A Politico story published on Wednesday puts forward the notion that “the real post-Trump GOP divide” is between House and Senate Republicans.
“Technically they belong to the same party,” the story says. “But on a growing number of issues, House and Senate Republicans might as well live on different political planets.”
There is truth to all that, though even beyond the GOP’s inter-chamber divisions, several events over the past year have emphasized on a broad scale just how divergent the House and Senate are in their operations, as well as how the rules and structures of each chamber encourage very different kinds of political behavior.
As an example, to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic, the House approved proxy voting in May 2020, allowing members to take votes while absent. It was a monumental change, one that “attempts to change both of the fundamental features of how any legislative body operates,” as Heritage Foundation scholars Thomas Jipping and John Malcolm wrote shortly after the new rule passed.
The Constitution says that “a majority of each [chamber] shall constitute a quorum to do business,” but under the change, the House could do business with as few as 20 members present.
To the point, with a simple majority of only Democratic votes, the House functionally abolished the Constitution’s quorum rule without one Republican supporting it, and Republicans had no way to stop it from happening.
A remote voting proposal had much less of a chance over in the Senate, even though there was a level of bipartisan support for it early on in the pandemic. The prima facie explanation for this is a partisan one: Republicans had the majority in the last Congress, and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans were against it. “We will deal with the social distancing issue without fundamentally changing Senate rules,” McConnell said.
Yet, unlike the House, there are other institutional differences within the Senate that make it much harder for something like a proxy voting scheme to succeed without broad bipartisan support, even with a Democratic leader.
Current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office told the New York Times in January of this year that absentee voting is “a serious issue” and that it is worth “looking into.” As Jipping explained to me in an interview on Wednesday, a proxy voting scheme would require a rules change, and under Senate rules, ending debate on a rules change requires a two-thirds majority. That would require a lot of Republicans in the current 50-50 Senate. Given the caucus’s general aversion to institutional change, it’s probably too long a shot, though as Jipping said, “It depends [on] if the Senate, Schumer wants to follow the rules.”
Schumer could theoretically employ the nuclear option to end debate, absent the requisite Republican support. But centrist Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are on record resisting quite firmly more of that kind of institutional decay, and Schumer couldn’t afford to lose their votes.
These are constraints that House Democrats do not have.
Speaking of Manchin and Sinema, as senators, the two of them have to represent entire states, both of which, as it happens, have a lot of Republican voters. To chart another source of divergence between the chambers, representatives are accountable to much smaller constituencies which can be much more distinctly partisan than entire states, encouraging more partisan outcomes.
This dynamic might help explain, at least in part, why there was such a divergence between Republicans in the Senate and Republicans in the House at the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress. Eight Republican senators, or about %16 of those voting, objected to one or both of the certifications of Arizona and Pennsylvania. In the House, 139 representatives, or 68% of those voting, did so.
The constituency considerations don’t perfectly explain this divergence. Many of the Senate Republicans who did not object serve very red states that went for former President Donald Trump and were very friendly with Trump themselves: Sens. Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and Rand Paul are three. Perhaps the Senate develops more principled statesman, though all things considered (e.g., the Democrats’ performance during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings), I’m not so confident in that generalization.
Whatever the ultimate truth may be, this from the Politico story is particularly insightful on this point:
“That’s just not conducive to big problem solving,” he said of rowdy House conference meetings. “So you’re driven more to populism, quite honestly.”
That sounds about right.
Despite the House-Senate differences, the Senate itself has become less deliberative, especially over the last several congresses, and its rules and deference to its traditions are the only things preventing Congress from becoming a body of two simple-majoritarian chambers. That’s what liberal presentists would wish for if they knew a genie.
“The only question before was, ‘Should we change Senate rules?'” Jipping told me. “And today it’s, ‘Can we get what we want without changing Senate rules?'”
That, regrettably, sounds about right, too.
