CONGRESS
Kyrsten Sinema is Stuck in the Middle
What her party affiliation change tells us about the Senate today
Earlier this month, former Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced she had switched her voter registration and would represent Arizona as an Independent. Her motivations have been portrayed alternately as genuine or cynical; based on a sincere belief that Arizona voters want truly independent representatives or a gambit to avoid a competitive Democratic primary election. While others have commented on where Sinema and Democrats go from here, some of my past research also explains why Sinema may have felt this was the move to make given her place within the Senate.
That the two parties organize significant portions of congressional life today is at the same time clichéd and underappreciated. Even in the Senate, where the legislative process is less hierarchical and individual legislators have more power to determine what gets considered and when, a series of changes to rules and practices over the past 50 years has shifted authority to party leaders and given committees fewer incentives to legislate. Change to Senate life over the past 50 years — and in some cases 15–20 years — make it hard for a senator like Sinema to shape policy using their institutional power.
Amendments Are Not an Option
Today’s Senate is very different even from the institution as it was in the 1980s. Political scientist Barbara Sinclair has described how changes to Congress’s workload, the Washington policy community, and the media environment in which Congress operates led to a period of “unrestrained activism” among individual senators. That activism was reflected in a larger number of votes on floor amendments as senators wanted to be seen offering proposals on larger numbers of issues.
Aside from budget vote-a-rama and end-of-session scrambles to add personal projects onto must-pass legislation, the Senate barely considers amendments any more. The Library of Congress’s Congress.gov website tracks every bill and amendment introduced, and the data show that senators just aren’t offering amendments much these days.
The number of amendments offered during floor debate has significantly declined since the start of the Obama administration (111th Congress, 2009–2020); senators offered around 2,000 amendments per congress from the 1980s through the 2000s, in 2019–2020 that number was less than 400. Even accounting for possible COVID-19 related disruptions to legislative business, senators offered less than 600 floor amendments in both the 113th (2013–2014) and 115th (2017–2018) Congresses.
The amendments that are being offered in recent years aren’t even examples of the majority party fine-tuning their legislative outputs. Since the late 2000s most amendments offered during Senate debate have been sponsored by minority-party senators. Majority-party senators (or those who caucus with the majority party like Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders) haven’t sponsored even a quarter of offered amendments in a decade. The possibility of shaping legislation through the amendment process is almost entirely closed off to senators today, particularly those in the majority, which gives Kyrsten Sinema one fewer avenue to try to get what she wants.
Subcommittees Don’t Help Either
If the era of “unrestrained activism” on the Senate floor is over, perhaps Sinema could wield some influence through the committee system. Although committees are less central to the Senate legislative process than they are in the House, committees and their chairs still matter for policymaking. But here Sinema runs into another barrier to influence: what I call the “stratified Congress.”
While party leaders have gained authority over the legislative agenda, committee chairs retain their institutional advantages in conducting oversight and other non-legislative business, including the ability to decide which issues receive attention and which witnesses testify on those issues as well as additional staff. Chairs also can play a large role in the fate of executive and judicial branch nominees as most dramatically illustrated by former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley’s handling of Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
Members of Congress with Independent affiliations typically caucus or conference with one of the two parties so they can receive committee assignments and other institutional benefits. Senators who find themselves in roughly similar positions to Sinema clearly see the value in committee leadership positions. Sanders will chair the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which will give him a great amount of input on the next Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization scheduled for the next term as well as his own health policy priorities.
West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and recently used that position to kill Richard Glick’ renomination as Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chair likely in retaliation for Glick’s expressed desire to change the natural gas pipeline permitting process and President Biden’s comments about shifting the nation’s energy supply further away from coal.
Kyrsten Sinema negotiated the ability to retain her current subcommittee chair positions; she currently chairs the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee’s Government Operations and Border Management Subcommittee and the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee’s Aviation Safety Subcommittee. Gaining a key institutional position like chairing a committee clearly helps moderate or independent-minded senators achieve some of their policy goals. Chairing a subcommittee, as Sinema does? Not so much.
Subcommittees used to be where legislators specialized in policy issues or oversight and gained seniority, additional staff, and other resources they could use to advance their careers. But where “subcommittee government” once reigned in Washington, subcommittees today are less active than they have been in decades.
The U.S. Policy Agendas Project’s congressional hearings dataset also tracks whether a hearing was held by the full committee or a subcommittee. Their data show that more than half of all Senate hearings in the 1980s were held by at least one subcommittee, but by the late 2010s that number had dropped to about one-third of Senate hearings. (See the top panel below.)
The Library of Congress also tracks whether a bill was marked up (amended and advanced) by a subcommittee or just the full committee. The markups data tell a similar, perhaps even more dramatic story to the hearings data. In the 1980s, between one and three out of every 20 bills referred to a committee received a subcommittee markup, meaning subcommittee chairs had a chance to put their stamp on a bill before the committee chair could. According to the Library of Congress data, from 2009–2012 zero bills received a Senate subcommittee markup. (See the bottom panel.)
Instead of subcommittees, legislators in both the House and Senate have turned to the party structures to advance their careers and achieve their various goals. The growth of party whip structures has been more dramatic in the House and the Senate, but even so, when accounting for both the majority and minority parties about 40 percent of the Senate has some kind of official party position whether that’s as a whip, policy and communications committee leader, conference secretary, or similar roles.
If we take Sinema at her word that she never really participated in Democratic caucus life, and in the absence of opportunities to amend legislation on the floor or use her subcommittee leadership roles to meaningfully shape policy outputs, then she may not have had any other choice than to go her own way in order to get what she wants out of being a senator.
