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ОглавлениеOn Becoming a United States Senator
The following article first appeared in the February 2, 1973, issue of National Review. After it had been reprinted under the title of “Notes of an Earnest Freshman” (I fear I was), I received a note from Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who was kind enough to call it “one of the most revealing and frank commentaries on the Senate and what happens in that august body that I’ve ever read.”
On January 20, 1971, Jacob Javits, pursuant to custom, escorted me down the center aisle of the United States Senate chamber. Vice President Agnew swore me in, and I was handed a pen, with which I entered my name in the books of the Senate. I then walked a few steps to my desk on the Republican side of the aisle. I had become the Junior Senator from the State of New York. Or, as senatorial courtesy puts it, the distinguished and honorable Senator from the great State of New York.
Rarely has anyone, distinguished and honorable or otherwise, entered the United States Senate so innocent of the mechanisms of a legislative body or of the impact of politics on the legislative process. Prior to my election, I had never held public office or participated in any organized political effort other than the third-party mayoralty and senatorial campaigns of the brothers Buckley.
Shortly after my election, Clif White, my campaign manager and guide to the political world, organized a private dinner with a few of the senior Republican senators so that I might acquire a better feel for the life I was about to enter. I had hoped to get specific advice on how to go about the job of being an effective senator. What I got instead were affable assurances to the effect that anyone capable of winning election to the Senate would find no difficulty in getting along once in it. This was all, in its own way, reassuring; but I did not emerge from the dinner with the mother lode of hard, practical information that would help me to thread my way through the complexities of senatorial life.
The first formal business for a senator-elect is the meeting with the sergeant at arms and the secretary of the Senate, who give you the basic housekeeping instructions, take sample signatures for franking privileges, and explain a senator’s insurance and retirement benefits. I also learned where I would stand in the Senate pecking order. I would rank ninety-ninth, because I had no prior service as a congressman or governor, which is taken into account in the calculation of seniority. (I beat out Lawton Chiles of Florida because New York has the larger population.) At that meeting I was presented with three books: The Rules and Manual of the United States Senate; an exegesis thereof by the chief parliamentarian, Dr. Floyd Riddick; and the Congressional Directory for the second session of the prior Congress. I was determined to spend the next few weeks mastering the parliamentary rules, but I was soon bogged down in their intricacy. To my relief, however, I quickly learned that the Senate operates in a reasonably free and tolerant manner, and that much of its business is conducted not by the rule book but by continuing recourse to unanimous-consent agreements. Those who do know the rule book, however, are equipped, at critical moments, to take the parliamentary advantage.
New senators learn that they are expected to carry the principal burden of presiding over the Senate. For someone like me, who had never presided over any official function or even read Robert’s Rules of Order, the prospect seemed ominous. It isn’t all that difficult, however, because sitting immediately in front of the Chair is one of the three parliamentarians, who whispers up the appropriate instruction. The most difficult task is to learn the identity of eighty or ninety brand-new faces, together with state of origin, so that one can recognize the Senator from Such-and-Such without any obvious fumbling.
During this orientation period, I introduced myself to the Senate Republican leadership—to Minority Leader Hugh Scott, Minority Whip Bob Griffin, Chairman Gordon Allott of the Republican Policy Committee, and Chairman Margaret Chase Smith of the Republican Conference.
One important call was at the office of Senator Wallace Bennett, chairman of the Republican Committee on Committees, in order to learn how committee assignments were made and to register my preferences. The process is in fact mechanical. Once the majority and minority vacancies on the various committees become known, the members of each party in the incoming class line up in order of seniority to take their pick. Each senator is appointed to two major committees, and often to one or more minor ones. My own initial assignments were to Public Works, Space, and the District of Columbia.
It was in committee work that I first came to appreciate the enormous volume of business that courses through Congress, and its implications. It is not unusual to find meetings or hearings involving as many as three committees or subcommittees of which one is a member scheduled for the same time, each involving business of some importance. A senator either spreads himself thin by putting in token appearances at each or devotes himself to one meeting, relying on overworked staff members to keep abreast of what is going on in the other two. I have yet to be convinced that there isn’t somewhere in the bowels of the Capitol a computer programmed to arrange as many conflicting meetings as possible.
The committee system constitutes a delegation of responsibility for legislative work in designated areas. It should not be assumed, however, that a given committee will be representative of the Senate as a whole. Senators naturally tend to gravitate to those committees that interest them the most or whose work is most important to their particular constituencies, and a committee can become as “mission oriented” as an executive agency. Given the broad range of viewpoints represented on each side of the aisle, the requirement that each committee have a majority and minority membership roughly comparable to that of the Senate as a whole is no guarantee that it will reflect the political spectrum in any other sense. Thus committee reports are too often “selling documents” that do not provide other senators with the kind of balanced information that would be needed to help them reach a reasonably educated opinion regarding a bill’s merits.
It isn’t long—especially if controversial and complex legislation is being worked on—before a newcomer senses the enormous influence wielded by committee staffs. These are usually heavily loaded in favor of the majority party in terms of both outlook and availability to committee members. Time and again, after new points are raised in committee, the staff will disappear, to return the next day with what is often a considerably refocused bit of legislation.
It can be extraordinarily difficult for committee members, even those who are particularly concerned with the legislation in question, to keep up with what is happening to it. There simply isn’t time for a member to rethink and reconsider every interlocking provision of a complex bill each time a substantive change is made; hence the heavy reliance on staff. Furthermore, committees often work under enormous pressures to report out particular pieces of legislation by deadlines that are often set not so much by the natural rhythm of the legislative process as by political considerations.
Thus major legislation is often rushed through committee, reported out on the floor of the Senate, and put to a vote with few senators fully understanding it. It is, in fact, virtually impossible for a senator to keep up with most, let alone all, of the significant legislation being considered by committees other than his own. I do not refer to legislation that grabs the headlines and occasions national debate: a senator has to examine such legislation in some detail if only to answer his mail and reply to reporters’ questions. It is, after all, by his positions on conspicuous legislation that he establishes his political identity.
Most of the bills considered by the Senate are relatively inconspicuous, though by no means unimportant. They may establish new programs that will have an enormous impact on American society, on the states, or on the economy; programs that in time may grow into multi-billion-dollar commitments. Yet many of these bills will be enacted with little real examination by most of the senators who will have to vote yea or nay on them, and with less than adequate comprehension of what such bills involve.
A senator simply does not have sufficient legislative help to get a proper analysis of every bill that issues from the legislative mill. Too many bills are called to a vote before the ink has dried on the explanatory report. Thus, all too often a senator’s vote is based simply on a summary description of the bill (which can be totally inadequate), plus whispered conversations with colleagues who may or may not have detailed information as to its content—all in the fifteen-minute period allowed for voting after the bells have started ringing to summon him to the floor.
Technically speaking, any senator can ensure that adequate time is allowed for debate of any bill. He can simply register his refusal to sign on to a unanimous-consent agreement limiting the time allotted for debate. This presupposes, however, that he has had enough advance warning of the particular mischief at hand to record a timely objection to any agreement to which he is not a party. It also presupposes that he will be able to educate and energize a sufficient number of his all-too-preoccupied colleagues to assure himself of sufficient floor support to make the effort worthwhile.
I recall two cases in my own experience—although there are, unfortunately, many more—that dramatize the pressures under which the Senate operates.
In early 1971, Governor Daniel Evans of Washington suggested the need for legislation to cope with economic disasters, similar to existing legislation designed to cope with natural disasters. The law he proposed would be narrow in its focus, providing relief on a short-term, emergency basis to help communities ride out sudden economic catastrophes.
Two bills incorporating this approach were introduced, and hearings on them were held by the Public Works Committee. Several months later, the committee met in executive session to consider the legislation as revised by staff after the hearings. To the astonishment of at least some members, the draft bill differed in fundamental respects from both of the measures that had been introduced. The basic concept had shifted drastically. Instead of a tightly focused bill to bring maximum effort to bear on specific emergency situations, it had become an amorphous one that would also cover areas of chronic unemployment or chronically low economic activity, for which there already existed thirty or forty other federal programs. The definition of areas that could be eligible for relief under the legislation was such that even a neighborhood could qualify for the most exotic kinds of federal help.
Nevertheless, this basically new legislation was approved in a single day by the full committee and reported out. The legislation was then rushed to the floor of the Senate, debated before a largely empty chamber, and put to a vote—all within a day or two of the time printed copies of the bill and of the accompanying committee report had become available to the senators. This legislation opened up a whole new area of federal intervention. It carried no price tag, and it was approved by senators only a few of whom had any grasp of its scope.
The second example concerned a new program of a truly sweeping nature that was enacted by an overwhelming majority of senators, many of whom I am convinced had little understanding of the real issues involved. Just before the August recess in 1971, the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare reported out a measure innocuously titled “A Bill to Extend the Economic Opportunity Act of 1968 and Other Purposes.” The “other purposes” turned out to be the inauguration of a comprehensive federal program for “child development” services designed ultimately to embrace a very large proportion of pre-school-aged children regardless of financial need. Whereas in its first year the new program would cost a mere $100 million (chicken feed these days), the committee report placed the figure for the second year at $2 billion—an amount significantly greater than the projected cost of all the rest of the Office of Economic Opportunity’s activities. Furthermore, the report stated that the cost of the child-development program would double every two years thereafter for some time hence. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Elliot Richardson estimated that the annual cost of the new program would come to $20 billion before the end of the decade.
Thanks to an interested housewife who had followed the progress of the bill in committee, my office was alerted to its implications. Because of the recess, we had time to examine its horrors, and I was in a position to argue, on the basis of expert opinion, against the child-development section. The bill, however, had been scheduled as the first order of business on the day Congress returned and was to be voted on in the Senate the next day, “other purposes” and all. As a consequence, there was little opportunity to educate my colleagues about those “other purposes.”
Any senators who happened to be on the floor to hear the debate would have learned that there was substantial controversy among professionals over the child-development section, a fact they would not have discovered from reading the committee report. They would have learned that a number of experts questioned the need for such a vast undertaking and, in fact, warned that permanent harm could be done to younger children placed in the impersonal “warehouse” environment of the kind of day-care facility that was apt to result from the legislation. They would have learned also that the expert opinion heard in committee was entirely one-sided; and that even among the experts who favored the program, one had remarked that its far-reaching provisions would revolutionize the concept of the family in American life.
Unfortunately, almost no one besides the sponsors of the bill and the two or three senators arguing for the elimination or modification of the child-development section was on hand to hear the debate. Thus, when the time came to vote, most senators voted aye on the assumption that nothing significant was involved in the bill beyond a simple two-year extension of existing OEO programs. (This bill was later vetoed by President Nixon.)
This rush to enact legislation with little or no time allowed for pause, thought, or deliberation brings to mind another aspect of the Senate’s current way of conducting its affairs. I speak of the phenomenon of the amendment—printed or unprinted—offered from the floor with little or no notice. Amendments can range from purely technical corrections of the statutory language to the most far-reaching changes in the legislation under consideration.
There is usually little check on the scope of amendments that can be offered from the floor, and no opportunity for the relevant committees and their staffs to study them so that some measure of expert analysis might be brought to bear in arguing their merits for the benefit of the Senate as a whole—always assuming that other senators are on hand to hear the debate. Thus all too often, especially when the Senate is operating under unanimous-consent agreements severely limiting the time for debate, amendments are apt to be adopted or rejected on the basis of their emotional or political appeal. So it was with the amendments that in October 1972 added $4 billion, or more than 27 percent, to the cost of the Welfare/Social Security bill reported out by the Senate Finance Committee; and with the amendments that added, in one day’s time the previous June, almost $2 billion to the HEW/ Labor appropriations bill. Surely there is a better way to conduct the nation’s vital legislative business short of the highly restrictive rules that obtain in the House.
All of which brings me to certain observations about the Senate today.
At the root of most of the problems with the Senate is the enormous expansion of federal activities in recent years. A recent study by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York found that the workload of members of Congress had doubled every five years since 1935. Congress is simply trying to handle more business than it can manage. The results too often are waste, conflicts, inconsistencies, and superficiality.
Once upon a time Congress was in session only six or seven months a year. There is every reason to believe that during those months there was time and opportunity to think, to study, to argue, and to come to educated conclusions. As the volume of work increased, Congress was at first able to cope by extending the length of its sessions. But now, as a result of the explosion of federal activity resulting from the War on Poverty and other programs established in the 1960s, it is conceded that Congress is in session essentially on a year-round basis. And even with the increased length of congressional sessions, senators, as I have outlined above, have more legislation to consider in any given week than they can possibly digest.
One consequence of these increasing demands on senators’ time is that it can no longer be said of the Senate that it is a club, exclusive or otherwise. Not so many years ago, members were able to spend unhurried time together, to get to know one another and develop a sense of fraternity while working towards common goals in a highly civil environment. I do not mean to suggest that all of this has disappeared. Real friendships and a sense of belonging do develop. But the sense of community that must once have existed has certainly been dissipated by the preoccupations that tend to keep senators concentrating on their own separate concerns except as their work requires them to come together. It is difficult, in fact, to come to know members of the opposition party who do not happen to serve on one’s committees.
Whether the situation can be changed, only time and a differently constituted Congress will tell. But even assuming that the volume of business can be held at present levels, there remains the fact that each senator has only so many hours per day to devote to his job. A senator must be able not only to bring effective judgment to bear on his legislative duties, but also to maintain contact with his own constituency so as to find out what are the real problems people are faced with, and what are the real effects of the legislation he has helped enact.
All this, in turn, requires adequate staff and office space. Mundane as these considerations may seem, staffing and space can become important factors in determining just how good a job a senator is going to be able to do.
A new senator from a state like New York quickly learns that the Senate places great emphasis on the equal sovereign dignity of each individual state, which is a polite way of saying that when it comes to allocating rooms and funds, senators from the largest states invariably feel shortchanged. It should be kept in mind that the volume of work that must be handled by a senator’s office depends significantly on the size of his constituency. I speak of answering mail and addressing constituents’ problems (the so-called case work), which have been increasing at an enormous rate as the federal government has intruded more and more into its citizens’ lives.
Case work involves such things as assisting with immigration problems, chasing down Social Security checks, helping municipalities process their applications for this or that program, helping businesses thread their way through red tape—you name it. While the office workload for a senator from New York may not be sixty times as heavy as that for a senator from Alaska, it is significantly more than two or three times as heavy. Yet when I entered the Senate in 1971, the smallest number of rooms assigned to any senator was five and the largest (for California and New York), seven. As I started out with a staff of thirty-five and needed one room for myself, this created a degree of congestion. In like manner, my allowance for hiring staff was less than twice the allowance for the smallest state. It is of course true that each senator bears an equal legislative responsibility and needs equal facilities to keep track of legislative matters and to help him do his individual and committee work. But this doesn’t explain the disparity (or lack thereof) in space and staff allowances. In my own case, for example, staff members directly involved in legislative matters are less than one-fifth of the total.
Committee problems, time problems, space problems ... it would seem from my descriptions that a senator’s lot is not entirely a happy one. There are, of course, compensations, not the least of which is the pervasive air of civility and mutual respect with which the business of the Senate is conducted. But even the extraordinary civility and respect that are the hallmarks of the institution cannot overcome organizational and structural complexities that make a difficult job even more difficult.
I have often been asked whether I find my work in the Senate frustrating, and whether I have had any surprises. I have not found the work particularly frustrating, because I had few illusions as to what a very junior member of the minority party could accomplish on his own. Nor have I experienced any really major surprises, although I was not at all prepared for the enormous demands that would be made on my time, seven days a week, or for my loss of anonymity (the unsurprising result of six hundred or so thousand well-deployed dollars spent on television advertising during my campaign, reinforced by periodic meetings with the press).
Early on, I was struck by the number of extracurricular demands on a senator’s time, especially for one who lives as close to millions of constituents as does a senator from New York: invitations to speak which for one good reason or another cannot be declined; ceremonial visits; people with problems whom one must see oneself and cannot refer to staff; people in the federal government one needs to get to know; and so on. The day is splintered into all kinds of pieces, even before the business of legislative work begins.
One thing that in my innocence I had not anticipated was the intensely political atmosphere that prevails within the Senate, the great impact of purely political considerations on specific actions taken by individual senators. It may well be, of course, that mine was an unusual introduction to the institution, as at least a half-dozen of my colleagues were beginning to jockey for position in the presidential race within months of when I was sworn in. This had an inevitable influence on how they orchestrated their performance in the Senate. Also there was the fact that both houses of Congress were controlled by one party and the White House by the other; and as the presidential primaries approached, the political atmosphere palpably intensified.
But these unusual considerations notwithstanding, I soon learned that many senators tend to cast their votes with a view towards minimizing future political controversy or embarrassment. When a senator’s vote is clearly not critical to the fate of a bill, it is often deployed for future political convenience on the ground that it “wouldn’t count anyway.” Thus the Senate vote will often be quite lopsided on questions on which public opinion and the real opinion within the Senate are much more evenly divided.
This protecting of political flanks may seem harmless enough, but it vitiates what I believe should be an important educational function of the Senate. If citizens see that members of that body have voted overwhelmingly in favor of this or that piece of legislation, many who are not entirely certain of their own grounds for opposing it may decide that they have in fact been wrong, or backward, or insensitive. Yet if on such issues each member of the Senate had voted his true convictions, the breakdown might have been, say, fifty-five to forty-five instead of seventy to thirty. I can’t help but wonder to what extent this form of political expediency may affect the public’s perception of the issues.
There may be another reason why the opinion of the Senate—even when accurately recorded—is very often at odds with what I, at least, take to be the current mood of the American people. Without having researched the point, I suspect that the Senate incorporates a cultural lag of ten or fifteen years; that it is out of phase with the people by a period approximately equivalent to the average tenure of its membership.
A decade or so ago, the Senate was considered by some to be a backward, conservative body whose Republican-Southern Democrat coalition lay athwart progress and the will of the people. Others viewed it as a necessary brake on the rasher impulses of the House of Representatives. Today the situation is quite the reverse. The liberals are clearly in the majority in the Senate, and they do not reflect the growing public skepticism about federal initiatives; and it is the House that tends to blow the whistle on the excessive spending approved by the Senate.
If I am right about this cultural lag, there is a reason for it. A member of the House of Representatives is up for election every two years and thus needs to keep abreast of the views of his constituency. Also, because each member of the House represents a relatively compact area, his constituency tends to be more homogeneous than a senator’s, and there is less of an impulse to cater to the fringe groups within it. A member of the Senate, on the other hand, represents an entire state, incorporating a multitude of conflicting claims and interests. For better or for worse (I suspect the latter) a senator tends to pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the loudest voices—editorial writers, television commentators, pressure groups. Furthermore, once in office, he is there for at least six years. Thus a senator may be less sensitive than a representative to basic shifts in the underlying mood of the electorate as a whole.
I make this comment by way of observation and not of criticism. The Founding Fathers intended, after all, that the Senate be a balance wheel that would moderate the impulses of the moment. This function it in fact performs, even though at any given time those who believe that the current impulses are the correct ones may tend to impatience. The Senate, however, is not an institution to which the impatient should gravitate. It has its own pace; and, under the present rules, it takes a little maturing on the vine of seniority to be in a position to have a large impact on the institution.
It would be inaccurate, however, and unfair to suggest that the newest members are without the power to do more than register their 1 percent of the Senate’s total vote. The ancient tradition that freshman senators were to be seen and not heard has disappeared. Somewhat to my surprise, on my initial rounds I was encouraged by senior members to speak out when I felt I had learned the ropes and had something to say—which was not, I hasten to say, an invitation to be brash.
In point of fact, I soon learned that there are a number of ways in which even Number 99 can make his imprint on the law. If he is willing to do the necessary homework on the bills before his committee, if he attends meetings, if he presents arguments for or against specific provisions, he does have a chance to mold their final form. I have found that my own views will be given as careful a hearing as those of any other member of the committees on which I have served; again, the essential courtesy of the Senate comes to the fore. It is also possible, by submitting appropriate amendments, to shape legislation after it has reached the floor.
It will also occasionally be the lot of a senator to come across an idea of such universal appeal that it will whisk through the legislative process in record time; witness two bills I introduced involving certain benefits for prisoners of war and those missing in action in Indochina. Each immediately attracted more than sixty co-sponsors, and each has since been signed into law.
Finally, there are the educational opportunities that the Senate opens up even to the newest of senators. These had not occurred to me when I first decided to run for office, but it did not take long for me to appreciate the skill with which some of the more liberal members were utilizing their office to reach the public. They would schedule time on the Senate floor, often in tandem, to deliver themselves of learned or impassioned speeches to an empty chamber. Their wisdom might be wasted on the Senate air, but they were able to alert the press that Senator So-and-So would deliver remarks on such-and-such a topic at a particular time. Copies of the speech would be distributed, and the gist of the senator’s argument and the points he wished to make would become part of the nation’s informational bloodstream. I also noticed that conservative-minded senators were generally less alert to the possibilities presented by this exercise.
Whether utilized or not, the opportunity does exist for a senator to present his views on the important issues with some reasonable assurance that they will not be totally lost. Only by exploiting such opportunities for public education can he expect to help the electorate become more adequately informed on the basic issues. This in turn bears on the legislative process, because, in the last analysis, public opinion dictates the outside limits of the options available to Congress. By joining in the public debate and articulating the arguments in support of his own positions, a new senator—even one labeled “Conservative-Republican” (my official designation, since I was elected on the Conservative Party ticket but was accepted by the Republican caucus)—can contribute to the educational process that ultimately finds its reflection in national policy.
These, then, are the random impressions of the United States Senate by one of its newest members: It is a deliberative body in which there is too little time to deliberate. It is a place where a member is entitled to free haircuts (although he is expected to tip the barber one dollar) in a barber shop that keeps a shaving mug with his name on it. It is a place where on each desk there is a little inkwell, a wooden pen with a steel nib, and a glass bottle filled with sand with which to blot one’s writing, and where on one side of the presiding officer’s desk is a spittoon and on the other a box of snuff.
Yet it is also a place where the rules of civility are still observed, and the rights and independence of each individual still respected. It is a place where many of the major decisions affecting the shape of our times are made; a place where even the least of its members may have a hand in making them.
It is, all in all, a good place to be.
The one fundamental change that has occurred in the Senate since my departure more than three decades ago is the disappearance of the pervasive civility that so impressed me when I arrived there. Otherwise, the treadmill merely runs faster. Staffs have grown, but not in pace with the growth of the government agencies Congress is supposed to oversee. Major pieces of legislation now weigh in at wrist-snapping lengths of 500, 800, or even the 2,700 pages of Obamacare, and no senator will have read the entire document or the corresponding committee report before voting on it. Meanwhile, the recent tightening of campaign-finance screws has compelled senators to devote even more of their evenings and weekends to the task of raising money.
