Bring Back Seniority Leadership in Congress

Now that the “who won and who lost” question is settled, Congress will meet to organize before beginning its 200th year next January. Reaching the two-century landmark certainly calls for a celebration, but does it also call for a face-lift?

When the Senate begins organizing on Nov. 20, the underlying question will be how to get this group of 100 elected representatives--one-third freshly anointed by the voters to protect their states’ interests--to act as a body called the United States Senate. Charles de Gaulle could have been talking about our Senate when he asked, “How do you govern a country that has 256 different kinds of cheese?” How do you reorganize a venerable institution that has, in the words of Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), “managed from roughly 1970 or 1971 onward to so pervert and torture the process of this body that we are approaching being inert?”

Inertia certainly is what Sen. David Pryor (D-Ark.) was describing when he pointed out that the Senate, “so rich in tradition and costing a billion dollars a year to operate, spends about three months of the year calling quorum and roll calls.” So was then-Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), when he complained about his “wet noodle problem,” which meant that “I can’t make the Senate do anything it doesn’t want to do.”

Seventy percent of the 189 laws passed by the first session of the 99th Congress were of a non-substantive nature, such as proclaiming Baltic Freedom Day, National Organ Donation Awareness Week, Made in America Day and George Milligan Control Tower Day. It is not that our elected officials do not work long hours to pass this legislation. They do, for most of the 12 months of the year. And evening sessions, once a rarity, now are more common than not. In the 99th Congress the Senate adjourned as late as 5:30 a.m., only to reconvene four hours later; 58 votes were scheduled after 8 p.m., 35 between 10 p.m. and midnight, and 26 after midnight. This conduct, termed anti-social by many, is moving some senators to demand “quality of life” considerations.

How can quality of life be improved if, for example, Sen. Mack Mattingly (R-Ga.) is expected to serve on two of the Senate’s 25 major committees, in addition to 11 of the more than 100 subcommittees, plus the Joint Economic Committee? Moreover, committees’ jurisdictional lines are vague and overlap so that, say, a health bill will be considered by as many as 19 subcommittees.

Little wonder, then, that our bicentenarian seems to have institutional paralysis. Unless its 100 working parts can organize and give direction, the Senate body will have a hard time moving forward.

I believe that this inertia or paralysis is caused, in part, by the weakening of the structure that, until recently, provided established channels of authority. Yes, I’m talking about the much-maligned seniority system that served the Congress well.

Critics may charge that the seniority system rewards longevity at the expense of ability and allows, even encourages, dictatorial chairmen. Still, it made the congressional machinery work. And no one has yet put forth a workable alternative.

The seniority system evolved from the need for an efficient and automatic method to organize and determine status, and this non-discriminatory structure, based on length of service, provided it. Yes, there were abuses, and the reforms of the 1970s corrected, or at least sufficiently tempered, the most egregious of them. But the reforms should not be taken too far. A Senate without the seniority system, as Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) points out, would foster “all kinds of politicking and maneuvering to see who is going to be chairman,” concluding that “the great thing about seniority is that it is the least worst of all the systems that you might use here.”

A further weakening of the seniority system would create an operational vacuum of uncertainty. It would be filled, according to former Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), by the most intense personal competition among its members who would exploit weaknesses in their colleagues in order to secure chairmanships.

As Congress approaches its 200th birthday, it does not need a face-lift, only a fitness regimen. A reinvigorated seniority system would go far in restoring the energy and muscle that Congress needs to be the greatest legislative body in the world.