Inside Leadership

The rules of the Senate present unique advantages for individual senators and for cohesive Senate minorities. Unanimous consent requires that all senators agree on critical motions like the motion to proceed to consideration of a bill; a single senator can stop the consideration of a bill through a simple objection from the floor. It provides the minority leader with a potent tool to slow the legislative process and force the majority to compromise. Empowering the minority leader to use this power on the behalf of the Republican Conference allows individual Republican senators to avoid blame for obstructing popular legislation.

Unanimous consent is the foundation of the filibuster. A filibuster is an attempt to modify or kill legislation on the floor by refusing to end debate and allow a vote. Rule XXII of the Senate allows the body to invoke cloture ending debate and, eventually forcing a vote. However cloture requires a supermajority (60 members) in the Senate and is only likely when there is broad support for the underlying legislation. As long as a significant minority can withhold 41 votes from the cloture motion, debate continues.²

The Senate Republican leadership has used the filibuster to great effect on legislation where their Conference is fairly united in opposition (not unlike the Democrats when they have been in the minority).³

The Senate rules provide potent weapons for a cohesive minority. The math is simple: Up to eight Republicans can defect on any cloture vote (assuming Democratic unanimity) and the filibuster will remain in force.⁴

Democrats, who would like to challenge the president and members of his party with uncomfortable position-establishing votes, especially votes on the Iraq War and war strategy, have mostly been frustrated. In the hands of the Republican leadership the filibuster has proven an effective method for protecting Senate Republicans and the president's policy positions, especially regarding Iraq War policy.

Adding to the problems faced by Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV) is the proliferation of presidential candidates on the Democratic side of the Senate. Four of the eight Democratic presidential candidates are sitting members of the Senate (Joseph Biden [DE], Hillary Clinton [NY], Christopher Dodd [CT], and Barack Obama [IL]). This circumstance poses tactical challenges for Reid, and his whip, Richard Durbin (IL). With many Senators out campaigning, holding votes poses a challenge; given their slim majority, Reid and Durbin must schedule votes to accommodate this raft of far-flung presidential aspirants. The aspirants may seek to use the Senate floor as a forum for position-taking in the presidential race; each may have distinct preferences for the legislative issues that the Senate will consider, a desire to sponsor amendments that will help their cause—perhaps undermining their opponents—and the proclivity to use amendments in an attempt to get candidates on “the record.” Reid and Durbin must negotiate this treacherous terrain without appearing to favor one or another of the candidates.⁵

This Senate is a study in the steady ideological polarization of congressional politics in recent decades. This Senate is not only closely divided numerically, but is also ideologically divided. Using nominate scores we contrast the Senate at four time points: 1) the 95^th Congress (1977–1978), Democratic majority, Democratic president; 2) the 100^th Congress (1987–1988), Democratic majority, Republican president; 3) the 104^th Congress (1993–1994), Republican majority, Democratic president, and; 4) the 109^th Congress (2005–2006), Republican majority, Republican president. Figure 1 illustrates the ideological distribution of members of the Senate during these four Congresses. We also indicate the president's ideological position for each of these periods.

These graphs indicate the polarization of the Senate into two relatively homogeneous ideological partisan camps. During the 95^th Congress the Senate was characterized by considerable overlap between the two Senate parties; the most conservative Democrats were located at about the median position of the Republican Conference, and the most liberal Republicans at the center of the Democratic distribution. By the 100^th Congress, the Senate parties were drifting apart, though a number of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans occupied the center of the ideological spectrum, providing prospects for bipartisan compromise. By the 104^th Congress, the extent of party polarization becomes apparent; just a handful of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans populated the political center.⁶

By the 109^th Congress, the two Senate parties were mirror images of each other with a Democratic median ideology of −.43 and a Republican median of .46; the inter-party differential is .89, a high-water mark for this period.⁷

It is within this ideological context that Senate leaders attempt to run the Senate. Controversial legislation that perturbs partisan divisions will produce successful filibusters and highly partisan votes. Each of the Senate leaders can count on nearly unanimous support of their party on the floor and the advantage goes to the minority, which can stall floor action through the use of the unanimous consent rule, the filibuster, and the defeat of repeated cloture motions by the majority party. Both leaders are also constrained by their members in that there is little support or incentive on either side to compromise.

Further complicating the ideological context of the Senate is the position of President Bush relative to the majority party and chamber ideological medians. George W. Bush is significantly to the right of the majority median in the Senate (+1.03), more distant from the majority median than any president in the past 30 years. While his positions during the 109^th Congress had the effect of moving Senate Republicans to take positions slightly to the right of their preferred positions, he is well to the right of Senate Democrats making the likelihood of compromise on significant issues remote. This is especially true given the inter-party differential, which is at a high-water mark for the last 30 years.

The leadership team of Majority Leader Harry Reid and Assistant Majority Leader (Whip) Richard Durbin led the Democrats in the 109^th Congress; they returned unchallenged to those positions in the 110^th Congress.⁸

On the Republican side of the aisle, Mitch McConnell (KY) succeeded Republican Leader Bill Frist (TN) who left the Senate at the end of the 109^th Congress. McConnell, a 24-year veteran of the Senate, was unchallenged for the position. He had served as the Republican whip during the 109^th Congress. McConnell's long tenure and his intimate familiarity with the rules of the Senate gave the Republicans a leader who could serve as a knowledgeable foil to Reid on the Senate floor. Though no stranger to compromise, the Republicans were counting on McConnell for his parliamentary abilities to block Democratic initiatives, especially those that aimed at the Republicans' Achilles' heel: Iraq War policy.

As the Republicans moved to complete their leadership team, Trent Lott announced his intention to challenge for the position of assistant Republican leader (whip). Lott was deposed as Republican leader four years earlier following a speech in which he made comments with perceived racist overtones. Throughout the year, Lott's attempt at a return to the leadership had been rumored and most of his campaigning for the job was sub rosa. Lamar Alexander (TN) had announced his intention to seek the position months earlier. His campaign for the position was highly public, and he was widely viewed as likely to assume the job since no competitor publicly emerged. In something of a surprise, Lott emerged as a public candidate late in the process and won the election by a single vote.

Competitive Senate leadership races are fairly rare, and systematic analysis of voting in these races even rarer (for an exception see Kelly 1995b).⁹

The folk wisdom in the congressional studies field is that these races are determined by non-systematic components like “friendship” or whether members have neighboring lockers in the Senate gym. We examine patterns of support for Alexander and Lott in the Republican whip race. Using national, regional, and local newspaper sources we identified the votes of 29 of the 49 Republicans who voted in the race. While our data do not include the preferences of all Republican members, they allow us to speculate about the sources of support in the Conference.

In the race against Alexander, Lott had several attributes that recommended him for the position of whip. First, his previous service as the Republican leader made him familiar with the rules of the Senate and the need to craft coalitions across the Conference, and he had past experience working with Reid, who served as former Democratic Leader Tom Daschle's whip before becoming the Democratic leader. Lott had served in the House of Representatives from 1979 to 1983 with a number of future senators, and had served as the Republican whip in the House before arriving in the Senate. Despite his strongly conservative and partisan predispositions, Lott had ample opportunity to prove his sensitivity to the needs of individual members through his House and Senate service.

Lott changed the way that the Senate Republican whip operation worked by introducing a much more personal service orientation when he became whip for the first time in 1995 (Bradbury, Davidson, and Evans 2006). His predecessor (Alan Simpson [WY]), Lott claimed, had delegated much of the work of counting votes and persuading senators to the staff of then Republican Leader Bob Dole (Lott 2005, 120). Lott sought to create the whip operation in the image of his House operation: “I told Dole that we were in a tough spot. If we were going to win close votes … we'd need much the same whip organization as we had in the House: one that would provide the members with serious listeners, a friendly shoulder, even counseling” (121).

Alexander, a former governor, education secretary, and presidential candidate, had not previously served in Congress and only had his five years of Senate service to prove himself to his colleagues. While somewhat more liberal than Lott,¹⁰

Alexander is solidly in the mainstream of Senate Republicans; but he is considered “more of a policy wonk than a hard-boiled strategist” (Kady 2006, 3013).

Alexander's lack of House service did not seem to hurt his support among Republican senators (he polled the same number of votes from members with previous House service); Lott's previous House service with seven senators gave him an advantage: six of those seven supported Lott. We also examined support for Alexander and Lott by ideology. The results seem anomalous. The more-conservative Lott tended to draw votes from more-liberal Republicans, while the more-moderate Alexander drew more-conservative votes. This supports our contention that Lott's history of working across his Conference, and being well attuned to the challenges that liberal Republicans face back in their states, ultimately got him elected to the post. In many ways the role played by the Republican whip is more important to the careers of liberal Republican members from competitive states than it is for senators from states that are more solidly Republican. The whip plays a key informational role on difficult floor votes. The more-politically moderate members typically have more of an interest in accurate vote counts, as they are often forced to decide whether to vote with their states (and their electoral interests) or with their parties. Moderate senators therefore may value experience, trust, and communication skills in a whip over more moderate ideological perspective.

As an additional step we modeled support for Lott as a function of four variables: Previous House service with Lott, ideology (as measured by nominate scores), campaign contributions made to members by Lott and Alexander,¹¹

and seniority (as measured by years of service in the Senate).¹² Our results are depicted graphically in Figure 2. They indicate that, controlling for other factors, those members who served in the House with Lott were significantly more likely to support him for whip. Members who had previous House service with Lott were 11 times more likely to support him than were other senators. Ideology continued to evidence the paradoxical influence we witnessed in our bivariate results; more-liberal members were more likely to support Lott than were his more-conservative colleagues. Results for campaign contributions offer another interesting finding (assuming that one is willing to accept a higher than usual level of statistical significance): Alexander's contributions to his Senate colleagues caused them to be more supportive of him and less supportive of Lott; when both men gave to their colleagues the probability of support was about equal; those who received a contribution from Lott but not Alexander were less likely to support Lott. Alexander was far more aggressive with his campaign contributions to other senators, making contributions in 2004 and/or 2006 to 43 of the 49 senators who voted in the election (87.8%). Lott contributed to only 19 of the 49 (38.8%). It would appear that campaign contributions to colleagues makes a difference and Lott's poor record of giving could have cost him the election if not for the personal relationships he had already established.

In sum, Lott's victory is less surprising than some Washington observers suggested. Lott held several advantages in the race and used them to good effect. With the Senate leadership teams in place by mid-November the sides turned to the difficult job of running the Senate and legislating.

Outside Leadership

Legislative politics are broadly defined by the existing issue agenda (Kingdon 1984). The issue agenda is the universe of problems that are considered pressing by the public, policy elites, and legislators. Legislative responses to the issue agenda become the focus of conflict in legislative politics as interest groups, policy entrepreneurs, party leaders, and the president battle to gain support for their policy preferences. Like presidents and other political actors, congressional leaders seek to influence public opinion in an effort to provide more comfortable opportunities for their partisans to support party positions in the legislature (Kelly 1995a; Harris 2007). Congressional party leaders compete with one another and with the president to shape public opinion. A president has a decided advantage because he demands more focused media attention and can offer a more focused message. By contrast, congressional leaders tend to draw less media attention, speak with less relative authority, and must compete with members of their own party who are often working at cross-purposes and with opposition party messaging operations.

Despite the competition, party leaders do seek to influence the debate by offering “issue frames” within which the public may come to understand issues in distinct ways that favor their legislative positions. Drawing on the political communications literature, Harris (2007) identifies four types of issue frames used by political leaders. Causal frames offer theories for social problems and imply policy solutions. Group-centric frames seek to influence public perceptions of “who wins and who loses” given a specific policy response. Episodic frames underlie attempts to frame issues as “us versus them” battles by focusing on specific individual cases. Finally, conflict frames are characterized by the use of “wedge issues” that attempt to split existing coalitions between political supporters and the legislative parties.

Political actors employ these different frames to seek advantage for their preferred policies. If the party leadership is able to achieve a political advantage on a policy issue, they will provide vital public support for their partisans in the legislature and present political pressure for the opposition party to support their policy preferences. Effective outside leadership can ease the problems of inside leadership by breaking down opposition to majority party legislative proposals.

No issue looms larger in the 110^th Congress than the war in Iraq. President Bush and congressional Democrats have engaged in a pitched battle to control the “issue frame” throughout most of George W. Bush's presidency. The president's speech to the nation on September 13, 2004, and the Democratic response, given by Senator Jack Reed (RI), provide an excellent opportunity to illustrate how the president and Senate Democrats are attempting to use these issue frames to capture public opinion.¹³

The president's goal is to provide an opinion context that will allow Republicans in the Senate to continue to fight off attempts to modify the president's Iraq War policy. Senate Democrats attempt to frame the Iraq War issue in a way that maintains Democratic cohesiveness and drives a wedge between the liberal and moderate wing of the Senate Republican Party and their leadership. Success for the Democrats will be measured by their ability to peel off enough Republican votes to bring cloture on an anti-war resolution.

Table 1 contrasts the rhetoric of the president and Senator Reed according to the categories identified above. The causal frame provides an opportunity to explain why the nation is at war in Iraq. The Republican argument for the war is anchored in the threat of domestic terrorism and the “war on terror.” As the president has frequently intoned, “Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.” He argues that the “cause” of the war is a need to defeat terrorism and “secure the homeland.” Democrats have sought to reframe the war as a devastating policy blunder on the part of the president that has caused an increased risk of terrorism at home and abroad. In short, they argue that we are in Iraq because the president miscalculated and put into motion a civil war that has trapped the country.

In the group-centric frame, the president paints a picture of Americans as the potential victims of failure in Iraq, arguing that the consequences of withdrawal from Iraq will be a surge in domestic terrorism. The terrorists will “follow us home” and the country will be subject to more September 11^th-like attacks. Democrats offer a competing frame for continued engagement in Iraq. They argue that the American people lose as a result of the president's policy, specifically the American taxpayer who is footing the $10 billion a month bill for the war, and the soldiers who are wounded and killed in Iraq.

The Democratic leadership seeks to utilize the episodic frame to focus the attention of the public on the seeming unwillingness of the president to be responsive to public opinion, despite the fact that a majority of the public believes that the war was a mistake, and few trust the president to bring the war to a swift and successful conclusion. President Bush, they argue, is ignoring popular opinion. President Bush argues that public disillusionment with the war should lead all Americans, regardless of party, to a policy that addresses America's vital interests in the Middle East.

Finally, the president seeks to undermine Democratic proposals by portraying them as driven by short-term political concerns. His decision making, by contrast, is driven by his concern for the common good and founded on sound military policy. “Who,” he implicitly asks, “do you trust: Our military leaders or politicians who are looking for advantage in the next election?” On this public opinion seems clear. In a recent New York Times poll, voters were asked whom they trust “with successfully resolving the war in Iraq?”: 68% of Americans said they trust the military on Iraq, 21% trust Congress, and only 5% trust the president. This provides solid ground for the president's Senate allies to stand on; simply put, “Senate Republican are standing with the military leaders on the ground.” In this case the conflict frame provides a firewall for Republicans. In order to neutralize the argument, Democrats would need to successfully argue that there is good reason to question the motives of military leaders; specifically, that military decisions are being made for the benefit of the White House and are not based on sound military principles.