In contemporary practice, bills and resolutions (collectively, "measures") normally reach the floor of the Senate for consideration either by unanimous consent or through agreement on a motion to proceed to consider (often called simply a "motion to proceed" or "MTP"). Most measures considered today reach the floor by unanimous consent; the motion to proceed is normally reserved for situations when unanimous consent cannot be obtained. In consequence, measures called up by motion are more likely to be controversial or highly contested than those considered by unanimous consent. Unanimous consent to consider a measure may be granted in the form of either (1) a simple request for unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to consider the measure, or (2) a broader unanimous consent agreement that typically also prescribes terms for consideration, such as limits on debate and amendments. If any Senator objects to such a request, in either form, a motion to proceed may then be offered. However, if the leadership is aware that objection would be raised to such a unanimous consent request, the majority leader (or a designee) may offer the motion to proceed without first seeking unanimous consent. In these instances, the majority leader often files a cloture petition at the time the motion to proceed is made. Senate Rule VIII, paragraph 2, which provides for the motion to proceed, places no restrictions on who may offer the motion. Nowadays, however, the Senate normally cedes to the majority leader the prerogative of calling up measures, either by motion or by unanimous consent. Absent this deference, it would be difficult for any majority leader to carry out his function of managing the schedule, and in recent decades a substantial majority of motions to proceed have been offered by the majority leader. Nevertheless, other Senators have made that motion as well, sometimes without direction from the majority leader. This report presents data on the total number of motions to proceed offered in each recent Congress, with particular attention to the small number of these motions not made by direction of the majority leader. In contemporary Senate practice, both unanimous consent requests and motions to proceed to consider a measure are most often offered by the majority leader personally. Sometimes, however, they are offered by the majority whip, or by another Senator acting in coordination with and as the designee of the majority leader (for instance, the chair of the committee that reported the measure). Such actions also may be taken by a Senator not acting in coordination with the majority leader, most often by the minority leader. In such cases a Senator acting for the majority leader will typically take action to protect majority party control of the floor agenda. In the case of unanimous consent requests, this action will ordinarily consist of an objection to the request. In the case of motions to proceed, the Senate has often agreed to table the motion or defeat it outright. Table 1 below displays the number of motions to proceed to consider offered by the majority leader, the majority whip, other designees of the majority leader, and other Senators, in the 96 th through 113 th Congresses (1979-2014). For purposes of this report, motions to proceed offered by the majority whip were presumed to have been made in coordination with the majority leader. Other majority party Senators offering motions were also presumed to be acting as designees of the majority leader, unless the record of proceedings afforded positive evidence to the contrary. For most motions not offered by the majority leader or whip, the proceedings contained positive evidence that the motion was indeed offered by direction of the majority leader. Sometimes, for example, Senators offering these motions stated explicitly that they were doing so on the majority leader's behalf. In other cases, the Senator offering the motion also submitted a petition for cloture on that motion that included the majority leader among its signers. On other occasions, the Senator offering the motion did so during a course of actions normally carried out by the majority leader or his designee. Table 1 identifies the number of motions to proceed to consider items of legislative business offered in each Congress from the 96 th (1979-1980) through the 113 th (2013-2014). From the 97 th Congress onward, motions to proceed were identified through an electronic search of legislative status information in the Legislative Information System (LIS) or, for more recent years, Congress.gov. For earlier Congresses, these databases contain only limited legislative status information; for this reason, motions to proceed in the 96 th Congress were identified instead through examination of the Journal of the Senate . For all Congresses, information about who offered the motions was obtained from the Congressional Record and the Journal of the Senate . The data displayed in Table 1 reflect motions to proceed to the consideration of all forms of legislation. Items of executive business, which include nominations and treaties, are also brought to the floor by unanimous consent or a motion to proceed to consider, but this report does not address motions to proceed to executive business, and the figures in Table 1 exclude them. Table 1 includes both debatable and non-debatable motions to proceed. Under Senate Rules, motions to proceed generally are debatable, but a motion to proceed to consider a conference report is not debatable, and the same is true of a motion to proceed to a measure under a statutory expedited procedure. Finally, on any measure, a motion to proceed is non-debatable if offered during the "morning hour." This proceeding, however, has seldom been used since the 1980s. Sometimes more than one motion to proceed was offered on a single measure. This may occur if the Senate rejects the first motion. It may also occur if the Senate adopts the first motion, but lays the measure aside before a decision, and later proposes to take it up again. A third possibility is that the Senate adjourns while a motion to proceed is pending, for the adjournment causes the motion to "fall," meaning that it is no longer pending. On a subsequent day, accordingly, the Senate could decide to take up the measure only if a new motion to proceed is offered. In these and similar cases, the table treats each motion to proceed separately; in other words, it shows the number of motions to proceed actually offered on bills and resolutions, not the number of bills and resolutions on which motions to proceed were offered. As Table 1 shows, from the 96 th through the 113 th Congress (1979-2014), a total of 628 motions to proceed to consider measures were offered, 86% of them by the majority leader personally and 96% of them either by the majority leader or under his direction. On average, 35 motions to proceed per Congress were made during this period. Five Congresses exceeded this average, including three of the four most recent ones. The 113 th Congress reaches a high-water mark with 124 motions to proceed offered during that 2-year period. Consideration of several features of contemporary Senate practice permits conjectures about the reasons for the increase. One possible explanation may lie in the Senate's practice of not permitting a motion to proceed to be offered while another such motion is already pending. If, as suggested in the next section, the Senate has lately started to display less deference to the majority leader in offering motions to proceed, then it is possible that the majority leader has resorted more frequently to offering these motions as a means of precluding others from offering their own motions to proceed to other measures. By Senate precedent, only one motion to proceed to a measure may be pending before the chamber at any given time. Another potential explanation might involve the procedural distinction between recessing and adjourning at the end of the day. In the earlier years of the period covered, it was common for the Senate to recess at the end of most daily sessions, whereas in more recent years the Senate usually adjourns at the end of each day. Accordingly, in previous decades it was often possible for the Senate to continue considering a single motion to proceed to a specific measure on several successive days, while today the Senate would need to renew the motion to proceed by offering it a second time. The Senate's shift toward daily adjournments, however, seems to predate the rise in motions to proceed by many years, making it less likely that this shift in practice accounts for the rise. Nevertheless, the use of daily adjournments creates conditions in which renewing motions to proceed may be required more often. In recent times, perhaps reflecting the shift from recesses to adjournments as the preferred method of concluding business for the day, the Senate rarely considers motions to take up a specific measure over a period of several days. Instead, after offering a motion to proceed, the majority leader often immediately files for cloture on the motion and then withdraws it. Even if the Senate then adjourns at the end of the day, this proceeding makes it unnecessary to renew the motion to proceed on a following day, for the Senate instead pursues other business until the cloture vote occurs, and if the Senate invokes cloture, the original motion to proceed automatically returns as pending. This report provides no overall data on how the Senate disposes of motions to proceed. Few such motions, however, are defeated outright, because a motion to proceed that was unlikely to command majority support usually would not be offered in the first place. Instead, most motions to proceed that are not adopted simply do not reach a final vote. Some, for example, fail to reach a vote because the Senate ultimately agrees to take up the measure by unanimous consent. In other cases, a filibuster prevents a vote from occurring, or the motion is either displaced by subsequent action or withdrawn. By contrast, as noted in the next section, many of the motions to proceed not offered by direction of the majority leader are defeated outright. During the 18 Congresses studied, 28 motions to proceed to consider could be identified as being offered other than by direction of the majority leader. Of these 28, 20 were offered by the minority leader, 7 by other minority party Senators, and the remaining 1 by a majority party Senator. Relevant details surrounding the consideration of each motion are provided in the next section.