United States Senate

V

The Life of a Senator

Senators generally work very long hours. Most arrive at their offices early in the morning to meet with their staff and plan the day’s work. Committee meetings, floor votes, and informal meetings with other senators fill the day. Senators must also make time to give interviews to the press, handle pressing citizen complaints, and plan legislative strategies with their colleagues. On top of this full schedule, senators try to make time to study complex policy questions.

To help them in lawmaking and in dealing with citizens of their states, senators are provided with staff aides and funds according to the population of their state. Some senators have more than 70 people on their staff, but the average senate office has about 35 aides. Some of these workers assist in drafting legislation in complex areas, such as military weapons, transportation planning, and agriculture. Senators rely on their most trusted assistants to confer with other members of the Senate about pending legislation. Senate staff also work on large projects, such as securing federal grants to fund roads and schools in their state.

Some Senate staff spend all their time on constituency service, solving problems that individual citizens have with government agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Veterans Administration. Most senators maintain offices in several major cities in their state. These offices help senators keep in touch with voters and make it easier for their staff to work on citizens’ problems. Many senators choose to assign as many as one-third of their staff to these offices.

In 2001 senators were paid an annual base salary of $145,100. They also receive reimbursement for travel and housing expenses.

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VI

History of the Senate

A

Early Years

The Senate today bears little resemblance to the institution created in 1789. When it met for the first three Congressional sessions in New York City and Philadelphia, the Senate met behind closed doors. The House of Representatives held public proceedings, leading to widespread controversy over the Senate’s secrecy. Under pressure from the state legislatures, which appointed all Senate members, the Senate opened its doors to the public in 1795. (Since 1795, the chamber has on very rare occasions held secret sessions to discuss national security policy and other sensitive subjects.)

During these early sessions, senators debated politely and avoided personal attacks. The quiet tone of the Senate stood as a model of civility compared to early House sessions, where members often traded insults and shouted at one another. Although Senators showed more tact than their counterparts in the House, both chambers developed party splits that dominated voting and debates on nearly all issues. By the early 1790s the Federalist Party, which advocated close ties with Britain, dominated the House and the Senate. The Democratic-Republican Party, which supported states’ rights and opposed close relations with Britain, offered spirited opposition and won control of Congress in the elections of 1800.

In the Senate’s first 20 years it assumed only modest responsibilities. The chamber saw itself as an advisory panel for the president, responsible for revising legislation drafted in the House. From 1789 to 1809, almost all laws originated in the House. The Senate created ad hoc committees—temporary, single-issue committees—to consider House proposals. The vice president of the United States, who had few other responsibilities, usually presided over the Senate. Both the House and the Senate allowed the White House to guide the legislative agenda until James Madison succeeded Thomas Jefferson as president in 1809.

Madison, unlike Jefferson, could not bend Congress to his will through party discipline. The House continued to draft most pieces of legislation and send them on to the Senate for revision. Both chambers often snubbed Madison’s attempts to lead the process. During Madison’s presidency the Senate broke with the earlier two decades of near-automatic acceptance of White House appointments. The Senate rejected many of the president’s cabinet nominees and forced him to accept their choices for the positions. The Senate also challenged Madison’s lead in foreign policy. The Senate took center stage, for example, in the debate over policy toward Britain in the years prior to the War of 1812.

The Senate’s growing workload prompted the chamber to replace the system of ad hoc committees with 12 standing legislative committees in 1816. Over the next three decades the Senate eclipsed the House as the nation’s leading legislative body. In the 1830s the Senate attracted some of the most articulate speakers in the country, including three men known as “the great triumvirate”: John Calhoun of South Carolina, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. These leaders elevated Senate debates to a level of eloquence never heard before in Congress. Crowds packed the Senate gallery to see the debates over slavery, states’ rights, and agricultural policy, which historians still regard as some of the finest moments in Senate history.

B

Civil War and Reconstruction

By the 1850s debates over slavery carved deep rifts between the Senate’s dominant parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. Southern Democrats bitterly fought an alliance of Republicans and antislavery Democrats. The issue destroyed the chamber’s civil tone. In the 1850s and early 1860s floor discussions often degenerated into shouting matches, and many members brought guns to the chamber. During a tense debate in 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi drew a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. An even more violent episode erupted in 1856 when Representative Preston Smith Brooks of South Carolina became enraged over a speech by abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Two days later Brooks entered the Senate chamber, cornered Sumner, and repeatedly beat him over the head with a cane.

In 1860 and 1861 long-standing disputes over economic policy, slavery, and states’ rights led 11 Southern states to secede from the United States. The secessionist Southern states formed the Confederate States of America, sparking the Civil War (1861-1865). The Confederate states withdrew their representatives from Washington, D.C., leaving the House and the Senate in the hands of antislavery forces. Although Congress agreed with President Abraham Lincoln that the Southern secession should be met with force, lawmakers resented the president’s broad seizure of power. Lincoln asserted sweeping authority, including the right to draft soldiers, suspend civil liberties, and raise funds for the war. The Senate and the House created the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to act as a check on Lincoln, but the committee failed to rein in the president. The Senate and the House cooperated with the White House on many wartime measures, but Lincoln took the lead in most matters.

The conclusion of the war in 1865 left many issues related to slavery unresolved. Reconstruction—the process of incorporating the rebel states back into the United States—sparked bitter congressional disputes. Lincoln and Congress proposed different plans for Reconstruction. The struggle between Congress and the White House intensified after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln in 1865. Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean who favored moderate Reconstruction policies, assumed the presidency.

Johnson fought with Congress over the terms of reincorporating the Southern states. Congress passed a law restricting the president’s power to remove appointed officials, overriding Johnson’s veto of the measure. In one of the most dramatic episodes in Senate history, Johnson faced impeachment in 1868 under charges that he had ignored the new limit on his power to remove appointees. Johnson prevailed in the Senate by a single vote. The proceedings established an important principle that a president could not be removed from office simply over disagreements with Congress.

Eventually Congress passed many Reconstruction laws, including legislation to implement the voting rights for African Americans granted by the 15th Amendment. The extension of the vote led to the 1870 election of Hiram Revels, a Republican clergyman and teacher from Mississippi, who became the first African American to win a Senate seat. But after the collapse of Reconstruction in 1876 many Southern states instituted poll taxes (taxes levied on people who vote), literacy tests, and other rules that effectively prevented African Americans from voting. The restrictions rolled back the gains that African Americans had made in Congress, preventing African American candidates from winning election to the Senate until 1966, when Edward Brooke won election from Massachusetts.

The end of Reconstruction in 1877 ushered in a system of strong party control of the Senate. Party leaders such as Republican Roscoe Conkling of New York used party meetings known as caucuses to rally party support before important votes on legislation. Party power weakened in the 1880s, but in the 1890s Republicans led by William Allison of Iowa reestablished party control of Senate committee appointments and the chamber’s legislative agenda. Under the renewed system of party leadership, most important debates occurred behind closed doors in party caucuses rather than in Senate committees or on the floor of the chamber. The strong hand of the parties, combined with the increasingly common use of filibusters, led to widespread public criticism of the Senate.

C

The Progressive Era

The political debates of the Progressive Era, which lasted roughly from the 1890s until the 1920s, focused on the need to democratize all levels of the political system and to restrict the influence of large businesses in American society. Progressive reformers attacked the party system that controlled the Senate, claiming that it was prone to manipulation by corporate interests.

The drive for progressive reforms also fed pressure to change the rules for selecting senators. State legislatures, which held the power to choose senators, frequently deadlocked on voting to select a Senate delegation, especially when the two chambers of a legislature were controlled by different parties. In many cases powerful business interests controlled the selection of senators, sometimes bribing legislators to vote for a particular candidate. By 1909, 33 state legislatures had urged Congress to draw up a constitutional amendment for direct election of senators, and 29 states had devised procedures whereby citizens could vote their preference of senatorial candidates (the vote was not binding on the legislature). The House of Representatives passed numerous resolutions calling for the Senate to subject its members to direct election, but the Senate rebuffed these efforts. The Senate relented only after the states threatened to call a constitutional convention, and it voted for the 17th Amendment in 1912. The amendment, which transferred senatorial selection from the legislatures of each state to “the people thereof,” passed the House and was ratified by the states in 1913.

The Senate embraced another important reform in 1917 when it adopted the first cloture rule, which allowed the chamber to end filibusters by a two-thirds vote of present members. The Senate has modified the rule several times since then, and it now takes three-fifths of all Senate members to invoke cloture.

The Democrats won both the White House and Congress in 1912. Congress followed the lead of President Woodrow Wilson in banking reform, military mobilization for World War I (1914-1918), and reducing the tariff. Largely to deal with presidential legislative proposals, Senate Democrats chose the first majority floor leader in 1913—John Worth Kern of Indiana. Cooperation with Congress faltered after the war, and the Senate rejected American membership in the League of Nations, the central goal of Wilson’s postwar foreign policy.

Wilson was followed in the White House by Republicans Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, presidents who generally allowed Congress to take the lead in drafting legislation. The Republicans held majorities in the Senate from 1921 to 1933, but the chamber passed little significant legislation in this period because some Republicans tended to support Democrats in floor votes, resulting in deadlock. Despite the devastating stock market crash of 1929 and the unemployment that followed, neither Congress nor President Hoover took decisive steps to resolve the crisis in the early 1930s.

D

The Great Depression and the New Deal

Public discontent over America’s declining economy led to a major political transformation in 1932. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency easily, and voters also gave the Democrats control of both houses of Congress. Senate leaders persuaded their colleagues to pass much of the New Deal, Roosevelt’s broad agenda of government intervention in the economy. However, Roosevelt’s support in Congress plummeted in 1937 when he tried to win control of the Supreme Court by expanding it and appointing allies to the new positions. Both the House and the Senate rejected the so-called court-packing plan. Roosevelt maintained much of his influence in Congress despite the setback. The New Deal led to an unprecedented increase in the government’s role in the economy and a corresponding increase in responsibility for the Senate.

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