned would lead to legislative chaos.Barbara Sinclair 1989 Transformation of the US Senate
This is now the pattern of business in the House of Representatives: Spend most of the time passing [political-message] bills designed not to become law but to satisfy the ideological desires of conservative voters. And block laws that actually need to get passed.
This colossal waste of time, punctuated by moments of real destruction, has been going on since early last year, and is well-illustrated this month. The House voted Thursday to repeal crucial parts of the health care reform law, and an upcoming bill would make government regulation virtually impossible. None of these bills have a chance of enactment. In the meantime, though, House Republicans won’t bring up a desperately needed transportation bill.
Political-message bills have sprouted like weeds in the last few years, the product of extreme polarization and stalemate. Elected officials have to show that they’re doing something, so they propose bills designed only to create a talking point against the other side. Senate Democrats do it, too. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which was predictably filibustered to death by Republicans on Tuesday, was the latest example. We supported that bill as an important vehicle for reducing the wage gap between men and women, but the principal reason Democrats introduced it was to embarrass Mitt Romney and other Republicans over their pronounced indifference to the issue.Editorial Board N.Y.Times 2012 The Bills to Nowhere
Obama's speeches are more about taking victory laps on what he's already done and touting a broad scope of his energy policies than on pushing specific legislation. The one energy item he's demanding a vote on now is ending tax subsidies for oil companies — but that's simply a rehash of votes and bills from last year that went nowhere. And it isn't likely to end up as anything more than another show vote this year.Meredith Shiner 2012 Democrats Try to Pad Resumes
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) has been working with Democrats facing re-election to help organize and develop message amendments to counter the GOP on gas prices and the Keystone XL oil pipeline, another tool Republicans have used this year to attack the president on jobs.Meredith Shiner 2012 Democrats Try to Pad Resumes
Lyndon [Johnson] was raking [John F.] Kennedy every day about missing votes. Here he was — Lyndon the great tower of strength of the Democratic party; he was there on the job passing legislation and casting votes. He forced roll call votes of all kinds, even on quorum calls. He’d have a dozen quorum calls in order to demonstrate that Kennedy was not around. And then he’d point out these absences.Joseph E. O’Connor 1996 Jack L. Bell, Oral History Interview
I argue here that minority-party electoral incentives mean that the minority has an incentive to make Congress look more partisan by requesting that instances where parties disagree the most become a matter of public record... Notably, the House in the 1970s for the first time introduced recorded voting in the Committee of the Whole (Smith 1989). As Roberts and Smith (2003) convincingly demonstrate, votes on amendments in the Committee of the Whole tend to be far more partisan and divisive than other types of House votes. The introduction of recorded voting on COW amendments, along with the ease of electronic voting, quickly led to an explosion of amendment votes, driven largely by minority-party Republicans who sought to force members of the majority party to take difficult or embarrassing votes, which added a whole new and divisive set of votes to the roll-call record. As Smith explains, “[minority Republicans] actively sought ways to challenge committee products, raise ideologically charged issues, and force recorded votes. [Robert] Bauman [R-MD] even entertained requests for recorded-vote amendments from Republican challengers to Democratic incumbents in order to compel Democrats to take politically dangerous positions” (1989, 34).William Egar 2016 Tarnishing Opponents, Polarizing Congress
We now have cameras operating in the House and Senate, which on rare occasions capture actual debate, but are more commonly used as a stage backdrop for politicians recording something for use in their next fund-raiser or political ad. When public votes are taken much more often, then more votes are also taken just for show in an attempt to rally one’s supporters or to embarrass the other party, rather than for any substantive legislative purpose. Politicians who are always on-stage are likely to display less civility and collegiality and greater polarization, lest they be perceived as insufficiently devoted to their own causes – or even showing the dreaded signs of a willingness to compromise.Timothy Taylor 2019 When Special Interests Play in the Sunlight
I have said it before and I say it again: There is a scorched Earth policy underway to try to prevent anything from happening in Congress so that the Congress will look bad so that, hopefully, the Republicans will be the beneficiaries, because they can go out to the country and they can say: You see, those Democrats are in the majority and they cannot run the show. Frankly, Republicans get away with this strategy because America does not understand that you have seven different cloture opportunities just to get one piece of legislation through here. And America does not understand that it takes 60 votes in order to break the logjam every time – not just a majority, which the Democrats have; not just 51, which the Democrats have ≠ America just doesn't understand that a very few people can kill any bill in the Chamber. And Republicans can make people look silly and foul the whole process up and go out and claim victory.Senator John Kerry 1994 Congressional Record. 103rd Cong., 2nd sess., p. S14627)
Senators, for example, may indicate that they have holds on measures or nominations to alert appropriate colleagues that they want to be consulted about a measure or nomination, signal displeasure with the administration, or retaliate in kind against lawmakers who have placed holds on their bills. (These are called) retaliatory, tit-for-tat or choke holds.Walter Oleszek 2017 “Holds” in the Senate
The Senate is now more the scene of obstruction than action and obstruction is more a consequence of credit claiming than position taking.Douglas Arnold 2017 Electoral Connection: Age 40
Legislators know that challengers delight in using votes on legislative salaries against them, whereas an across-the-board increase makes a poor political issue. The aim of all procedural strategies is to structure the legislative situation in a way that either increases or decreases the ability of an instigator to rouse inattentive publics or of a challenger to make a good campaign issue out of a specific roll-call vote.Douglas Arnold 1990 Logic of Congressional Action
It is easy to explain why legislators, once the House adopted the Republican-sponsored rule, approved the entire package of spending cuts. They were voting on the president’s economic recovery program, and many of them were afraid that citizens would hold them accountable if they voted to block the president’s program. It is not so obvious why legislators would agree to the rule in the first place, rather than accepting the original rule that would have required six separate votes. Ordinarily one expects that legislators are not heavily constrained by electoral considerations when they act on procedural matters. In this case, however, the administration worked to activate electoral considerations by
making this procedural vote the key test of whether a legislator supported the president’s program
. The administration transformed what was usually an obscure procedural matter into a very visible vote on the president’s economic program, thus guaranteeing that future challengers could use this vote as if it were really a substantive vote on explicit economic policy. In addition, some legislators wanted to approve the president’s program but could not do so without the protection of a closed rule. Forcing legislators to vote on explicit economic policy was the key to the administration’s entire political strategy. The administration also offered extra group and geographic benefits to crucial legislators who were severely cross-pressured. Douglas Arnold 1990 Logic of Congressional Action
While coalition leaders work to weaken or break the traceability chain, opposition leaders do everything in their power to strengthen it. This counterstrategy is obvious in the case of legislators' compensation. Whenever proponents of salary increases thought they had found a safe mechanism, opponents responded by creating a new identifiable governmental action for which legislators had to stand up and be counted.Douglas Arnold 1990 Logic of Congressional Action
One of the easiest ways to scuttle a bill is to devise several embarrassing amendments. Many proposals that might slip by if there were no recorded votes falter when legislators must stand up and be counted.Douglas Arnold 1990 Logic of Congressional Action
As stated, “Party and institutional leaders in the House, as well as other especially articulate or telegenic Members, might be encouraged by fellow Members to assume highly visible roles on the House floor, to focus public attention on issues and party positions.” The final effect predicted by the CRS related to partisan problems that might occur if House members became active distributors of their floor speech recordings. This is not to say that House television could not be used in other ‘creative’ ways to achieve partisan objectives. In fact, its potential in this respect has already been exploited. The House has two unique vehicles for partisan floor speeches that are especially directed to television viewers. One is the “morning hour” where one-minute speeches,” as they are called, are delivered by House members speaking on their choice of subjects. Whereas one-minute speeches are scheduled prior to convening the House for regular daily business, a “special order” period is reserved following the close of House business for individual speeches of longer duration (up to an hour) on any subject. A comparison of figures from 1977 (two years before House television began) with figures from 1981 (two years after House television) showed that the number of one-minute speeches had tripled during the period.
Shortly after television had entered the House chamber, Democrats found themselves on the receiving end of a daily barrage of Republican verbal jabs during the morning hour and special order periods. One House Democrat, in reference to the practice, complained that the periods were being used “to bludgeon us to death each day on nationwide TV.” The bludgeoning was especially painful considering that not only were viewers of House proceedings exposed to the speeches, but television networks could also record them, particularly the short morning hour speeches, for airing during evening newscasts.
What House Democrats saw as an abuse of the morning hour came to a head in July 1980 when House Majority Leader Jim Wright, at the urging of his fellow Democrats, announced that hereafter the one-minute speeches would be delivered only at the end of the clay. Wright defended his action as necessary for the House to complete its official legislative business. The action and its defense were entirely unacceptable to Republicans who charged that the Majority Leader had “gagged” them. After several days of verbal wrangling over the matter, Representative Wright reversed himself and allowed the morning hour speeches to resume. It may have been just as well that Wright acquiesced to Republican demands, for Democrats were soon to find the morning hour speeches a convenient way of chiding Republican President Ronald Reagan. This seemed to meet with the full approval of House Speaker O’Neill.Ronald Garay 1984 Congressional Television
The United States Senate is starting the New Year the same way it ended the last one: with the Democratic leader bringing up legislation that hasn’t been considered by committee, then threatening to cut off amendments, cut off debate and cut off votes. First, it was unemployment insurance. Next, it will be minimum wage. Avoiding committee consideration, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) explains, avoids “embarrassing amendments.”Sen. Lamar Alexander 2014 This Is the End of the Senate. It’s Harry Reid’s Fault.
At the same time, however, the (1970s) changes in Congress have compounded the difficulties of cooperation on issues salient to broad constituencies. As with deliberation, the reason is that they have increased the exposure of decision-making. The opening of committee meetings inhibits negotiation in what would otherwise be an ideal forum. It requires that negotiations be conducted either in public, where constituency pressure encourages rigidity, or in informal private meetings, which add to the costs of the decision process. The increased frequency of recorded votes on floor amendments has meant that politically difficult concessions are likely to become highly visible. If, as a result of negotiation, a committee bill denies a demand of an important constituency, some member will seek to offer a floor amendment to reverse the decision. Unless the amendment can be blocked by a restrictive rule (in the House) or set aside in a unanimous consent agreement (in the Senate), sustaining the negotiated solution will require rejecting the demand in a potentially visible recorded vote.Paul Quirk 1991 Evaluating Congressional Reform
As Speaker, Tillis controlled the House agenda. Time after time Tillis quashed politically embarrassing votes on amendments by Democrats, by allowing unlimited GOP "laying on the table" of the amendments. Most importantly, rarely if ever anything Tillis was opposed to was brought up for a floor vote. Further, he allowed floor votes where timely public notice was lacking, including the fracking bill and budget.Editor Daily Kos 2014 Thom Tillis’ Worst Legacies
Senate leaders have fewer procedural tools than do House leaders, but majority leaders can use their right to be recognized first on the floor to regulate the timing, order, and content of debates to partisan advantage. For example, then-Senate majority leader Reid deliberately scheduled a series of votes he knew he would lose in fall 2010. Why? He wanted to portray Republicans as “obstructionists,” to indicate to the bill’s supporters that he tried, to demonstrate that Senate rules need revision (the measures were blocked by filibuster threats), and to direct the public’s attention to these issues. Minority Leader McConnell viewed the entire exercise as political theater: “Are we here to perform, or are we here to legislate?” At the same time, minority party members also have strong incentives to stick together on procedural and other matters, forcing vulnerable majority party members to cast difficult votes and making it increasingly difficult for the majority party to pursue its program.Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2017 Congress and Its Members
There were no open rules in the 115th Congress continuing a decades-long trend restricting or preventing opportunities for members to offer amendments. This pattern, provoked by acrimonious partisanship and fierce electoral competition, occurs regardless of which party is in the majority. Whether the majority is Democratic or Republican, restrictive rules prevent troublesome amendments from being offered, debated, and voted upon.Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2019 Congress and Its Members
At times, party leaders disagree on how aggressively to pressure members to toe the line. Democrats faced repeated challenges in 2019 from Republicans’ use of a procedural motion – called a motion to recommit – to add politically embarrassing amendments to bills. Some leaders, including Pelosi, advocated treating the motion to recommit like other procedural votes and thus to enforce strict party discipline. An aide noted, “She thinks the caucus should vote together. The more you act afraid of these things, the more Republicans seize on it.” Republicans had imposed such discipline on motion to recommit votes when they were in the majority. But Hoyer and Clyburn advocated for allowing members to vote for the motions if they believed it would help at home: “My position has always been, if it does no harm, and members feel that’s a vote they need to cast, then it’s fine with me.” But once some Democrats defect, it becomes harder for others to hold the line. The GOP even succeeded in using the tactic to add language condemning anti-Semitism to an unrelated bill, the first time a motion to recommit had been approved since 2010. After a second GOP success – amending a bill to require background checks on all gun sales to include a provision that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement be told of any undocumented immigrant who attempts to purchase a gun – Democrats met in a party caucus to debate how to respond to such GOP motions. Pelosi threatened defectors with the prospect of less party help in their campaigns, but moderates countered that they need to cast votes in line with their constituents’ expectations. The conflict underscores the two Congresses – the pressure to vote the district versus acting on behalf of broader shared policy goals – and points to the internal tensions of a Democratic majority dependent on the votes of many members elected from GOP-leaning districts.Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2019 Congress and Its Members
The minority party may employ discharge petitions to spotlight issues for electioneering purposes. For example, minority members may promote and publicize their high-priority issues and then circulate discharge petitions “in an attempt to force House votes-and provide a contrast with [the majority party] in an election year.” In brief, vulnerable House members can be subject to attack ads for failing to sign a discharge petition supported by many voters in their respective districts.Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2017 Congress and Its Members
It is a matter generally understood, that the deliberations of the Convention, which were carried on in private, were to remain undisturbed... Had the deliberations been open while going on, the clamors of faction would have prevented any satisfactory result; had they been afterwards disclosed, much food would have been afforded to inflammatory declamation. Propositions made without due reflection, and perhaps abandoned by the proposers themselves, on more mature reflection, would have been handles for a profusion of ill-natured accusation. Every infallible declaimer, taking his own ideas as the perfect standard, would have railed without measure or mercy at every member of the Convention who had gone a single line beyond his standard. The present is a period fruitful in accusation—much anonymous slander has been and will be vented—no man’s reputation can be safe, if charges in this form are to be lightly listened to.Alexander Hamilton 1792 The Papers of Alexander Hamilton
If there is an open rule, opponents may try to load a bill with so many objectionable amendments that it will sink under its own weight... Amendments can have electoral, as well as legislative, consequences. Floor amendments enable lawmakers to take positions that enhance their reputations with the folks back home, put opponents on record, and shape national policy. For example, “put-them-on-the-spot amendments,” as one representative dubbed them, can be artfully fashioned by minority lawmakers to force the majority to vote on issues such as gun control, immigration reform, or climate change that can be used against them in the next campaign. The majority party’s control of the Rules Committee minimizes the use of this tactic because the panel often “scripts” the amendment process. Only the amendments made in order by Rules can be offered, often in a set order, and only by a specific member. Structured rules of this sort block spontaneous amendments and debates on issues that might stymie passage of the majority party’s priorities.Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2017 Congress and Its Members
Recent Congresses have seen a change in the major purposes of the motion to recommit. Although still employed by the minority party to force the House to vote on its alternative policy proposal (the “instructions” in this motion), the motion to recommit is now frequently employed to achieve two political purposes: (1) to defeat, delay, or eviscerate majority party policies and (2) to force vulnerable majority lawmakers to vote on “gotcha amendments” certain to cause them electoral grief if they do not vote for the minority proposal. As Democratic leader Steny Hoyer, Md., exclaimed, “The unfortunate fact is that the motion to recommit with instructions has for more than a decade become a hollow vehicle and farce.” For example, whether a Democratic or Republican minority, the instructions in motions to recommit are artfully drafted to require members to vote on “hot-button” issues-preventing child molestation, for example-while also undermining the majority party's policy objectives. Clearly, many lawmakers would be reluctant to vote against a motion to recommit with this kind of instruction because they would likely face a barrage of campaign attack ads suggesting that they support child molestation.Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek & Frances Lee 2017 Congress and Its Members
On that June afternoon in 1980, most of McCloskey’s colleagues provided him with debate time – and joined him in the discussion because they saw this as the only way to keep him from forcing them to vote on an amendment cutting aid to Israel. Some of them privately agreed with McCloskey’s position but did not want his amendment to come to a vote. If that happened, they would find themselves in the distressing circumstance of reacting to the pressure of Israel’s lobby by voting against McCloskey’s amendment – and their own conscience Findley 1985 They Dare to Speak Out
In the interest of propaganda advantage, common values are minimized and differences exaggerated. More and more it happens that the conflicting parties find that they have gone so far in pushing their demands that they cannot compromise for fear of “losing face.” Whenever a nation’s leaders become “bidders of an auction of popularity,” advised Burke, they will be turned into “flatterers instead of legislators… Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors.” Floyd Matson 1955 In Defense of Compromise
The impact may be most dramatic in the House... right-wing Republicans craft potentially embarrassing amendments to whatever bill is up.Adam Clymer 1978 Electorate Tilted Right, But Not by Very Much
With Republicans in control of the House, it’s not like the Senate can really get much done anyway. So what’s the harm in wasting a bit of time and making this a knock-down-drag-out fight? After all, the House leadership got a nice, clean repeal vote by bringing up the bill under a closed rule and allowing no potentially embarrassing amendments and virtually no debate. In the Senate, by contrast, Democrats control things, and they can bring up all the amendments they want. So maybe they should play along, hold hearings, and force Republicans to vote on, say, an amendment to the repeal bill that would keep the preexisting condition ban in place. And another one that would keep the donut hole fix in place. Etc. etc. Is that better? Who would benefit more from a bunch of dueling amendments? And since Republicans seem to be dedicated to full and complete repeal, full stop, would they offer any amendments anyway? Kevin Drum 2011 How Should Dems Manage the Healthcare Repeal Circus?
Television was a perfect vehicle for Gingrich’s plans: it poorly conveyed the subtleties of compromise and instead rewarded controversy, polarization, symbolic amendments and the repetitious presentment of partisan themes. “C-SPAN does work best for the minority party. The majority controls the process - and looks like it’s closing things down,” Walker said. When he challenged the Democratic leaders on the floor, “the phones in my office would light up,” he recalled. By 1984, CSPAN’s potential audience had spread to 16 million homes and included some 200,000 devoted viewers. “Newt immediately understood this was a great opportunity,” Walker said...Gingrich bad dispatched emissaries to the boll weevils - asking them to join in a conservative coalition that would strip O’Neill of the Speaker’s office. The Democratic leadership had been forced to hustle, and make concessions that later drew fire from the ranks of House liberals, to end the threat. “The coalition project has already racked up several important achievements,” Gingrich wrote to conservative activist Paul Weyrich that December. “We have forced O’Neill to use strong arm tactics on his own people... set into motion the weakening of O’Neill’s power... made our future attacks on O’Neill credible.” John A. Farrell 2013 Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century
Our third result is consistent with Gilmour’s notions of stalemates and bidding wars. In each, the opposition members of Congress pass an extreme bill, which is intended to force the president to veto the bill so they will have a campaign issue in the upcoming election. Our fourth result where Congress and the president reject compromises that they would both prefer to the status quo is consistent with Gilmour’s notion of strategic disagreement, a phrase which Gilmour adopts as the title of his book. In such cases “politicians frequently reject compromise because the political advantages of maintaining disagreements outweigh the benefits of a modestly better policy achieved through compromise (1995, 3).”
The third and fourth results, where Congress proposes a bill that it knows the president will veto, has been dubbed “blame-game politics” by Smith (1988) and has been explored in a game-theoretic model by Groseclose ( 1995). Several anecdotes suggest that Congress often engages in such tactics. One example, mentioned above, is the Family Leave bill that Congress proposed in 1992. Another involves two appropriations bills that Congress sent to President Clinton in October 1999. Consistent with our model, New York Times reported the next day: “House Sends Clinton Another Spending Bill He's Sure to Veto."(Rosenbaum, 1999). Another example occurred in June 2000, when Congress sent Clinton a bill that would outlaw partial-birth abortions. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “Dismayed by a Supreme Court ruling on the issue, the House GOP aims to send Clinton in September a bill banning partial-birth abortions, so he would veto it just before the elections” (Shafer 2000). More systematic empirical work also demonstrates that blame-game vetoes are common. Tim Groseclose & Nolan McCarty 2001 The Politics of Blame - Bargaining Before an Audience
The volume of amending activity, along with the time it consumed and the unpredictability it created, caused problems for all representatives, not just the majority party leaders. [With the increase in transparency] everyone in the House found that they were being exposed to unanticipated votes that could be politically dangerous...Long daily sessions extended by debates and votes on what sometimes seemed to be an endless series of amendments, strained collegiality and tested members’ tolerance of their colleagues’ floor behavior. Democrat John LaFalce argued that “without relief of some kind, we won’t be able to do the jobs for which we were elected and the ultimate result will be inefficient Members in an inefficient institution.”Stanley Bach & Steven Smith 1988 Managing Uncertainty in the House
Conservative members often used riders to force roll call votes on controversial issues, such as school busing and abortion, while avoiding normal legislative procedures in such matters. (Riders are amendments that are extraneous to the subject matter of the bill).Lawrence C. Dodd & Bruce I. Oppenheimer 1989 Consolidating Power in the House
The ability to put oneself, and especially one's opponents, on public record, coupled with the convenience of electronic voting, evidently was an almost irresistible temptation.Stanley Bach & Steven Smith 1988 Managing Uncertainty in the House
[Hyde] and his colleague once again were raising one of the most controversial issues...[they] were looking for an opportunity to force yet another floor vote on the issue. Although their amendment ultimately was rejected, 190-214, at least they had their debate and their vote, even if it meant ratcheting still higher the level of mutual suspicion and distrust in an already polarized House.Stanley Bach & Steven Smith 1988 Managing Uncertainty in the House
Painfully often the legislation our politicians pass is designed less to solve problems than to protect the politicians from defeat in our never-ending election campaigns. They are, in short, too frightened of us to govern. Americans often complain that their system is not sufficiently democratic. I will argue that, on the contrary, there is a sense in which the system is too democratic and ought to be made less so.Anthony King 1997 Running Scared (Atlantic)
[The scoring of public votes began as a] lobbying tactic with an electoral edge, intended to produce legislative results by threatening hostile lawmakers with the prospect of electoral retribution. Scorecards were meant to wean group members off party labels as their sole guide in the voting booth, under the theory that greater influence could be secured through non-partisanship. Instead, members should support a group’s true “friends”—lawmakers who reliably backed favored measures, as shown by their record, not their rhetoric—and punish those “enemies” who did not…Legislators did not take kindly to this scrutiny and its coercive flavor. They “looked upon it as black-listing,” she explains. Some rank-and-file members were also troubled by its imperative quality regarding their own vote.
ADA and ACA scores have been heavily utilized in political science as proxies for liberalism and conservatism and used to demonstrate the growing polarization of the congressional parties. Archival evidence suggests, however, that those scores were intended to create the very phenomenon they have been used to measure. They were deeply political rather than objective metrics, which the ADA and ACA used to guide their electoral activities in accordance with an increasingly partisan strategic plan. Each group directed campaign resources toward incumbent lawmakers they rated highly, but they did so unevenly—with the ADA favoring liberal Democrats over Republicans and the ACA showing a preference for conservative Republicans over time. By rewarding favored lawmakers in their preferred party, and using scores to highlight and discourage ideological outliers, they hoped to reshape the parties along more distinct and divided ideological lines.Emily Charnock 2018 Interest Group Ratings
In some cases, members may request a roll call vote in an effort ot put a political opponent on the record. More often than not, this happens for measures that are politically unpopular for the opposition party. In making these requests (often requests from lobbyists), members are using the electronic voting system to potentially score political points or stop legislation they are opposed to...these measures are often designed to 'kill' the underlying piece of legislation if they are adopted.Jacob Straus 2012 The Rise of Roll Call Votes
Since roll call votes were allowed in the Committee of the Whole, forcing a vote on a killer amendment can require members to go on the record in support or opposition of a controversial matter. Regardless of whether members believe they are voting strategically, the vote can be analyzed out of context for political reasons and provide important campaign material. The adoption of electronic voting changed the strategy of voting in the House of Representatives.Jacob Straus 2012 The Rise of Roll Call Votes
Members request roll call votes for any number of reasons. These include establishing visibility and forcing their political opponents (most often members of the opposing party) to vote on measures not popular among their supporters.Jacob Straus 2012 The Rise of Roll Call Votes
In the House, the institution of the recorded teller vote drastically affected the dynamics of the floor stage. Forcing a recorded vote on an amendment is extremely easy. Because the vote is recorded, members cannot simply follow the party or committee leadership, even if they wish to. The visibility of the vote requires careful political calculation. Given the skill of the right in fashioning politically embarrassing amendments with considerable constituency appeal, the “safe” course for many members was to vote against the leadership’s position.Barbara Sinclair 1981 The New Congress
The willingness of members, Democrats as well as Republicans, to offer amendments and the ease with which a recorded vote can be had dramatically increased unpredictability. The House leadership’s probability of getting ambushed on the floor was much higher in 1980 than it once was. Frequently the leadership did not know in advance about all the potentially disastrous amendments that would be offered; and, in any case, it was impossible to conduct whip polls on all. Furthermore, the leadership’s time and resources were limited; the great increase in floor activity stretched both to the limit. Ignorance of the meaning of a complex amendment, fear of political consequences, or the erratic behavior of some members during late night sessions could easily lead to the adoption of disastrous amendments.Barbara Sinclair 1981 The New Congress
Frequently, bill managers will negotiate their support for an amendment in exchange for the member not pressing for a recorded vote. While these kinds of negotiations are far more common at the committee or pre-floor stages, they can occasionally be observed on the floor. For example, in 2010, Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN) offered to work with Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) on one his amendments. Specifically, Oberstar informed Graves he would “commit to the gentleman that we will work through to hopefully a legislative solution” provided Graves “would consider withdrawing his amendment or at least not pressing it to a recorded vote.” Graves responded by promising not to push the matter to a recorded vote: “Mr. Chairman, I tell you what, I would rather not withdraw the amendment, but I would take just a voice vote. I would like to say if I can, I just appreciate the chairman’s willingness to work with me on this, and I understand what he’s saying, too, and I respect it.“Michael Lynch, Anthony Madonna & Alice Kisaalita 2018 Broken Record - Transparency, Position Taking and Recorded Voting in the US Congress (from upcoming 2019 book)
When a roll call vote is requested a party (or some members of parliament) may want to signal to particular groups or individuals its stances on particular issues. This might have to do with electoralist considerations and issues of accountability (see for instance Carey, 2008). The party or individuals requesting a roll call vote might also want to shame the members of parliament of another party when voting in a particular way. In this situation a party does not necessarily want to signal its own position but is more interested in making public the voting behavior of its political adversaries.Simon Hug 2009 Understanding Roll Call Vote Requests
Some conservatives already are acknowledging that to help keep Republicans together they will have to be less aggressive than they were this year, when they forced repeated recorded votes on abortion, labor and other divisive issues. “Will we put as many pro-life votes on the floor? No. We won’t cause our moderates that kind of grief,” said conservative Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. Others say everything will be all right as long as votes are held on issues important to conservatives, win or lose. Associated Press 1998 Far Right May Retreat in 106th
Helms was able to raise large sums because he created a national following soon after arriving in the Senate. On the advice of Senator Jim Allen of Alabama, Helms became a master of the Senate rules – learned in part by volunteering for the largely thankless task of presiding over the Senate. Conservative southern Democrats had long used the Senate rules to block civil rights legislation. Now Helms used the rules to force the Senate to vote on controversial amendments dealing with issues that most politicians preferred to ignore. Helms forced votes on abortion, school prayer, court ordered busing for school integration, homosexuality, federal funding of the arts, and a host of other issues. While other senators snickered when Helms went down to defeat by wide margins, Helms used the votes to help raise money for his political organization and for other conservative groups.Rob Christensen 2008 Paradox of Tar Heel Politics
Thanks to Sen. James B. Allen, Alabama Democrat, I learned that my greatest ally in changing the Senate was the Senate itself. The rules made it possible to bring to the floor issues that most senators would just as soon have ignored. One revered tradition was to dispose quietly of almost any issue that senators didn’t want on their voting records. Controversial bills languished in committees or were disposed of in anonymous voice votes. Constituents often did not have the faintest idea that they were routinely re-electing politicians who voted in ways totally opposite to the way the constituents assumed they were voting. I believed then, and I still believe, that people, especially senators, should have the courage of their convictions. Senators should be “on record” about what really matters to most Americans (e.g., school prayer, spending the people’s money on obscenities, killing unborn children, raising taxes, giving aid to our enemies, protecting the Boy Scouts, ending a self-perpetuating welfare system). My staffers laughingly but proudly told me that one of the most dreaded phrases on Capitol Hill was “Senator Helms has an amendment.” Over the years, I offered literally hundreds. Some, of course, did not pass. My detractors, including newspaper editors, assumed such losses were failures. In fact, they were small victories on the way to big ones. I was picking up steam by Nov. 29, 1973. That day, I introduced three amendments to the Social Security Act and demanded a vote. One amendment, calling for a balanced budget, was tabled 46 to 43, but our little group of conservative senators was pleased by such a close vote on an amendment offered for the first time — and by a freshman senator. I wanted senators to take stands publicly. I was willing to leave it to their constituents to decide what would happen next.Senator Jessee Helms 2005 Senator No' not meant as compliment
Republicans controlled the state Senate for much of Obama's tenure and GOP leaders often forced votes on social issues such as abortion restrictions that put some Democrats in swing districts in a difficult position.Adriel Bettelheim 2008 Yes, but it's complicated.
The liberalization of House procedures implemented by reformers of the 1970s — more hearings on controversial issues, more opportunities to offer amendments in subcommittee, committee and on the floor — expanded opportunities for younger members to attempt to liberalize bills emerging from committees, but also provided Republicans with the chance to force votes on divisive issues like school busing and abortion that weakened marginal Democrats. From 1970 to 1976, the number of recorded votes in the House, due to a combination of more open rules and greater ease in calling for votes, rose from 266 to 661; with the advent of televised floor coverage shortly afterward, the numbers rose higher.John Lawrence 2014 Democrats’ High-Water Mark
A bipartisan floor amendment by O'Neill and Charles Gubser, a California Republican, took aim at the secret teller voting in the Committee of the Whole. The amendment required a recorded vote if just 20 members (a quorum of the Committee of the Whole) requested one. Few features of the Legislative Reorganization Act would have greater institutional or public consequence. Members would now face greater accountability for voting to kill amendments to keep them from being offered before the full House, where a recorded vote could easily be demanded. In years to come, the ability of so small a number of members to demand on-the-record votes in the Committee of the Whole would serve as an unintended means for forcing votes on divisive, party-defining issues and compelling marginal members to cast votes on controversial topics that exposed them to political retribution.John Lawrence 2018 The Class of ‘74
Looking back at their experiences and actions in the House, Class members disclaimed any idea that the reforms they promoted were intended to promote partisanship; indeed, as they noted, their criticisms often were aimed at their own leadership, including chairmen who were unresponsive to the broader caucus. Nevertheless, they acknowledged that the open floor procedures, expanded transparency, and dissemination of power they supported helped provide the mechanisms by which a skilled generation of Republicans could launch an unforeseen battle for control of the House. “Liberals were thinking we were winning,” recalled Scott Lilly, a senior DSG and committee staffer. “But we were about to get shit kicked out of us.”John Lawrence 2018 The Class of ‘74
The success rate of the Conservative Coalition improved during the second session from 50 percent in 1975 to 58 percent in 1976, further assisted by conservatives’ success in utilizing open rules (and recorded voting) to force repeated votes on controversial topics like abortion, busing, and defense policy.John Lawrence 2018 The Class of ‘74
I think that in some cases what you are getting is messaging legislation. You're getting bills where the idea is that I want to draw a clear partisan contrast, but if I were really thinking about the nitty-gritty being implemented then I would think about them very differently.Reihan Salam 2021 Congress, the Constitution, and Compromise
In the House, a return to regular order would require a reduction in the use of closed and restricted rules and emergency meetings that shut the minority out of the deliberative process. In exchange for opportunities to offer amendments in committee and on the floor and to participate in conferences with the Senate, the minority would have to agree to resist such tactics as regularly offering poison pill amendments intended solely to undermine the process or embarrass the majority. It would be in the interest of both parties to pursue this approach, because it allows the majority to pass bipartisan legislation that has a reasonable chance to survive in the Senate, with its unanimous-consent and supermajority requirements. Regular order also offers the minority a voice and a stake in the process and a claim to being part of the solution rather than part of the problem.Kay King 2010 Congress and National Security
Many of the roll-call votes assembled in these volumes did not arise simply in the normal course of Senate business. It was no mere accident that Republicans and Democrats were winding up on the opposite sides of so many issues that Democrats wanted to highlight. Many of these votes were deliberately staged by Democrats for the purpose of communicating partisan differences to external constituencies. “I remember [Sen.] Don Riegle (D-MI) forced the Republicans to vote on cutting Social Security five or six times via amendments,” recalled a former Senate leadership staffer from the period. “It was just like the many Obamacare repeal votes they took in the House over the last [113th] Congress. It made the Republicans crazy, and it had an impact in 1982.” Riegle “was one of our big bomb throwers. He'd stop by the Democratic Policy Committee, stick his head in the door, and ask, ‘Got any Social Security Amendments I could offer today?’”Frances Lee 2016 Insecure Majorities
NOTE: The votes that are weaponized are on amendments which are the very votes that were made public by the 1970s reforms. If the voting was secret, these shennanigans couldn't occur.
Both parties in both houses of Congress are guilty of exploiting the rules at ever-increasing rates. In the Senate, which the framers structured to temper the populist excesses of the House, lawmakers take this right too far by threatening filibusters not just to delay but to completely obstruct action. In the House, which was established to be more immediately responsive to popular opinion but still cognizant of minority views, open debate is often stifled by means of closed and restrictive rules that severely limit or even prevent the bringing of amendments to the floor for debate and a vote. This results in a breakdown of the legislative process, or “regular order.” Unfortunately, in a deeply polarized environment, regular order provides the minority with opportunities to play politics and embarrass the majority. As a result, to head off such behavior, the majority feels compelled to advance its legislative agenda by limiting hearings and markups, reducing floor time, and passing legislation with a minimum of debate or delay, thus severely restricting the minority’s role.Kay King 2010 Congress and National Security
Roll-call votes are typically not requested randomly by a disinterested party; they are selected by a purposive actor (such as a party leader) with a vested interest in what the vote will reveal about legislative behavior to a particular audience. Thus, we cannot be confident that we can infer behavior on the unobserved (non-roll-call) votes from the roll-call votes. This disjunct has negative implications for the use of roll-call votes to estimate legislators’ ideal points, the dimensionality of the policy space, and party influence on legislative voting.Carrubba, Gabel & Hug 2008 Legislative Voting Behavior
The Senate Republican conference’s vote earlier this year to preserve the earmark ban was an important step in the right direction, but we need to do more. That is why I sent the letter to President Trump, and it is why, should earmarks return, I intend to challenge each one of them on the Senate floor. Just as I did in my time in the House, I will file amendments to force debate and force votes on these earmarks. That way, Members can publicly defend their earmarks to the hard-working taxpayers they represent.Senator Jeff Flake 2017 Congressional Record
The key votes came on a series of amendments – most of them recorded teller votes. Many had been drawn deliberately in such a way as to maximize their symbolic impact and they were poor excuses for legislation. Some made a meaningful yes or no vote almost impossible. A few seemed blatantly unconstitutional. Others, although poorly drafted, seemed reasonable in principle. One or two were an even mixture of these good and bad features.
Bill Broomfield from Michigan offered an amendment to delay the implementation of all court-ordered busing plans until the full appeals process has been completed in the courts. This amendment caused me the greatest agony. I supported its over-all aim, yet at the same time I was troubled to have to support a measure that seemed to interfere with the judicial process. Additionally, his amendment was bound to delight the hard-core segregationists. They would support anything to delay integration. The though of being sandwiched in with them upset me enormously.
That's the problem with so much legislation here. Often, you’re unsatisfied with a yes or no vote. Sometimes you’d like to vote “sixty percent yes and forty percent no.” And sometimes you'd like to vote “neither.” But on recorded teller votes it all comes down to a red or green printed card on which you write your name, your state and the number of your district. It’s either yes or no.Donald Riegle 1972 O Congress
Then I rose to offer an amendment that would have allowed the Pentagon to spend only ninety-five percent of the funds it received from the Congress this fiscal year. This five percent cut would have saved some $3.5 billion. My suggestion met little support in the full committee, but I had expected that. It was a necessary preliminary to offering it up on the floor. There I could get a recorded teller vote that would put every member on the record for or against a cut in military spending. With the elections only one year away, I should pick up some votes.Donald Riegle 1972 O Congress
The aim of asking for unanimous consent is to bring up these bills for a vote faster, dispensing with regular procedural votes that take time. But as the leader of the Senate, McConnell has the final say on granting the request. And he said no.
“The last thing we need to do right now is to trade pointless show votes across the aisle,” McConnell said during a floor speech, saying Schumer had agreed with him on that point last month. “We agreed we wouldn’t waste the Senate’s time on show votes related to government funding until a global agreement was reached that could pass the House, pass the Senate, and which the president would sign. ... That’s how you make a law.”
Even if he had allowed a motion for unanimous consent, it’s unlikely all Republican senators would have agreed. But Democrats wanted to put McConnell on the spot in publicly denying their request to take up funding bills.Ella Nielsen 2019 A “Pointless Show Vote.”
The budget resolution was the first bill of genuinely national import to come to the floor after the cameras were turned on. To Speaker O’Neill’s chagrin, the resolution faced forty-one first-and-second-degree amendments and the debate stretched over three weeks, setting records for budget resolution debates in the House. O’Neill attributed the multitude of amendments to the presence of television cameras. There is little doubt that several amendments were offered for symbolic purposes... The effects on amending activity of televised sessions, which began in March 1979, were never given a chance to materialize fully. Beginning in late 1979, the shift to more restrictive special rules for major bills prevented the members from fully exploiting the opportunities created by House television.Steven Smith 1989 Call to Order
*NOTE: Smith claims, and it seems evident, that the massive rise of restrictive special rules and closed rules (two dangerous and anti-democratic turns of the mid-late 1970s) were driven by the rise of 1970 transparency.
In 1681 a Whig tract warned electors against M.P.s of known Roman Catholic proclivities; in 1690 the Whigs circulated a list of 130 Tories who had voted against recognizing the abdication of James II, and the Tories replied by circulating a list of members who had voted for the Corporation Bill, whom they described as “Republicans, Fanatics, Latitudinarians, or Atheists.”J.R. Pole 1983 The Gift of Government
The third period was intended to begin in September, 1982, as a prelude to the mid-term elections. Actually, the ground work for this period was to be laid in the spring and summer when the social issues – prayers in schools, abortion, school busing, and the constitutional amendment mandating a balanced Federal budget – would be introduced into Congress. Social conservatives would be mollified by these initiatives. They had watched during the first year as Reagan concentrated on economic issues, but by mid-1982 they would want action. President Reagan would give it to them by endorsing some of Senator Helms’ social bills and amendments. Of course, the practical purpose was not to get these bills and amendments passed, but to force votes on them. Then, these volatile issues could be used as major campaign issues against liberals and Democrats in the House and Senate.Ingold Windt Jr 1984 Trying to "Stay the Course" - President Reagan's Rhetoric during the 1982 Election
Roll-call votes have largely become a political tool...Party groups frequently call for a roll-call vote to clearly, and publicly, differentiate themselves from other groups. In these cases the primary motivation is to make a public statement; measurement or control of internal group cohesion is secondary. More generally, this type of roll call voting is used to highlight the activities and behavior of other groups, rather than investigate behavior in one’s own group. The goal is to draw public attention to the activities of other groups that are objectionable to those calling for a roll-call vote. A roll-call vote might also be called to draw attention to actions of the individuals calling for the vote (as opposed to the actions of others). For instance, prior to a national election, MEPs of the same member state might request a roll-call vote to demonstrate that they were voting in their home state’s interests despite their own party group’s stance on an issue. This often is the case when RCVs are called, despite an overwhelming majority on one side or the other.Kreppel 2002 Institutional Development
In response to openness provided by the reforms of the 1970s] “your former colleague Leo Ryan said many of those amendments were designed to stall, delay, to make things not happen, to embarrass opponents.”John Lawrence 2019 House Committee on Reform
When people out in the real world turn on the TV and they see members of Congress excoriating each other in the most hyper-partisan political way, they don’t make the distinction between that and serious debate. Members know that and I think we all have written those speeches and those gotcha amendments. That deteriorates from the public regard for the institution....I suggested you may want to take a hard look at one minutes [public floor speeches] and special orders and how integral they really are to the business of the legislative responsibilities of the Congress and get rid of at least that gratuitous partisanship that most Americans are horrified about.John Lawrence 2019 House Committee on Reform
The introduction of television to the House chamber in 1979 and the Senate chamber in 1986 has had a major impact. “I think TV is the biggest evil that has come to the House,” said Anderson. “Speaker O’Neill predicted what would happen... We now have four hundred and thirty five potential stars of daytime television who are acutely aware that there are cameras in the chamber. They use them to get messages out. They plan for sound bites, things that can be quickly snatched by the evening news. It’s created a nastiness and a level of personal attack that was unheard of-or rare-in earlier times.” The vituperative attacks, together with the relentless need to garner more campaign contributions-figured in the retirements of fourteen senators and thirty-five representatives from the 104th Congress in January 1997. “I think TV has ruined the legislative process as we know it,” William F. Hildenbrand, a former secretary of the Senate, said.Rep Eric Fingerhut Inside Congress (by Ronald Kessler 1997)
National representatives also want to avoid the possibility that their political opponents will use their negative vote against them. A representative of a member state X explained that such votes trigger media attention while journalists usually overlook measures adopted without opposition: “When we are isolated, we prefer not to express our opposition because the journalists in X would make big titles with it.”Stephanie Novak 2015 Secrecy and Publicity
Interviews reveal that the different actors in the legislative process make strategic use of transparency rules over the course of negotiations. In some cases, actors tend to convert transparency rules as they use publicity to put pressure on their opponents.Stephanie Novak 2013 Transparency as Organized Hypocrisy
Recorded votes may have initially developed to solve an agency problem and enable constituents to monitor the behaviour of their representatives. Today, they are frequently used as a weapon against political opponents, forcing them to declare in public their position on an issue of great political concern… recorded votes may be used to embarrass or divide the “opposite side.”Thomas Saalfeld 1995 Dynamics of Congressional Loyalty
Recorded votes are a weapon in the “continuous election campaign of the whole life of a parliament”Thomas Saalfeld 1995 Dynamics of Congressional Loyalty
The ‘management’ of procedure has tended to avoid recorded votes which would publicize divisions or abstentions within parties, or which for other reasons would embarrass the Members and incidentally, complicate the task of the whips. Only when a party hopes for political gain by exposing the contrast between its position and that of the others, or hopes to win allies in other parties by compelling Members to honor election promises or interest-group commitments, does it demand a recorded vote.Gerhard Loewenberg 1967 Parliament in the German Political System
People who have baggage from previous administrations, that’s a problem. People who have too many congressional votes on their record, that’s a problem. If our system is made that it is non-viable to have experience, that is a problem.Julia Azari 2018 Oprah & The Legislative Presidency
*NOTE: Julia Azari and Matt Glassman discuss on the podcast about how just having lots of votes in Congress is a negative, especially with respect to running for President or other office. What this suggests is that congressional voting is used to make members look bad.
In a secret ballot race, there was no way to tell which members did and which members didn’t live up to their promises. In a multi-ballot race, members could keep their commitment to a candidate on one ballot and desert him on the others. If you wanted a hard count of your vote, the question you had to ask was nor “How are you on the majority leader’s race?” or “Can we count on your vote for Mo?” The only right question was “Can we count on you to vote for Mo on every ballot?” And even then, some of your colleagues would look you in the eye and lie through their teeth. When the votes were counted, Mo’s total fell well short of his commitments. When the votes were announced Mo asked the press, “Do you know how to tell the difference between a cactus and a caucus? With a cactus the pricks are on the outside.”David Obey 2007 Raising Hell for Justice
*NOTE: Obey is a retired Member of Congress talking about how hard it is (impossible really) to predict Members votes when the voting is done by secret ballot.
Judicial nominees don’t want to have records of writing judicial opinions. People running for President don’t want to have records of taking votes on things, right? And all that kind of fuels, I think it’s a mirage, but the desire of voting for an outside candidate.Matt Glassman 2018 Oprah & The Legislative Presidency
*NOTE: Julia Azari and Matt Glassman discuss on the podcast about how just having lots of votes in Congress is a negative, especially with respect to running for President or other office. What this suggests is that congressional voting is used to make members look bad.
[Weaponized transparency] undercuts the prospects for legislative success because it is aimed at defining “us versus them” rather than finding common ground. “Messaging escalates the conflict. It makes it harder to legislate,” stated a longtime Senate leadership aide. “If we are trying to set up a message vote, we are not trying to find the common ground. Instead we often find something that’s easy for the Republicans to vote against… If you are trying to legislate, you wouldn’t take such a hard line.”Frances Lee 2016 Insecure Majorities
Television Transcript of a C-SPAN discussion on whether congressional committees should be open or closed. This excerpt features a caller from Maine – a former congressional staffer – speaks about the nightmare that occurs when committees are open.
C-SPAN HOST BRIAN LAMB: We’ve got a Kennebunkport Maine call go ahead please.
CALLER: I’m sorry, its Kennebunk, not Kennebunkport
HOST: All right, all right we’re having trouble this morning with these these names out there, go ahead.
CALLER: I was calling in simply because I had been for a long time, the minority staff director of one of the congressional committees and I was going to offer a comment on this issue of open versus closed meetings.
HOST: Terrific.
CALLER: Prior to the adoption of the rule requiring open markups and open conferences, I think that the process of a executive session for the consideration of a bill was a far more meaningful process because the members came in and really, honestly debated many of the issues. Whereas, I think today the tendency is to resolve most of the more controversial questions before you get to the markup. And it in turn becomes almost a pro-forma show for the audience without any real serious hard give-and-take among the members when they’re standing there in front of the audience. They’re playing to the audience. Whereas in a closed session, they tended to really be addressing each other seriously on the issues. I can recall back when, for example, we held markups on some of the early environmental laws on NEPA, for example, the Endangered Species Act and various other environmental bills. This is in the house Merchant Marine Committee. If we had been having an open session it would have been a disaster.
HOST: Would you conclude from that then that sunshine is not good for our country?
CALLER: In that sense yes, I think in terms of hearings per se, clearly they should be open unless there is something involving national security at issue. But in regard to a markup on a bill or even more importantly perhaps a conference between the House and the Senate, I think the process works much better if it’s in private than in public. And the lady is quite correct of course, you did have staff members running in and out of the room passing messages to people letting them know what happened. And frequently the messages were sugar-coated in many respects. You did get the job done I think far more efficiently in that kind of an environment.
CALLER: I just want to add one more comment and then I teach government now here in Maine and I’m using gavel-to-gavel as my primary tool for educating the students on how Congress functions. I think it’s far better than any of the textbooks and it’s a great publication. it’s great to hear thanks a lot for the call…good good background. What do you think when you hear somebody who’s been in the process and it’s not a longer there and not defending it but saying I think you must be absolutely right about the although I’m not inside the closed-door meeting I’d think he’d be absolutely right about members feeling freer to have honest forthright discussions among themselves about issues and their differences on these issues. You know human nature being what it is I would guess that’s true. And that is a good thing it’s just one of those things you have to weigh the are balance whether you want a democratic governments policy made in the open or do everything behind closed doors I think there’s a medium I’m proponents of complete openness are not so naive I think to believe that there wouldn’t be something done behind closed doors for instance if you’re going to be writing legislation and voting on legislation on a Tuesday morning members would get together on Monday over lunch or in private meetings and thrash things about I mean I would expect that to go on if they a chairman who ran a committee markup on legislation that fell apart would be considered a terrible chairmanC-SPAN with Brian Hood 1987 Open or Closed Committees
The partisan jockeying in the narrowly divided Congress was intensified by the 2008 presidential campaign, which for all practical purposes was already under way. Both parties forced votes they knew they could not win, in hopes of making life uncomfortable for their opponents and shaping issues for the election...The House held a record 1,177 roll call votes during the year, in part as a result of GOP attempts to amend and recommit bills.CQ Press 2008 Partisan Jockeying in Advance Of 2008
“This is the sort of thing we've never done before,” said Representative James M. Shannon of Massachusetts. In the last few years, the Republicans have also forced votes on many damaging issues, such as an increase in the national debt. Swinging at a 'Fat Pitch.’Steven V. Roberts 1981 New Democratic Tactics
The restriction of calls of the yeas and nays to one fifth is founded upon the necessity of preventing too frequent a recurrence to this mode of ascertaining the votes, at the mere caprice of an individual. A call consumes a great deal of time, and often embarrasses the just progress of beneficial measures. It is said to have been often used to excess in the congress under the confederation; and even under the present constitution it is notoriously used, as an occasional annoyance, by a dissatisfied minority, to retard the passage of measures, which are sanctioned by the approbation of a strong majority. The check, therefore, is not merely theoretical; and experience shows, that it has been resorted to, at once to admonish, and to control members, in this abuse of the public patience and the public indulgence.Joseph Story 1833 (Supreme Court) Commentaries on the Constitution
Republicans are looking to avoid another floor situation like the one that occurred on July 9, when Democrats forced votes on the Confederate flag. The Democrats’ action came after an exclusive CQ Roll Call report the night before on Republican efforts to roll back restrictions on the display and sale of the Confederate symbols in federal cemeteries.Matt Fuller 2015 All Appropriations on Hold Until Confederate Flap Fixed
In short, legislative process enables the parties to wage partisan wars, not just policy wars... In many, if not most cases in the current Congress, votes taken on the floor are political. In other words, they are meant to distinguish the two parties rather than create good public policy. In other words, opportunities to make the opposition party look bad are just as likely to receive votes as those that create good policy... Legislative process is arguably the backbone to today’s polarization.Huder 2013 It’s Congress’s Fault
In order to clearly define “us versus them,” roll-call votes designed for [weaponized] purposes will force members to select between simplistic “either/or” alternatives. As such, messaging [weaponized transparency] does not entail an effort to wrestle with policy complexity or to identify inclusive “both/and” solutions. As a Senate leadership staffer put it, “With messaging, you’re setting up simple choices: pay equity, motherhood, and apple pie. Are you for it, or are you against it? Of course, you and I know that these issues are not so simple. But they’re designed for use in the thirty second ad.” Even though messaging may undermine the prospects for successful lawmaking, legislative achievements are not necessary for parties to advance their political goals of creating favorable contrasts with the opposition. “In some ways, the failure to get things done makes these issues as clear and sharp a distinction between the two parties as if they get through,” said Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux (Hollander 2014). In fact, for messaging purposes, failure often works better than success. Frances Lee 2016 Insecure Majorities
If members are staging public votes to highlight differences between the parties more frequently in the contemporary era than in the past, then not all the growth in partisan conflict represents genuine ideological polarization, a widening disagreement between the parties on basic questions of public policy. Instead, some share of the increased party conflict is simply an artifact of the changed strategic behavior [and increased transparency]. Put differently, a substantial amount of partisan conflict in the contemporary Congress is engineered for public consumption. In that sense, not all party conflict is “polarization,” a widening difference in the two parties’ policy preferences. Instead, driven by electioneering in a more party competitive context, a considerable amount of party conflict in the contemporary Congress is position taking for partisan public relations.Frances Lee 2016 Insecure Majorities
Senators may over several days “cast back-to-back votes on a dizzying array of dozens of amendments,” many designed to provide campaign ammunition (so-called gotcha amendments) for the next election.Walter Oleszek 2015 Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process
Democrats are dreaming up several partisan votes aimed solely at contrasting Democratic candidates and their Republican counterparts and at making trouble for John McCain for the fall. Having a productive and honorable legislative session is out of the question. What's more likely is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have nearly ultimate power to decide what the Senate and House debate and vote on in the remaining few months of the congressional session in advance of the election. It's a perfect time for leaders to set up recorded votes on issues to help Democrats in political campaigns, and just as the GOP is bracing for possibly large losses in November. Some of these symbolic votes will ripple into the presidential race as well. Richard Sammon 2008 Congress Loves ‘Gotcha’ Votes
Procedures structuring floor deliberation seek to balance a number of competing concerns. First, certain structures, notably points of order, reduce the chances that Congress will inadvertently or intentionally ignore difficult or controversial issues, a problem many critics of congressional performance in this area have noted.’“ Even though most members may want to avoid such issues, and the party leaders may work to structure a bill or floor consideration to spare their members difficult votes, the availability of a point of order can allow one lawmaker (or a few) to halt proceedings, highlight the issue, and force a roll-call vote. Especially in the House, where the floor is tightly controlled by the Rules Committee, a point of order that cannot be waived in a special rule empowers individual members and reduces the chance of success of avoidance techniques. Furthermore, the point-of-order process focuses legislative attention on the constitutional issue and provides the opportunity for sustained debate for which members can be held accountable. Occasionally, constitutional issues identified by a handful of members have been brushed aside during the rush of floor debate and activity. Points of order make that more difficult.Garret, Vermeule 2001 Institutional Design of a Thayerian Congress
Another amendment calling once again for a short timetable to begin an initial withdrawal from Iraq. Doesn't matter that it won't pass, put everyone on the record again for tomorrow's news cycle. Democratic leaders will wink, knowing the public-at-large approves in poll after poll. An amendment to index the minimum wage to inflation. McCain and Republicans would vote against it, perhaps without giving speeches in protest. Or a proposal in the House to expand the plant-closing notification law to cover more businesses. Republicans would vote no, even though it would be stopped in its tracks in the Senate, where the GOP has more procedural tools at its disposal. Or a nonbinding amendment calling for a middle class tax cut to be paid for by ending tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans won't want to vote against middle class tax cuts, but they don't want to end cuts for the wealthy.Richard Sammon 2008 Congress Loves ‘Gotcha’ Votes
Some of these reforms – including open meetings, televising of hearings and floor proceedings, and the liberalization of floor procedure – would eventually afford significant new opportunities for the GOP minority to embarrass Democrats and to promote their own policy proposals (Farrell 2001, 626-38; Lawrence 2014; Roberts and Smith 2003; Zelizer 2004, 2007). But at the time these battles were being waged, the possibility that Republicans might gain partisan advantage from these reforms was simply not a pressing concern for Democrats, who felt secure in their majorities. “It was the furthest thing from Democrats’ minds that [the reforms] would help Republicans,” reflected one longtime former Democratic staffer. “At that point, the fighting in Congress was centered within the Democratic Party – that was the focus.” Republicans, for their part, were more alert to the possible advantages, and many strongly favored the sunshine reforms (Wolfensberger 2001, 86-128). “Open meetings, televised hearings – Republicans were for all these things,” observed a former Republican staffer who served through the 1970s. “They understood that transparency would help them… Many Democrats were out of step with their constituencies, and Republicans felt that anything they could do to raise the visibility would be helpful to the party.” One wonders whether Democrats would have been as interested in pursuing these institutional reforms had they anticipated how useful they would soon become to Republicans. Frances Lee 2016 Insecure Majorities
Leaders and members regularly set up roll-call (transparent) votes in full knowledge that these votes will have no effect on policy outcomes, but they nevertheless stage them for messaging purposes – that is, to define the differences between the parties in hopes of making their party look more attractive to voters or key constituencies than the opposition.Frances Lee 2016 Insecure Majorities
For an explainer on weaponized transparency click here.
A huge percentage of time is spent on how to use the political process to create a vote that will embarrass the other side. You basically have people working to make each other look as bad and stupid as possible.Rep Eric Fingerhut
