And today I'm just going to try to, in a nutshell, explain some of the differences from the Senate's perspective and then how we relate to the rest of the federal government. To understand the U.S. Senate, you have to go back to 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, which came to an impasse just a bit before the Constitutional Convention.
And so, in the U.S. Senate, you that this time, was they were getting ready for the 4th of July, they couldn't decide on representation in Congress because the large states said that representation should be by population, and the small states said they wouldn't join any union in which they weren't equal. So all they...
recessed for the Fourth of July weekend, a committee met to try to figure out how to get over this problem, and they did what politicians tend to do. They split the difference. They said, okay, the House of Representatives will be apportioned by population, and the Senate will be, all states will be equal.
Now, this is history 101, political science 101, you all know that. But the question is, what are the consequences of that great compromise? Well, take the state of California. Is anyone here from California? Great.
36.5 million people in California. You have 53 representatives, including the Speaker of the House. That is the largest delegation that has ever represented any state in Congress. Anyone here from Wyoming?
Yes. You have about as many antelope as they have people, right? You can drive for hours across Wyoming, a beautiful state, and not see another human being for a long stretch along the way.
There's about a half million people. Now, admit it. of your population lives in Arizona and claims Wyoming for tax purposes. Wyoming has a half million people. That's even less than the average number of people who are in a congressional delegation in California.
It's about 690,000. in a congressional delegation in most of the states. But the Constitution says you have to have at least one representative. So you have 53 to 1, California versus Wyoming. In the United States Senate, California has two senators, and Wyoming has two senators.
And that's the reason why the U.S. Senate can never be a majoritarian body. For instance, here's another little piece. Those of you who come from the following states, California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina, that's ten states.
You represent half of the population of the United States. You have 20 senators. All the rest of you, you represent the other 40 states. You have 80 senators. So we are not a majoritarian body.
We just can't be. Now the Constitution requires us to do certain things by super force. It requires us to overturn a presidential veto by two-thirds vote, to ratify a treaty by a two-thirds vote, or to convict somebody that the House has impeached by a simple majority.
We have to convict them by a two-thirds vote. And we also, under the Constitution, can set our own rules. That's a little phrase in the Constitution that says each House can set their own rules. And so we have evolved differently. In the House, which is a big body, has always been a bigger body than the Senate, the rules have evolved to allow the majority to get its way.
As long as the majority... sticks together, they can do whatever they want. They don't have to talk to the minority. They can zoom through.
They can steamroller anything through because, let's face it, there's no other way that a large body like that could operate unless you had majority rule. And, of course, they are based on, you know, population, majority of the population. It's not that way in the U.S.
Senate. Because of our peculiarities, because of the fact that we're not a majoritarian body, we have a rule that says... you need 60 votes to cut off debate. And these days, and I say in this Congress in particular, you need 60 votes to do anything, anything of any consequence.
It's either 60 or everybody. We do actually, in fact, an enormous amount of business by unanimous consent. Unanimous consent used to be just for a little housekeeping thing. I ask unanimous consent that my remarks be edited into the record as if I'd spoken the entire speech without objection, so ordered. And that's a nice...
gesture so that you don't have to hear somebody speak for a few hours when they can just hand it in. But you can sit in the Senate chamber and hear the majority leader say, I ask unanimous consent that H.R. 145 be enacted without objection. So what happened?
That was a bill that just passed, an entire bill. There was no debate at all on this. Why?
Because in the committee they worked out all the differences between the parties. The Republicans and Democrats both felt comfortable with it. They didn't have any problems.
They weren't going to debate it on the floor, and they could do it by unanimous consent, and they could leave on Friday to go back to their home states and all the rest of it. We do a huge amount of business by unanimous consent. If you don't do it by unanimous consent, then you've got to argue, debate, and you've got to get 60 senators on board.
Now, unanimous consent is wonderful because unanimous means unanimous. And that means that every single member of the U.S. U.S. Senate can stop the works just by saying, I object, as a lot of them have been doing in this particular Congress.
But that empowers everybody. The moment you walk in the door in the Senate as a brand new green senator from the minority party. or the majority party, you are a powerful person because you can object to a unanimous consent agreement. In the House, unanimous consent agreements are mostly for routine business, not for big controversial issues.
But in the House, they have a rules committee that decides when a bill comes onto the floor how it will be debated and how many amendments will happen. We have a rules committee on the Senate side that decides who gets what parking space and what office space. Working space and office spaces are really powerful tools along the way. You can cut a lot of deals under both of those, but it has nothing to do with the floor proceedings.
And so the substitute for what happens in the House Rules Committee in defining debate, we do by unanimous consent on the Senate side. And so that has empowered senators. Every senator, when they come in, is as powerful as, in many ways, when they go out.
They have an enormous amount of power. The minority party has an enormous amount of power. The minority party must be...
engaged in everything that goes on. You can't steamroller over the minority party in the Senate the way you can in the House, which is always frustrating to leaders of the House who have done their work and gotten bills passed and up to the Senate only to see compromises made that weren't made in the House and delay happening. And so the leaders, whether it's Republicans or Democrats, will complain to their counterparts on the Senate side about how come you're not holding up your end of the steel. And the leaders of the Senate have always got to remind the leaders of the House that our rules are different.
I was at a gathering like this in Kentucky where Senator Wendell Ford was sitting at the podium. He was a former whip of the Senate. And I was pointing out that Senator Bill Frist, the Republican leader of the Senate, was having a lot of trouble with Speaker Hastert because the House was doing a lot and the Senate wasn't. And Senator Frist had to explain that we were a different body.
And I turned to Senator Ford and I said, I guess from time to time when you were in a leadership position, position, you had to do the same with your House counterparts. And he looked up and he said, yes, about twice a day. So this is not a particular party issue.
It is a majority, minority, House and Senate issue that goes on. So this is this peculiar institution of the United States Senate that makes life difficult for presidents of the United States, for speakers of the House, and for majority leaders of the Senate in general. it is an important part of what our government is about because the framers of the Constitution thought that one body was not enough. Under the Articles of Confederation, we had a single-body legislature. They felt that if you were going to increase the powers of the central government, you had to make those powers more diffuse, and that in a legislative body, you needed a second house for second thoughts.
Everybody in the House is going to run for re-election if they're not retiring in this time. Everybody, speaker on through. And next...
Next January, everybody will take the oath all over again, and they will adopt new rules to suit their purposes. In the Senate, only one-third of the U.S. senators are up for this election, and we will not readopt our rules. We are a continuing body.
The sense is that public opinion can shift very dramatically. You might be riled up about gas prices right now, or you might be riled up about the war, or you might be riled up about something. And when you get riled up, the first thing you want to do is throw the rascals out and bring in new people to take over. And you can have large shifts in the membership in the House of Representatives.
The sense was that the Senate should be a more stable process, a necessary fence, as James Madison called it, against the frenzies of public opinion so that there would be more stability. Now the other third of the Senate is going to have to run in two years, and they know if you were riled up about that issue now, you might be riled up about it then, and so they're going to listen to what the election results were. But we don't change quite as drastically. drastically on the Senate side. In terms of dealing with the other branches, particularly with the Presidents, everything that the Congress produces, every bill, every appropriation, both bodies have to sign off on.
It has to be exactly the same. The Senate, however, has a unique role, and that is we have the role of advise and consent. And on issues of nominations and treaties, the Senate must vote. And this is not something that we share with the House of Representatives.
So that means that cabinet nominations, judicial nominations, all of these are vetted by the committees of the Congress and that of the Senate. And it gives those committees a great authority over those agencies or those courts or whatever in the sense of who they make a decision as to who goes on to them. And with cabinet people, other executive branch people, you also have to come back to hat in hand to get your budget.
taken care of. So you're going to see those people regularly. Those same committees are going to conduct oversight over those agencies. They're going to be intimately involved in the work that those cabinet departments are dealing with. This is something that members of parliaments around the world are a little bit envious of.
In parliaments, the executive and legislative branch are together. The members of the cabinet sit in the House of Commons. The prime minister is a member of parliament. Which is great and actually provides for a lot of unity and action and all the rest of it, but the committees of most parliaments are unable to call cabinet secretaries to testify.
They have question time in the chamber, but you don't have a situation in which committees can interrogate the cabinet secretaries. And whenever I have delegations from other countries, they're always impressed by that particular power. The chairman and the ranking members... and the regular members of the committees are very much involved in whatever that issue is, in shaping how those policies are.
We talk a lot about earmarks these days. A lot of that has to do with we want to make the decisions as to where the money is spent, not necessarily how the departments do it. But in the days before there were earmarks, you can be sure that members of those committees were calling up the cabinet secretaries and the department heads and saying, I've got a bridge that I want in your budget the next time around. And they were there. Actually, the current earmark process is more transparent than it used to be.
And it will be very interesting to see if they reform it, if it will go back to the way it was before. The Senate is a fascinating place to watch, and for me as a historian it's been so interesting to watch it evolve in the period that I've been there. I know one of the... the comments I'm sure that you all have about the institution is it's much more partisan now than it used to be.
And that's not our fault. That's actually your fault. Because you elected these people.
And that's something that we don't do. When I first came to the U.S. Senate in the 1970s, the two parties were both internally divided.
The Democrats were essentially a liberal party, but they had a lot of southern conservatives who happened to be the chairman of all the most important committees. The Republican Party was split practically down the middle between its moderate Eisenhower-Rockefeller wing and its conservative Barry Goldwater wing. Moderate Republicans used to win elections in the Republican Conference because there were more of them than conservatives, than the Jesse Helms conservatives.
Today, the two parties are... remarkably internally cohesive. That means there's almost no middle left. There's little room to negotiate. And you remember that in the beginning I said the Senate needs 60 votes to get anything done.
Well, it's been a long time since any party has had 60 members, and that means you've always got to be able to find at least a couple of members from the other party to join in if you have any hope of producing any kind of major legislation. You've got to negotiate constantly in good faith. with members of the other party, and it's harder and harder for the leaders of the two parties to find that kind of middle ground. The people who have been really successful in the last few decades have been those people who are firmly rooted in one side or the other, who recognize somebody across the aisle who, even though they vote against them 99% of the time, there's that one issue that they agree on. And so you get, for instance, Ted Kennedy has a bill on jobs with Dan Quayle.
or a bill on children's health with Orrin Hatch, and they can bring their both sides together. Hillary Clinton's First Amendment that she got enacted into law was co-sponsored by Lindsey Graham, who was one of her husband's impeachment managers when he was in the House of Representatives. Barack Obama had a reform bill up with Senator Tom Coburn, the most conservative member of the current U.S. Senate.
There's McCain-Feingold. You know, that's when... happens is when you can reach across party lines, you can get something done in the Senate.
If you try to do it just by party agenda, the probability is you're going to end up with nothing. And we have a lot of nothing, unfortunately, that's happened in the last couple of Congresses because the parties are so polarized. And that's been one of the biggest changes, and it reflects the population shift.
So because we're always wondering how each Each election will change the institution. The probability is it's going to be a very different institution after this next election, one way or the other. But that is something that is a card that is dealt to us rather than one that the leaders... or the Congress have any control over.
Just to close at this point, to give Fred some time on this program, a deference to the other house. We refer to each other as the other body, not the upper house and the lower house. People ask me what's the best book to read about the U.S. Senate, and there are lots of books I can recommend, but if you have only one to read, I highly recommend Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, his third volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. as Senate Majority Leader.
The only complaint I've ever heard about the book is it's uncomfortable to read in bed because it's so big. But it actually reads very fast. It's like a novel.
It starts with a 100-page essay on the history of the Senate. And people ask me, this is a biography of Lyndon Johnson. Why has he got this 100-page essay on the history of the Senate? I said, no, this is a St. George and the Dragon story. And he had to introduce the dragon first.
He had to introduce this institution that was a fire-breathing institution which had swallowed alive several of its previous majority leaders. And he had to show how Lyndon Johnson tamed it. And much of what we do today is a direct result to some of the things that Johnson started while he was majority leader.
If you want to understand that institution, I recommend it. Now unfortunately, majority leaders today would love to be Lyndon Johnson, but that's probably not going to happen again. Lyndon Johnson was unique.
The real model for majority leaders is Mike Mansfield, his successor, who believed that all senators were equal, everyone needed to pull their weight, and that the majority leader is not the master of ceremonies at a three-ring circus. Which I think all of them, regardless of party, would agree is probably the only way the Senate can really operate. Thank you.