The End of the Anonymous Senate Hold?
PATTERICO
By DRJ
Senator Claire McCaskill says she has the votes to end the anonymous Senate hold:
“Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said Saturday that she has secured enough votes to end the Senate’s longstanding practice of allowing the use of anonymous holds to block nominations.
In an announcement on Twitter, McCaskill said Sens. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) had agreed to support the effort, giving her the 67 senators necessary to change Senate rules. “First battle won!” McCaskill wrote. “Now gotta get a vote.”
A letter from McCaskill calling for an end to the practice has 66 signatures, according to spokeswoman Laura Myron, including nine Republicans, with only Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) opposed on the Democratic side. The letter is addressed to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who has agreed to support the move if McCaskill could muster the votes.
“He strongly supports Senator McCaskill’s efforts and will work with her to schedule a vote as quickly as possible,” said Reid spokesman Jim Manley.”
The rule change reportedly applies only to anonymous holds — which are anonymous only in the sense they are not public, but the Senator placing the hold must notify his or her Party’s leaders for the hold to take effect. The change would not impact a Senator’s ability to place a public hold on legislation.
There is precedent for this change. The Senate eliminated the anonymous hold in 1997 but it was soon abandoned:
“Oddly, proponents of “secret holds” believe they’re not a minor quirk of Senate procedure, but actually an important part of what keeps the Senate functioning, Ritchie told me. Despite this, the practice of honoring secret holds has no basis in law. It has no basis in Senate rules. And it has no basis in Senate precedents — a byzantine collection of many hundreds of rules developed over time by lawmakers, collected and codified by the Senate parliamentarian.
In fact, the practice was briefly banished in 1997.
Then-Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) and then-Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) agreed that for the 106th Congress, anyone wishing to hold a bill had to tell the bill’s sponsor and the chair of the appropriate committee. But the ban on anonymity didn’t last.
“They needed it,” Ritchie said. “What they found, I think, was that if you force people to identify themselves, they become less cooperative.” In other words: if the world’s going to know I’m stopping this bill, I’m not going to be subtle about it and tell you beforehand. I’ll wait until it’s on the floor, and waste your time.
Why is that so? One has to understand the practice of the Senate, Ritchie explained.
In the House, bills are considered only after strict limits are set on the legislation, including the length of debating time and the number of amendments which can be added. “The Senate doesn’t have anything like that,” Ritchie said.
Votes can be put off indefinitely; debates could go on forever. That’s a good flexibility for a deliberative body to have — but it makes it hard to get stuff done.”
Rules changes that ultimately delay more federal laws may be a good thing, especially since the U.S. government’s “regulatory budget” is growing even faster than the explosive federal budget. |
