A Little Context on the Sanders Global Warming Amendment

The other day I was having a conversation with a friend who was complaining that the Senate was going to vote on whether or not global warming exists and is human-made. He was making the point that the whole Senate would look silly being forced to demean itself with a vote on something the rest of the world takes as true.

The fact that Majority Leader McConnell is allowing an open amendment tree here is a little amazing given the Senate’s recent history. The trend in both houses of Congress over the last 25 years has been toward marginalizing the rank and file in favor of highly structured floor votes where the outcome is mostly predetermined. The calculation is a little different in this case, since McConnell is eventually hoping to override a presidential veto, but this is still a (probably temporary) warming of Senate relations.

That said, votes in the Senate are one of the most structured ways legislators can express their preferences. Legislation reaching the floor has usually gone through several rounds of bargaining to get the technical and nontechnical language exactly right, which is precisely why chamber leaders usually make legislation difficult to amend on the floor. Say Congress is trying to pass a national budget and everything seems worked out, but then a member tries to attach an amendment banning federal funds for abortion once the bill reaches the floor. Now all bets are off — the calculation just changed at the very end and most visible part of the process.

Amendments like that are one of the reasons chamber leaders limit amendments in the first place. If the majority party is responsible for, and will ultimately be held accountable for, the legislation it passes, its top priority is making sure the party doesn’t look bad. This is the central insight of Cox and McCubbins’ book on agenda control — the majority party owes its members a shot at re-election, and part of that is making sure they talk about and advance laws that help their “brand.”

More specifically, some Republicans from blue states will probably have to vote against this amendment so it doesn’t get attached to the broader bill, and those Republicans will look bad for it and take a hit to their re-election chances. I wonder how many of these votes Democrats will make Republicans go through before McConnell decides to lock the process back down. My guess is not many.