Why Does The Senate Parliamentarian

And how to avoid becoming Nancy Mace

“Political science” is obviously a bit of a bullshit field, as evidenced by the “science” in the name - it would be better to describe it as, nakedly, “politics”, Aristotle style, except that given contemporary usage one would naturally assume the goal as swindling tax benefits for your wife’s horse farm and so on. “Political theory” has the unfortunate word “theory”, which means communism. “Political systems”, maybe, except, “systems”, which means you never got past the cybernetics hangover and are stuck in 1987, potentially in some kind of biosphere.

So we’re left without a good word to denote the entirely real, moderately interesting, and slightly useful stamp-collecting of political systems and how they actually work. You run across a particularly weird beetle, flightless but with vestigial wings, that seems to have evolved the ability to exercise a line-item veto of important bits of legislation - we will call them the Senate Parliamentarian.

In understanding the evolution of this rare species, the first thing to understand is that if left to their own devices, Senators will spontaneously coat themselves in a sort of protective carapace to better ingest the smell of their own farts (see figure 1).

This is widely recognized as a negative-sum; although a satisfying act of self-care, donning the fart hood prevents others from hearing your vocal exertions, which is an important part of the mating display between a Senator and his donors and constituents. However, if everyone is allowed to exercise their natural hooting instincts in full, the cacophony would render them unable to, so to speak, seal the deal. They would pass nothing and be happy, for a while, but probably be replaced by more robust ecological competitors.

Balancing these tradeoffs between pure self gratification, external grandstanding, and passing bills, is a key part of the institution of the Senate as such (as opposed to its existence as a snake-ball of individual Senators).

This is what democracy looks like

“The Senate”, nominally, constrains its members with certain “rules” so that they do not devolve into a vulgar mob of Representatives, herded like cattle from vote to vote, and can exercise their maximum individual prerogatives, while still occasionally getting something done.

The existence of “individual prerogatives” is inherently at odds with “majority rule”, so they square the circle by saying that on really important stuff like keeping the money pump running, they can deign to rule via actual up-down votes, on one bill (technically three subjects, but in practical terms usually one bill) per year. This is known as “reconciliation”. The rest of the time, you merely need threaten to start talking, and the body agrees to not proceed absent a supermajority.

The natural temptation is to declare that absolutely everything is really important, but we can all see how this is going to go - pretty soon you’re a vile majority rule body and you’ve got a herd of uncouth Nancy Mace types screening their poorly edited sex tapes in the august halls because no one has paid attention to them in the last four minutes despite their party being in power, and a bunch of Senators with no attention at all when they’re in the minority. A fate worse than death.

Come on, man

There is a paradox where they thus need to set up a rule to declare what is really important (and in fact have, this is the “Byrd Rule”), but someone needs to actually enforce it and decide what passes by majority. It can’t just be the majority leader, because muh prerogatives; it can’t be the vice president because that’s even worse - he’s only nominally involved in the Senate and will be gone in 4-8 years, barely a blink in the average senatorial career. Pipe down, whippersnapper.

So they punt, and ask the Oracle - the Senate Parliamentarian. In the grand sweep of history, is this a kind of budgetary matter, or in it incidental - do the augurs look favorably upon it? Flip some chicken bones, take a hit of the Delphic volcanic offgassing and ponder the mysteries by which Obamacare in toto is not “incidental to its non budgetary components”, but a change in Medicaid reimbursements is, whack yourself in the head real hard with a gavel, and move forward with the vote. Maybe you win the next metadecision, and hey, it is just one vote.

This is a less than elegant solution, because it admits the kind of conservation-of-power gamesmanship whereby the Parliamentarian doesn’t want to issue a ruling that will be overridden (of course there’s a super secret emergency override procedure), and, being a player in the Senate as such, they have their own interests, favors, etc. This might end up leading to a consistent partisan tilt, which we do in fact infer, which ends up giving a structural benefit to one party over another.

This kind of tilt is difficult to rectify, because as soon as you start sacking the avatars of non-majority non-rule, Nancy Pelosi has made you her bitch and you’re stuck following instructions until you build a decade of seniority to get your individual power level back up to what it was. Unless you plan on being in a position of influence in a majority-of-a-majority forever, simply sacking the Parliamentarian, or routinely ignoring them, is likely to make your long-term Senate experience significantly less pleasant.

The cleaner solution would be to have a literal oracle, a high priest, grand wizard etc. doing the deciding on an explicitly unpredictable basis on account of the interactions of the I Ching and the application of randomly selected founding era aphorisms, but being the world’s greatest deliberative body in the world’s most democratic democracy, we cannot have nice things.