LegiStorm

Summary:

The Senate “hold” is an informal practice whereby Senators communicate to Senate leaders, often in the form of a letter, their policy views and scheduling preferences regarding measures and matters available for floor consideration. Unique to the upper chamber, holds can be understood as information-sharing devices predicated on the unanimous consent nature of Senate decisionmaking. Senators place holds to accomplish a variety of purposes—to receive notification of upcoming legislative proceedings, for instance, or to express objections to a particular proposal or executive nomination—but ultimately the decision to honor a hold request, and for how long, rests with the majority leader. Scheduling Senate business is the fundamental prerogative of the majority leader, and this responsibility is typically carried out in consultation with the minority leader. The influence that holds exert in chamber deliberations is based primarily upon the significant parliamentary prerogatives individual Senators are afforded in the rules, procedures, and precedents of the chamber. More often than not, Senate leaders honor a hold request because not doing so could trigger a range of parliamentary responses from the holding Senator(s), such as a filibuster, that could expend significant amounts of scarce floor time. As such, efforts to regulate holds are inextricably linked with the chamber’s use of unanimous consent agreements to structure the process of calling up measures and matters for floor debate and amendment. In recent years the Senate has considered a variety of proposals that address the Senate hold, two of which the chamber adopted. Both sought to eliminate the secrecy of holds. Prior to these rules changes, hold letters were written with the expectation that their source and contents would remain private, even to other Senators. In 2007, the Senate adopted new procedures to make hold requests public in certain circumstances. Under Section 512 of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (P.L. 110- 81), if objection was raised to a unanimous consent request to proceed to or pass a measure or matter on behalf of another Senator, then the Senator who originated the hold was expected to deliver for publication in the Congressional Record, within six session days of the objection, a “notice of intent to object” identifying the Senator as the source of the hold and the measure or matter to which it pertained. A process for removing a hold was also created, and a new “Notice of Intent to Object” section was added to both Senate calendars to take account of objection notices that remained outstanding. An examination of objection notices published since 2007 suggests that many hold requests are likely to have fallen outside the scope of Section 512 regulation. In an effort to make public a greater share of hold requests, the Senate adjusted its notification requirements by way of a standing order (S.Res. 28) adopted at the outset of the 112 th Congress (2011-2012). Instead of the six session day reporting window specified in Section 512, S.Res. 28 provides two days of session during which Senators are expected to deliver their objection notices for publication. The action that triggers the reporting requirement also shifted: from an objection on the basis of a colleague’s hold request (under Section 512) to the initial transmission of a written objection notice to the party leader (under S.Res. 28). In the event that a Senator neglects to deliver an objection notice for publication and a party leader nevertheless raises objection on the basis of that hold, S.Res. 28 requires that the name of the objecting party leader be identified as the source of the hold in the “Notice of Intent to Object” section of the appropriate Senate calendar.