I have a couple of things I want to say about the US Senate, so here we go, I guess.
First of all, not really an analysis, but I’ve occasionally been looking at seniority in the Senate, specifically looking at what percentage of the Senate are long-term Senators. Currently there are 19 Senators who have served at least three full terms in the Senate—Lindsay Graham is just starting his fourth, down a bit from when I first started counting. There are only 11 who have completed at least four terms, what I would consider lifetime senators. Only 35 Senators have completed two or more terms—three-fifths of the Senate are in either their first or second term, and another four Senators have served two terms plus a partial-term. That’s down quite a bit.
To analyze it a little, it seems as if there has been an increase in turnover in Senate seats—that could be for a variety of reasons (older first-term Senators being one) or could be an artifact of a small sample size, but it also could be because the power (and prestige) of being a Senator has decreased over the last forty years or so. And that turnover could continue—two Senators have already announced that they will not run for re-election, and I count ten more who will be seventy or older by 2022, none of whom (except Chuck Schumer) would greatly surprise anyone by choosing not to run again.
So what I’m seeing is a Senate with faster turnover, in which power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of ‘lifetime’ Senators who hold leadership positions, and in which it’s increasingly difficult to climb the ladder, as well as decreasingly appealing to stay only partway up the ladder. The committee chairs no longer run little fiefdoms, and the subcommittee chairs can hardly even get on TV, much less write significant portions of legislation that actually passes. An individual Senator, or even a small group of Senators, can’t get a floor vote for an amendment, even if they are third-term veterans of the place.
Which brings me to the second thing, which is the filibuster.
No Senator is going to support getting rid of the filibuster to further whittle their own individual power on the principle of getting rid of the filibuster.
However, there are a lot of Senators who would support getting rid of the filibuster in order to pass some specific policy that's important to them (for some of them, it's any policy they happen to like; for some it's only one or two hugely important things). There may be ninety such Senators, or ninety-eight. It would surprise me if there really are more than twenty Senators right now who would accept defeat on every single legislative issue they care about rather than get rid of the filibuster. But of course what those policies are will be different for each Senator. Is there any particular policy that has 50 Senators willing to ditch the filibuster in order to get the legislation they want passed? That’s the question.
The Green New Deal isn’t it. Minimum wage? Voting rights? Gun control? Infrastructure spending? Medicare for All/public option? DACA? I don’t know.
And then there's the question of whether—if it comes down to it—there are 10 Senators from the Other Party who would be willing to eat the cloture vote to let some popular legislation pass, so that the filibuster is saved for something else. That could maybe happen for the minimum wage or DACA, but I don’t think it will happen for gun control or voting rights.
I’ve written a few times about my fondness for the filibuster, as a tool of representative democracy. Seven years ago, at the demise of the filibuster for judicial nominations, I wrote:
And yet, there ought to be room—in the Senate, for crying out loud!—for individual initiative, individual prioritization, individual deals. The filibuster and the hold, which worked by threat of filibuster, allowed a Senator or a small group of Senators to demand action on a particular thing in order to make business happen. Essentially, the Majority Party has to pay off a trouble-making Senator…which of course means paying off that Senator’s constituents, that is, getting the will of (a group of) the people done in the government.
But are there actually Senators who are pushing for individual initiative, against letting (or compelling) the Party Leaders set the agendas and the providing the votes? Are all those two-term Senators interested in making the tool work? Or is the Senate just collapsing into its absolute bare essence: a way for small-population states to thwart the majority of people from democratic participation in self-government?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I am no expert, but my sense is that the issue that the issue on which fifty Senators might agree is worth ditching the filibuster is “if we don’t ditch the filibuster, the Republicans won’t pass literally anything we want to do”.
We’ll see if that comes to pass, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
“won’t allow a vote”, I meant to say there.
I don’t think there are fifty Senators who want to go on Face the Press and say “I got rid of the filibuster because the Republicans were mean.” But, as you say, if the Republicans are willing to filibuster everything, then there are definitely fifty Senators who will pick the most popular thing in their state and say “I got rid of the filibuster because it was just too important to pass [vaccine distribution funding or whatever].” Which is why, in the past, minority Parties and factions hadn’t really tried to filibuster everything.
There are problems with having a majority-rules winner-take-all Senate, but there are bigger problems with having a minority-rules loser-take-all Senate.
Thanks,
-V.
I’m adding an update here, rather than awakening the blog to post anew:
As of 2025, there are 17 Senators who have been in the house more than three full terms. That’s substantially down from when I first started looking at this question, back in 2009, when there were 26 such long-term Senators. Looking at the real outliers, in 2009, five Senators were in their sixth terms, and there were three in their eighth or ninth. In 2025, there’s only Chuck Grassley in his eighth term, only Mitch McConnell in his seventh and Patty Murray in her sixth. The next senior is Ron Wyden, who has served a partial term, four full terms and his current term for not quite as much as five full terms would be. On the other hand, 44 Senators have completed two full terms or more, which seem to be up from the 2021 number.
As for the first-term Senators, there are currently 31 of them—almost a third of the Senate are in their first term. That’s up quite a bit from a few years ago. So we’re at a Senate with higher turnover than we had back at the beginning of this century—both with more people serving for a shorter time, and with fewer of the real outliers who serve forever. I think that’s in part because we’re electing more old first-term Senators (if you start your first term in your late fifties, you are going to be less likely to serve for forty years) but that can’t be all of it, in part because the House numbers are numbers are fairly similar, even if they don’t make such nice percentages. Only around 15% of the current House have served more than 18 years, and around 26% have served six years or less.
Thanks,
-V.