Amending Senate Rules

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, my colleagues and any of the public watching the debate today know there is a great partisan divide thus far. Senator Wyden has already referred to the motion he and I are putting before the Senate. Senator Wyden, a Democrat, and I, a Republican, are joined also by Senator McCaskill, who is the Presiding Officer now, as well as Senator Collins, in this effort. It is the only bipartisan issue before the Senate this particular day. I emphasize that because I think the public ought to know that not everything in the Senate is partisan.

Senator Wyden and I have been chipping away at the informal, backroom process known as secret holds in the Senate. We have been working on this for well over 10 years. So it should not surprise anybody that we are back again at the start of another Congress, joined, as I said, by Senator McCaskill of Missouri, who was very helpful in our pushing this issue to the forefront at the end of the last Congress, and, as I said, I am pleased that we have Senator Collins onboard again.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the possibility of far-reaching reforms to how the Senate does business that have been hastily conceived and could shift the traditional balance between the rights of the majority and the rights of the minority parties.

In contrast, our resolution by Senator Wyden and this Senator is neither of those two things. In other words, it does not shift any balance between the majority and the minority.

This resolution is well thought out, a bipartisan reform effort that has been the subject of two committee hearings and numerous careful revisions over several years. In no way does it alter the balance of power between the minority and majority parties, nor does it change any rights of any individual Senator. This is simply about transparency, and with transparency you get a great deal of accountability.

I wish to be very clear that I fully support the fundamental right of any individual Senator to withhold his consent when unanimous consent is requested. In the old days when Senators conducted much of their daily business from their desks on the Senate floor and were on the Senate floor for most of the day, it was quite a simple matter for any Senator at that time to stand up and say ``I object'' when necessary, if they really objected to a unanimous consent request, and that was it. That stopped it. Now, since most Senators spend most of their time off the Senate floor because of the obligation of committee hearings, the obligation of meeting with constituents, and a lot of other obligations we have, we now tend to rely upon our majority leader in the case of the Democrats or the minority leader in the case of the Republicans to protect our rights, privileges, and prerogatives as individual Senators by asking those leaders or their substitutes to object on our behalf.

Just as any Senator has the right to stand on the Senate floor and publicly say ``I object,'' it is perfectly legitimate to ask another Senator to object on our behalf if he cannot make it to the floor when unanimous consent is requested. By the same token, Senators have no inherent right to have others object on their behalf while at the same time keeping their identity secret, thus shielding their legislative actions from the public, because that is not transparency and it is obviously not being accountable.

What I object to is not the use of the word ``holds'' or the process of holding up something in the Senate, but I object to what is called secret holds. The adjective ``secret'' is what we are fighting. If a Senator has a legitimate reason to object to proceeding to a bill or a nominee, then he or she ought to have the guts to do so publicly.

A Senator may object because he does not agree to the substance of a bill and therefore cannot in good conscience grant consent or because the Senator has not had adequate opportunity to review the matter at hand. Regardless, we should have no fear of being held accountable by our constituents if we are acting in their interest, as we are elected to do. I have practiced publicly announcing my holds for many years, and it has not hurt one bit. In fact, some of the Senators who are most conscientious about protecting their prerogatives to review legislation before granting consent to its consideration or passage are also quite public about it.

In short, there is no legitimate reason for any Senator, if they place a hold, to have that hold be secret.

How does our proposal achieve transparency and the resultant accountability? In our proposed standing order, for the majority or minority leader to recognize a hold, the Senator placing the hold must get a statement in the Record within 1 session day and must give permission to their leader at the time they place the hold to object in their name, not in the name of the leader. Since the leader will automatically have permission to name the Senator on whose behalf they are objecting, there will no longer be any expectation or pressure on the leader to keep the hold secret.

Further, if a Senator objects to a unanimous consent request and does not name another Senator as having the objection, then the objecting Senator will be listed as having the hold. This will end entirely, once and for all, the situation where one Senator objects but is able to remain very coy about whether it is their own objection or some unnamed Senator. All objections will have to be owned up to.

Again, our proposal protects the rights of individual Senators to withhold their consent while ensuring transparency and public accountability. In Congress, as well as almost anyplace in the Federal Government--except maybe national security issues--the public's business always ought to be public and the people who are involved in the public's business ought to stand behind their actions. As I have repeatedly said, the Senate's business ought to be done more in the public than it is, and most of it is public, but this secret hold puts a mystery about things going on in Washington that hurts the credibility of the institution.

This principle of accountability and transparency is a principle that I think the vast majority, if not all, of Senators can get behind. I believe the time has come for this simple, commonsense reform.

I yield the floor. Under the UC, if it is permissible to retain the remainder of our time, I do that.

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