Although they must work together to produce all legislation, the Senate and House of Representatives have very different rules, procedures, terms of election, and constituencies. These differences often cause tensions between the two bodies.
Some representatives, impatient with the many years that it will take them to achieve seniority and influence in the House, run for the Senate. In the 1940s and 1950s Speaker Sam Rayburn would try to persuade them to stay in the House, citing long lists of representatives who had gone to the Senate “and hadn't amounted to much.” Those who choose to spend their entire legislative career in the House bristle at the notion that the Senate is an “upper body,” or in any way superior. Donald Riegle (Republican/Democrat-Michigan), who served in both the House and Senate, observed that some of the older House members “detest the Senate and can always be counted upon to rise up indignantly any time someone suggests that the Senate is transgressing on House prerogatives, attempting to by-pass House rules or ‘blackmailing’ the House by attaching ‘non-germane’ [irrelevant] amendments to bills.”
Checks and balances
House members often focus more closely on the needs and opinions of their home district, whereas senators, with statewide constituencies, develop a more national outlook on issues. House members also serve on fewer committees and tend to become specialists in a few areas, whereas senators, with many committee assignments, become generalists. House rules favor the majority; Senate rules give greater leeway to individual members, whether in the majority or theminority party. These disparities often come to a head in conference committees, when senators and representatives seek to merge the Senate and House versions of a bill into a single piece of legislation.
In the spirit of checks and balances, the two houses insist upon their equality. During the 1st Congress, the House rejected a Senate plan that would have paid senators a higher salary than representatives. Members of the 1st Congress also devised the elaborate procedures by which clerks still deliver bills and messages from one chamber to the next. The clerks appear in the center door of the chamber to be announced to the presiding officer. They bow as they enter the chamber, deliver the bill to the front desk, and bow again when they leave, demonstrating through this 18th-century ritual the respect of one house of Congress for the other.
See also Bicameral; Conference committees; Congress; House of Representatives; Senate
Sources
- Ross K. Baker, House and Senate (New York: Norton, 1989).
- Donald Riegle, O Congress (New York: Popular Library, 1976)
