Abandoning the Regular Order Majority Party Influence on Appropriations in the U.S. Senate

In the summer of 1996, the Republicans who had trium- phantly captured Congress two years earlier were in dis- array. Their effort to leverage a partial government shutdown into substantial budget cuts had left the party politically damaged and anxious to show that it could govern responsibly. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's immediate goal was to avoid another budget confronta- tion and quickly pass 13 individual spending bills that would provide funding to run the government in the upcoming fiscal year. Instead, the narrow Republican majority in the Senate faced an onslaught of Democratic amendments aimed at scoring "pre-election" points by forcing Republicans to cast difficult votes on guns, terror- ism, health care and drugs (Washington Post, September 13, 1996, A20). Progress on the bills ground to a halt.Fed up with the political battering they were taking, Majority Leader Lott and Speaker Newt Gingrich announced that the Senate would abandon its effort to pass spending bills on an individual basis. Instead, both chambers would package them together into an omnibus spending bill:It is clear that Senate Democrats are using delaying tactics and political stunts designed more for the upcoming elections than for the completion of the people's business . . .Given the Democrat strategy to tie up the Senate floor, House and Senate leaders have decided that the defense appropriations conference report will be the vehicle for final consideration of all uncompleted appropriations issues. The remaining issues will be resolved through bipartisan negotiations between congressional leaders and the White House. (Congressional Press Releases, September 19, 1996)Packaging the remaining spending bills together in conference meant that two of the bills would not reach the floor on an individual basis and the Senate would have no opportunity to offer amendments to them. The Republican majority's further aim was to bring the omnibus itself to the floor as a non-amendable conference report to pre- clude amendments when it was debated. After additional haggling with the Democrats, an omnibus package con- taining six spending bills was brought to the Senate floor and passed without amendment. The plan worked, but at a cost. President Clinton and congressional Democrats received so much of what they wanted in the final omni- bus package that 14 Republican senators voted against it. Republicans shielded their members from further votes on amendments and passed the budget but were unable to pursue their broader policy goals.OverviewThere is an active debate over the nature and extent of the majority party's influence in the Senate (Den Hartog and Monroe 2011; Fenno 1989; Gailmard and Jenkins 2007; Monroe and Roberts 2008; Sinclair 2012a; Smith 2005). In this article, I describe the "limited influence" theory of majority party power in the Senate. I show that the major- ity party has an important but constrained ability to influ- ence legislative outcomes in the appropriations process that it uses when it is weakly positioned in the chamber and has difficulty managing the floor. It can manipulate the appropriations process by opting to pass some or all of the 12 annual appropriations bills as a package rather than individually. Its influence meets electoral goals by protecting the party's reputation but falls short of an abil- ity to secure preferred policy outcomes.I test three expectations associated with the limited influence theory. First, the Senate majority party is likely to avoid bringing individual spending bills to a vote and to create an omnibus package instead when it is small, divided, and ideologically distant from the minority. Second, the majority's decision to create an omnibus package rather than consider bills on an individual basis reduces the total amount of amending in the appropria- tions process. Third, omnibus bills are used to build broad bipartisan coalitions rather than to push policy toward the majority median. …