What is the role of the Senate’s majority leader? (with James Wallner)
What is the role of the Senate’s majority leader? (with James Wallner)  
Podcast: Understanding Congress
Published On: Mon Dec 06 2021
Description: The topic of this episode is, "What is the role of the Senate’s majority leader?"My guest is Dr. James Wallner. He is a senior fellow at the R Street Institute and a lecturer at Clemson University. He is the author of three books on the Senate, including one titled On Parliamentary War: Partisan Conflict and Procedural Change in the U.S. Senate (2017). James has worked in the Senate, and also is a cohost of the Politics in Question podcast. Kevin Kosar:Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.It is to James Wallner that we turn to learn about the role of the majority leader. James, welcome to the program.James Wallner:Thanks for having me.Kevin Kosar:First question. Chuck Schumer is the current majority leader in the Senate. How did he get that job? What's the process? Did all the senators get together and vote for him or some other candidate?James Wallner:Well, that's how it works in the House, where you nominate candidates to be the speaker of the House. Nancy Pelosi is our current speaker. Democrats and Republicans on the floor of the House all cast a vote for the speaker, and the nominee with the most votes becomes the speaker. And so the majority party, in effect, selects the speaker. In the Senate, it's a similar process, but slightly different, because they're not electing a speaker, they're not electing a presiding officer. The majority leader, Chuck Schumer, is merely the floor leader of the party with the most votes — so in this case, the Democrats. And it’s 50–50 right now, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The vice president is a Democrat, so assuming that the vice president would cast her vote with the Democrats on a tie vote — under the Constitution, she gets to do that — that means that Chuck Schumer has more votes behind him than the leader of the Republican Party, Mitch McConnell, has behind him. So he is the majority leader, McConnell is the minority leader. The way they're chosen is simply by their party colleagues in secret ballot, in a meeting that usually happens right after the election, typically in December following an election before the new Congress meets.Kevin Kosar:You underlined a point there about the difference between leadership in the House and leadership in the Senate. It sounds, at least ostensibly, that a speaker may make a claim to be the head of the whole of the House, whereas in the Senate, it sounds like the majority leader is just the partisan leader. James Wallner:Absolutely. Look, party leaders in the Senate have institutional tasks, too. They help to schedule legislation. They do a bunch of different things that institutional leaders in the House, like the speaker, also do. And the speaker is also a partisan leader, in the fact that she is selected by her majority party caucus and really works to advance the agenda of the majority party. So they go hand in hand. But there is no Senate leader. I'm reminding myself of Woodrow Wilson, where he says, "There's no leader in the Senate," and that's something that's really frustrating him. And this is what makes the Senate great. Because there's no one that presides over the Senate, who wields lots of power, whom all senators vote for, the institution has a very decentralized set of procedures. The way it makes decisions is very decentralized. And the majority leaders (that weren't in existence prior to the beginning of the 20th century) and the minority leaders, their job, while they do it differently over time, is really then to facilitate the participation of members in the process and also to help to enact their agendas. So there's an institutional component to it, and there's a partisan component to it.Kevin Kosar:Is there anywhere listeners can turn to see a job description for the majority leader?James Wallner:You could just Google it, I'm sure, and you’d get lots of interesting stuff. You'd probably look up something on Senate.gov. You can look at different biographies of different majority leaders in the past. Robert Caro's The Master of the Senate, a book about Lyndon Johnson, is a great example. But I want to underscore something. There is no one way to lead the Senate. That changes, and it changes over time in response to the environment in which the Senate operates, the problems and challenges that the senators have, and the goals that they want to achieve. And so the leadership position is going to look different at different points in time. There is no one way to lead the Senate.Kevin Kosar:And how does one lead the Senate? The first place a person's mind might turn to are powers. We should talk about powers. When you think of leaders, usually leaders have some sort of powers they can use to get other people to obey them. Does a majority leader in the Senate have any powers that are granted to them by the Constitution or Senate rules or something else? The power to give out resources, the power to assign people to committees, power to do whatever it might be? What powers does the Senate majority leader have?James Wallner:Well, the short answer is none. If you think about it, that seems a little strange, because if you open up the newspaper and spend five minutes reading about the Senate, you're going to hear a lot about Mitch McConnell, you're going to hear a lot about Chuck Schumer. You'll hear about some other members as well, but we hear about the leaders. The leaders don't have any powers, certainly when compared to the House. They're not mentioned in the Constitution, like the speaker of the House is. The Senate rules themselves, they mention the majority and minority leaders on several occasions, but not in any real, significant way. And they don't really bestow on the two leaders any significant powers. The reason why they're powerful is because the rank and file members, the lawmakers themselves, defer to the leaders to do a whole host of different types of activities to make the legislative process more orderly. This first starts in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and it gains steam over time. There's something else I really want to underscore though — that the leader has what we call priority of recognition. So everybody's favorite vice president, John Nance Garner, “Cactus Jack,” in 1937 created a precedent. A precedent is simply just what the Senate did in the past. And it looks to its past behavior on occasion to decide how it wants to operate in the present. And so there's a precedent out there where Cactus Jack is sitting there presiding over the Senate, and he just says one day, “Alben Barkley,” (ironically, a leader from Kentucky; we’ve got a current minority leader from Kentucky in Mitch McConnell), but Alben Barkley, he's about to speak, and Cactus Jack says, "You know what, I'm going to recognize the majority leader first, and then the minority leader after him, if more than two senators are seeking recognition at one time." So that's priority of recognition. It's a favor. It's a favor that the chair, the presiding officer, and in this case, the vice president, gives to whomever the floor leader is, whomever the majority leader is. And it's something that the Senate can't force the chair to do. Now, what does the majority leader do with priority of recognition? It doesn't really matter much at the time, but today it's almost everything. Because priority of recognition, coupled with senators’ deference to their leaders to order the chamber for them and order their deliberations and make it more efficient and predictable — and to be quite honest, easy and less hard — the majority leader will use priority of recognition to set the schedule by making motions to proceed to bills. And then, and most importantly, they will use priority of recognition to fill the amendment tree, which is just a fancy way of saying, they will offer a bunch of amendments, one after another, so that no other senators can offer amendments. And this, in effect, shuts the floor down, shuts down a bill, and denies senators the opportunity to amend it. The Rules Committee in the House will do that as a written rule. And you can very clearly see where the power comes from, and you can see when they vote against your amendments why you can't get your amendments. But in the Senate, the leader approximates that by this priority of recognition, in using it to basically do things that other senators cannot do.Kevin Kosar:Earlier, you mentioned that one thing a majority leader does is do stuff that other senators don't necessarily want to do. And one of those things I would think would be the seeking of unanimous consent. What is unanimous consent, and what's the leader's role in getting it?James...