Senators have centered on a favorite word to describe the upper chamber of the 114th Congress: rusty.
And it has both parties pleased.
“This is different. We’re just working our way through it. We’re rusty,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, told the Washington Examiner earlier this week.
The three-week, stop-start struggle that was the Keystone XL Pipeline Act is a testament to the Senate’s new GOP management. Despite the exhaustion that was apparent as senators prepared to leave Washington after passing the bill Thursday afternoon by a 62-36 vote, Republicans and Democrats alike were pleased with the results.
“Except for one horrible Thursday, it was a good process,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told reporters in the Capitol. “There’s a feeling that we should entertain a lot of different ideas. That’s what the majority leader promised, and I hope we stand by that.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a self-proclaimed student and admirer of the upper chamber, vowed to restore an open amendment process that served as a contrast to how his predecessor, now-Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., ran the chamber.
Senators acknowledged they spent a lot of time on the Keystone XL bill. The next one on the docket concerns Department of Homeland Security spending, which could prove a magnet for amendments far surpassing the more than 200 filed on the pipeline legislation.
Speaking about whether the DHS bill would prove a repeat of Keystone XL, Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said, “Oh, you know — by the time we’re done, more than 40-plus amendments, you know, and the timeline. You know, pretty hard to say. Obviously this is a lot of amendments. But I do think it’s a good sign that we’re getting back to an open amendment process and regular order. So we’ll have to see.”
Republicans boasted that in just a few weeks, the Senate had considered more amendments than it did in all of 2014, when the Democratic-led body voted on 14. Senators voted on 41 amendments during the Keystone XL debate.
“I think what this demonstrates is that under the leadership of Senator McConnell, you are seeing a process that is more deliberative, is more open and allows for an exchange of ideas,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski said, later adding, “All of a sudden, you’re looking around the floor and you’re realizing there may be someone you can work with.”
At times, the process was tense. Durbin’s allusion to that “horrible Thursday” is illustrative of the growing pains for a Senate that has had scant chance to work the full deliberate process the past few years.
Democrats on Jan. 22 said Republicans were reneging on McConnell’s open-amendment pledge when the Kentucky Republican began putting up amendments to “table,” rather than vote on whether to approve them.
But Republicans said it was a procedural option during that midnight session. They said Democrats had refused to agree on a shorter list of amendments, as is customary so senators wouldn’t need to consider every amendment that had been filed.
That muddied the waters for a time. A handful of Democrats who eventually voted to pass the bill blocked a procedural move Monday to end debate and proceed to a final vote, extending debate even longer.
“Would this vote have been different if the process had been different on Thursday?” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., said of the Monday vote. “Yeah. This vote would have been different had the process been different.”
Those bumps in the road are to be expected, lawmakers said. After Keystone XL, senators from both sides of the aisle think the rusty upper chamber is now well-oiled.
“Started good. Got bad. Ended up better,” Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., told the Examiner.
Added West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin: “At least we’re voting.”
