U-nanny-muss

February 3, 2011 7:27 PM

Help me understand unanimous consent (In the US Senate)

I am really struggling with the concept of unanimous consent. Can someone break it down in a language that makes sense to me? Is it just a way to mainline bills and procedures in the Senate that would otherwise require endless debating under normal rules?

It seems like there's a formal set of rules, and then there's an entirely second subset of rules under unanimous consent (which is where the concept of holds and secret holds) come from.

So can anyone give me a clear idea of how unanimous consent works or point me in the direction of a clear explanation of it?

Thanks

posted by orville sash to Law & Government (4 answers total)

From senate.gov:

From its beginning, the Senate has transacted much of its business by unanimous consent. The Senate's small size, few rules, and informality encouraged the rise of this practice. A single objection ("I object") blocks a unanimous consent request. Even several of the Senate's early rules incorporated unanimous consent provisions to speed the Senate's routine business.

Two types of unanimous consent are prevalent in today's Senate. Simple unanimous consent requests deal with noncontroversial matters, such as senators asking unanimous consent to dispense with the reading of amendments. Complex unanimous consent agreements establish a tailor-made procedure for considering virtually any kind of business that the Senate takes up. They are commonly brokered by the parties' floor leaders and managers. Two fundamental objectives of these accords are to limit debate and to structure the amendment process. As two Senate parliamentarians wrote in the Senate's volume of precedents: "Whereas Senate Rules permit virtually unlimited debate, and very few restrictions on the right to offer amendments, these [unanimous consent] agreements usually limit debate and the right of Senators to offer amendments."

If you click on that link and repeatedly search for "unanimous consent," you'll find many more examples of how it's used.
posted by John Cohen at 7:52 PM on February 3, 2011

Best answer: Are you asking about the general concept of unanimous consent or the modern use of unanimous consent agreements?

The general concept of unanimous consent is that a parliamentary body can choose to do pretty much anything, include ignore parts of its own rules or temporarily impose new restrictions on members, so long as nobody objects.

The more specific idea of the unanimous consent agreement (and related things) relate to scheduling bills. This may sound boring, but it's a vital power -- the Senate (and House) have more business to do than they have time to do it, so lots of things can get scheduled but never happen.

There's the basic rules of the chamber, which (roughly) say that when a bill is reported by a committee, it's put at the end of the line of the Calendar of Business.* This means that under the default rules of the chamber, the Senate votes on bills more-or-less in the order that they were reported by committee, so before we can get to this big important bill that just came out of committee we have to vote on 284 boring things, mostly fiddly changes to existing programs that 90% of the chamber or the country do not give the slightest crap about. It might well mean that the Senate is just never going to get to the big important bill because debate and voting on the 284 piddly ones will take too long.

This serves as the background, default system.

What the Senate wants is a way to grab important bills that "need" to be considered now, pull them off the calendar, and vote on them in the near future. Unanimous consent agreements do this -- we agree that we're not going to vote on S1066 when the Calendar says, we're going to vote on it next Tuesday, and we agree that each side will have 4 hours, and so on.

So you have the background system trundling along slowly, and when you want to you can deal with things more expeditiously by asking unanimous consent to do so.

Holds are basically just telling the leadership that you will object to the UCA, which will kill it.

(The House deals with similar problems with its system of special rules through the Rules Committee and with consideration under "Suspension of the Rules"; the House process is much more centralized and majoritarian)

*Unless it deals with a treaty or nomination; then it goes on the Executive Calendar.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:13 PM on February 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says that "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings..."

That's the constitutional basis for this.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:48 PM on February 3, 2011

Also, remember that calendar here might not be what you think it is. It's not a day-by-day, month-by-month schedule, but more of a list of things to be done, not necessarily associated with dates. It's an older meaning of the term.
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:34 AM on February 4, 2011