search

Categories

• Federal Government

• Executive Branch
• Cabinet
• Legislative Branch
• House of Representatives
• Senate
• Judicial-Branch

• State Government

• Alabama
• Alaska
• American-Samoa
• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• Delaware
• District-of-Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Hawaii
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Marshall-Islands
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Mississippi
• Missouri
• Montana
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Northern Mariana Islands
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Oregon
• Palau
• Pennsylvania
• Puerto Rico
• Rhode Island
• South Carolina
• South-Dakota
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Vermont
• Virgin Islands
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

Senate

---

 

 

 

The Framers of the Constitution created the U.S. Senate as a safeguard for the rights of states and minority opinion in a powerful national government. They modeled the Senate on colonial governors' councils and on the state senates that had evolved from them. James Madison explained that the Senate's role was "first to protect the people against their rulers secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led."

 

To balance power between the large and small states at the Constitutional Convention, the Framers agreed that states would be represented equally in the Senate and in proportion to their populations in the House. Further preserving the authority of individual states, the Framers provided that state legislatures would elect senators. To guarantee senators' independence from short-term political pressures, the Framers assigned them a six-year term, three times as long as that of popularly elected House members. Madison reasoned that longer terms would provide stability. "If it not be a firm body," he concluded, "the other branch being more numerous, and coming immediately from the people, will overwhelm it." Responding to fears that a six-year Senate term would produce an untouchable aristocracy capable of conspiratorial behavior, the Framers specified that one-third of the terms would expire every two years, thus combining the principles of continuity and rotation in office.

 

In the early weeks of the Constitutional Convention, the Framers had tentatively decided to give the Senate sole power to make treaties and appoint federal judges and ambassadors. As the convention drew to a close, however, they moved to divide these powers between the Senate and the president, following Gouverneur Morris's reasoning that "as the president was to nominate, there would be responsibility, and as the Senate was to concur, there would be security." Consent to the ratification of a treaty would require a two-thirds vote, reflecting the concern of individual states that other states might combine against them, by a simple majority vote, for commercial or economic gain. In dealing with nominations, senators as statewide officials would be uniquely qualified to identify suitable candidates for federal judicial posts and would confirm them, along with cabinet secretaries and other key federal officials, by a simple majority vote.

 

The First Senate convened on March 4, 1789, in an elegant second-floor chamber of New York City's newly remodeled Federal Hall. Present were only eight of the twenty-two members from the eleven states that had then ratified the Constitution. On April 6 the twelve members necessary to provide a quorum answered the roll call and got down to business. The Senate elected New Hampshire's John Langdon president pro tempore and invited the House of Representatives to its chamber to count the electoral ballots for president and vice president. On April 21 John Adams took his oath as vice president, thereby assuming his responsibility under the Constitution to serve as the Senate's president. Nine days later, House members again crowded into the Senate chamber to witness George Washington's inauguration.

 

In its first session the Senate cautiously engaged its constitutional responsibilities, mindful of the precedent-setting nature of its every action. Senators gave serious attention to their duty to provide advice and consent to the president's nominations and treaties. A Georgia senator's objection to an appointment of a naval officer in his state resulted in the first Senate rejection of a presidential nominee. This reflected the understanding that senators were the best judges of appointees from their states to which other members would defer as a matter of "senatorial courtesy." When President Washington visited the Senate in August 1789 to consult about a recently negotiated Indian treaty, he expected an immediate response. To his frustration, the Senate referred the issue to committee for further study. After Washington received Senate approval, he vowed that he would never again seek the chamber's advice and consent in person.

 

The Senate's work load increased greatly during the final weeks of the 1789 session. This accorded with the Framers' notion that the House would serve as the principal workshop for crafting legislation, while the Senate would pass on the representatives' handiwork, polishing and reworking in consideration of what were presumably the nation's broader and longer-term interests. In a second session convened in January 1790, the Senate turned to legislation that would place the nation on a firm financial footing and provided for a permanent seat of government in a special federal district along the Potomac River. While that site was being prepared, Congress agreed to move the government to Philadelphia, where the final session of the First Congress met between December 1790 and March 1791.

 

During its ten-year residence in Philadelphia, the Senate conducted its proceedings in the second-floor chamber of that city's recently reconstructed "Congress Hall." That chamber witnessed the rise of political parties as the principal determinants of legislative debate and accomplishment.

 

A clash in 1794 between Federalists and Antifederalists over the seating of newly elected Pennsylvania Antifederalist senator Albert Gallatin brought a partial abandonment of the Senate's closed-door policy. Like the Constitutional Convention, but in contrast to the House, the Senate in 1789 had decided to conduct its sessions behind closed doors. In 1794 members of the Federalist majority feared that their planned rejection of Gallatin on questionable constitutional grounds would trigger charges of arbitrary behavior if done in secret. Opposition to the closed-door policy came principally from the state legislatures, whose members argued that they could not effectively assess the conduct of the senators they had elected if they operated in secret. Press coverage of open sessions in the House of Representatives helped popularize that body's role. The Senate was in danger of becoming the forgotten chamber. (The same attitude played a part when the Senate decided to allow its proceedings to be televised in 1986, seven years after the House.) Consequently, the Senate opened its doors for all legislative business, although the doors would remain closed for executive business related to presidential nominations and treaties until 1929.

 

On November 21, 1800, the Senate took up residence in basement quarters in the unfinished Capitol at Washington. In the following decade, the Senate moved to a grander chamber on the Capitol's second floor, where it remained until 1859. This large, semicircular room, with its plain walls and low-vaulted domed ceiling, provided an ideal setting, both acoustically and dramatically, for the Senate as it moved into its so-called golden age. Although the Senate operated in the shadow of the larger and more boisterous House of Representatives for the first three decades after its move to Washington, it dominated the House and the presidency, with the exception of the Civil War years, for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

 

In 1833 the Senate's membership had risen to only 48, compared with 242 in the House of Representatives. With fewer numbers and equal balance between slave and free states, the Senate offered a forum better suited to lively and discursive debate. In the face of growing national tensions associated with federal authority versus states' rights and the extension of slavery into the nation's territories, the Senate served as a workshop for fashioning major compromise agreements. In this era Daniel Webster most dramatically articulated northern interests; John C. Calhoun those of the South; and Henry Clay, Thomas Hart Benton, and Stephen A. Douglas those of the West. The sectional accords they vigorously debated bought time for a maturing nation. When civil war could no longer be held back, the national government had amassed the experience, balance, and strength to guarantee its survival under the Constitution.

 

The nation's territorial expansion in this era produced five new states between 1845 and 1850, and new quarters were needed to accommodate the additional members. On January 4, 1859, the Senate's sixty-four members moved to a larger chamber in the Capitol's newly completed north wing. This room, in which the Senate has met since that day, witnessed the crisis of the Civil War. In 1868, amid the turmoil of postwar reconstruction, it provided the setting for President Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial. (Seven years later Johnson would become the only former president to return to serve in the Senate.)

 

The Republican party controlled the Senate's majority from 1861 to 1913, with the exception of the 1879 and 1893 Congresses. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, chairmen of major committees exercised great power on the Senate floor. Most members, viewing the Senate as a way station in a political or business career, served only a single term. In an institution that had come to assign power on the basis of seniority, a few long-term senators, through the newly developed party caucus system, controlled key legislative strategy decisions.

 

In 1913 the Democrats won control and established the position of majority floor leader to push through the party's legislative agenda. Within a decade the post of party floor leader achieved the primacy in conducting the Senate's business that it possesses in modern times. A second major change in the Senate's structure occurred in 1913 with the ratification of the Constitution's Seventeenth Amendment, providing for direct popular election of senators. Selection of senators by state legislatures had worked reasonably well for half a century, but eventually deadlocks began to occur between the upper and lower houses of those bodies. This delayed state legislative business and deprived states of their full Senate representation. By the start of the twentieth century, direct popular election of senators had become a major objective for progressive reformers who sought to remove control of government from the influence of special interests and corrupt state legislators. Although this amendment did not significantly affect the quality of persons subsequently elected to the Senate, its passage marked the only structural modification of the Framers' original design of the institution.

 

The Constitution's Framers would likely recognize several of the modern Senate's roles, particularly its unique constitutional responsibility to provide advice and consent to nominations and treaties. During the Senate's first two centuries it objected to few cabinet nominees and rejected only eight. This reflected an attitude that presidents were entitled to choose their own advisers, unless those officials clearly demonstrated unfitness to serve. The Senate gave greater scrutiny, however, to judicial nominees with lifetime tenure. Directing particular attention to the Supreme Court, the Senate rejected approximately 20 percent of those nominated to the nation's highest tribunal. Of the thousands of treaties submitted, the Senate turned down fewer than two dozen, but it routinely influenced treaty negotiations with threats of modification through the addition of amendments, reservations, or understandings.

 

The Framers would also find much in the Senate, as in modern America, that would surprise them. They would surely be amazed that the Senate has grown to one hundred members, with seven thousand staff members housed in immense office buildings, or that members tend to view service as a long-term career. And they would be surprised at the importance the Senate accords to its committee system. In its earliest years, the Senate relied on temporary committees to draft specific legislative language after the entire body had reached a consensus regarding a measure's general objectives. The War of 1812 demonstrated the need for consistently available expertise based in permanent, or standing, committees. In 1816, the Senate established permanent committees organized according to the broad categories of the president's annual message. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Senate committees proliferated. At a time when only committee chairmen had staff and office space, the number of committees nearly equaled the number of members. In 1920 and again after World War II, the Senate eliminated many committees. Since the 1950s the Senate has provided committees with significant professional staff resources and has enacted reforms to minimize the autocratic control by chairs that had existed earlier.

 

Since the 1920s Senate committees have taken on a greater investigative role. Among the most notable special investigations have been those of oil leasing in the 1920s, securities regulation in the 1930s, war profiteering in the 1940s, organized crime in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, Watergate in the 1970s, and covert intelligence operations in the 1980s. Through its combined investigative and legislative powers, the Senate has sought to preserve its balance with the presidency, supporting presidential initiatives while maintaining vigilant oversight of executive branch operations.

 

In retrospect, the Constitution's Framers would appreciate the Senate's passion for deliberation, its untidiness, its aloofness from the House of Representatives, and its suspicion of the presidency. Neither they nor most of the eighteen hundred persons (including sixteen women) who served as senators during the first two hundred years would be surprised at the continuing calls for reform. Viewed over the broad sweep of its history, the U.S. Senate has demonstrated the ability to balance faithfulness to the Constitution's principles with requirements for measured change in response to the complex demands of a diverse society.

Bibliography:

Richard Allan Baker, The Senate of the United States: A Bicentennial History (1988); Robert C. Byrd, The Senate, 1789-1989: Addresses on the History of the United States Senate, 2 vols. (1988, 1990).

 

Author:

Richard Allan Baker

See also Calhoun, John C.; Clay, Henry; Constitution; Douglas, Stephen A.; House of Representatives; McCarthy, Joseph R.; Philadelphia Convention; Sumner, Charles; Webster, Daniel.

 

 

 

---

 

 

 

 

---

 

 

 

 

 

Harry Reid

Senate Majority Leader

522 Hart Senate Office Bldg
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-3542
Fax: 202-224-7327