Even at its liveliest, the U.S. Senate isn’t known as a fast-paced place to work. By its very nature, the upper chamber was designed to be less passionate than the House, and the rules it has developed over the years — like the archaic filibuster — have only bolstered its intentionally sclerotic pace. But 2023 has been a real masterwork in how idle the Senate as a body can actually be.
Yes, that’s often the case in times of divided government. With Republicans in control of the House and President Joe Biden in the White House, Senate Democrats entered the year expecting to be on defense rather than offense. But as the House GOP descended further and further into a state of pure manic dysfunction, there’s been even less than expected for the Senate to actually do.
GOP control of the House has meant little amid the Republican infighting that’s repeatedly paralyzed the lower chamber. With Republicans having no interest in sending over bills that Democrats could support, the few bits of legislation that have cleared the House have been either intensely partisan or of the utmost necessity. As a result, a record low number of bills have been signed into law after the first year of the 118th Congress: a meager 27, according to NPR.
That wasn’t the case over the first half of the Biden administration. With Vice President Kamala Harris holding the tiebreaking vote in a 50-50 Senate, Democrats controlled of both houses of Congress. A dogged defense of the filibuster from a few key members made the Senate the fulcrum of all activity in Washington. Any deal had to include either two stubborn centrist Democrats or 10 Republicans — and the former often still insisted on the need for the latter.
Despite the drag on progress that caused, the number of bipartisan deals struck was impressive in hindsight. The Senate alone crafted bills providing for a massive investment in infrastructure, new funding for semiconductor production in the U.S. and major (if weak) gun violence prevention measures. (A bipartisan fix for the broken system that had hobbled the Postal Service originated in the House but cleared the Senate easily, as well.) The last months of 2022 in particular were a rush of last-minute deal-making, including an omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2023, reform to the Electoral Count Act and repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.
The same couldn’t be said about this year. The Senate stuck around slightly longer than the House ahead of the Christmas break to give negotiators room to try to negotiate a national security bill. But the two sides are still immensely far apart as Democrats try to unstick foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel and Republicans insist on including their preferred overhaul of the nation’s immigration system. These last 12 months, the bipartisan mavens who ran much of the show in 2021 and 2022 — often to the detriment of Biden’s sweeping agenda — have sat more or less idle.
What’s more, the Senate has been sort of shunted to the side at most major inflection points this year. Biden and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated directly over raising the debt ceiling in the spring and early summer. The House was likewise in the driver’s seat both times the federal government nearly shut down under two different speakers. Republican senators who pride themselves on being more genteel than the rabble of the House could only look on in frustration as the caucus continually cannibalized itself.
In the face of this chaos, the Senate’s Democratic leadership at least has continued to confirm Biden’s nominees — but even that was victim to the biggest bit of drama that the chamber saw this year. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., spent about 10 months blockading hundreds of military promotions in a quixotic attempt to change the Defense Department’s abortion policies. It not only failed miserably, as the policy remains in place even as the 450 nominees he blocked have now been confirmed, but it also annoyed his GOP colleagues enough for them to revolt against him.
It’s also worth noting that the Senate Appropriations Committee managed to bang out all 12 spending bills for this year, but there’s been no movement on the Senate floor. The lack of urgency can be ascribed in part to the House Republicans, who still haven’t even managed to settle on how much money to spend, let alone how their MAGA-friendly bills could find compromise with the Senate. That means preventing a shutdown will once again be at the top of the agenda when Congress reconvenes in January.
The odds of this dynamic’s changing next year seem slim, leaving Senate Democrats hoping to defend their majority with little to show for their efforts since the midterms. At best you could say that House Republicans have provided an effective before-and-after demonstration of what Democratic control means for Congress. That’s at least the message Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., delivered on the Senate floor before the holidays, choosing to focus mostly on the successes of 2022 than the frustrations of 2023.
If this current pattern holds, it will be all that Congress can do to keep the lights on in 2024, let alone pass anything substantive. That doesn’t exactly leave senators with much of a reason to hang around the Capitol between crises. While the weekly rush out of Washington on Thursday afternoons is always intense, I wouldn’t be surprised if senators are in even more of a hurry to flee next year — and for once, I wouldn’t blame them.
