New Senate leader Thune pushes for an end to backroom deals

It’s the first week of the 119th Congress, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has a big decision to make. Does he follow through on plans to make the Senate more open and democratic—and therefore less efficient—or does he leverage his power to make the America First agenda into law as quickly as possible?

“[The Founding Fathers] made the Senate smaller and senators’ terms of office longer, with the intention of creating a more stable, more thoughtful, and more deliberative legislative body to check ill-considered or intemperate legislation and protect the rights of the American people,” Thune said in his first address as majority leader on Friday. “One of my priorities as leader will be to ensure that the Senate stays the Senate.”

Most Senate Republicans support Thune’s ideas: allow more debate, give everyone an opportunity to raise amendments, have single-issue votes, and add more work days to the calendar. But other lawmakers and analysts say those new year’s resolutions are unlikely to stick, and if they do, they come at a cost.

Thune’s changes would return the Senate to passing bills by “regular order.” In recent years, Senate leaders have done away with much of the process for heavy-hitting bills, hammering out legislation in private meetings and then bringing it to the floor for a quick vote not subject to amendments. That circumvents the regular process of running bills through committee and opening them up to debate and amendments.

“Much of the process has been undermined in the last decade or two by virtue of primarily partisan parliamentary warfare,” Steven Smith, a politics professor at Arizona State University, told WORLD.

He said former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., opted for the parliamentary warfare tactic when he became minority leader in 2007. Then, like now, the majority party did not have the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, so it had to have some support from the minority to pass a bill. McConnell demanded that Democrats negotiate compromises or else receive no GOP votes.

“The Senate hadn’t really operated that way before, but he made it the norm,” Smith said. “Then the Democrats played into it. Among the things that the Democrats did was refuse to allow the Republican amendments to a bill to come to a vote if the Republicans were not going to allow the bill itself to come to a vote. And the result, oftentimes, was gridlock.”

Returning every bill to regular order could assuage portions of the GOP that wanted more of a hand in legislation but couldn’t get one with McConnell in charge. But it could also slow down the process, said Casey Burgat, an assistant professor and legislative affairs program director at George Washington University.

“Thune wants to at least show his rank-and-file that he hears them after a long time of Mitch McConnell having a pretty tight grip on that Republican caucus,” Burgat told WORLD. “But … the more people who are involved, as a general rule, the more delayed or more slow the process moves. Members like hearing that they will be more involved, but every other Senate majority leader and speaker of the House from both parties has promised this, and it doesn’t happen.”

Shutting off the amendment process allows the party in the majority to advance legislation cohesively without rogue members trying to change the bill. It also provides coverage for members taking a tough vote. Even if they disagree, they can say they were following the party’s desires.

President-elect Donald Trump was set to meet with Senate Republican leaders on Wednesday afternoon to discuss what he called a “big, beautiful bill” to act on his priorities. It would include provisions for border security, energy initiatives, tax policy, and extending the debt ceiling. The Senate could pass this through reconciliation, a process by which the Senate parliamentarian can suspend regular order to pass a bill on a simple majority vote as long as the legislation pertains to the budget. But it can only be used once per fiscal year, and Trump has floated a two-step reconciliation process.

“Senate Democrats know perfectly well that they are the one place that can stop a Republican juggernaut,” Smith said. “It’s going to be tough for the Republicans to get what they want out of the House on some issues because their margin of control is so narrow. Even if they’re able to keep the House majority together, the Senate’s going to be a serious problem. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer’s primary job is going to keep his colleagues in line so they can bargain with the Republicans collectively.”

In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., tried to pass individual appropriations bills through regular order last year. But he ended up having to group some of them into chunks to get them approved.

“They failed at individual appropriations in the House,” said freshman Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., a former House member. “I was in the minority for two years there, so I’ve gotten a sense of this before. The Republican Party is going to have a hard time building the kind of coalition they need, even for a reconciliation bill.”

Despite the GOP’s push for a return to regular order, leaders such as House Speaker Mike Johnson have indicated they could wait on that until after Trump’s agenda becomes law.

“If it runs through regular order or regular process and as a standalone, or as part of the appropriations, for example, then you have to have both parties negotiating,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol this week. “We feel like we’re in better stead to do it ourselves.”

Burgat from George Washington University emphasized that the rules in each chamber of Congress are only as strong as the members want them to be: “If they want to ignore them, they can, but if they want to enforce them, it takes them voting on it to actually enforce them on themselves.”

For now, Republicans say the priority is to make the Senate more productive to pass as much of Trump’s agenda in the first 100 days as possible.

“Chuck Schumer barely had them breaking a sweat,” newly elected Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, told WORLD. “So we’re going to be here Monday through Friday, and weekends if necessary, getting the agenda done. The first order of the day is to confirm every single one of President Trump’s nominees, do that as quickly as humanly possible. And then secure our border and lower prices because that’s what every one of us got elected to do.”