The Senate is broken, but Mike Lee’s reforms can repair it

Nobody knows who will be the next majority leader of the Senate, but there is more than a 50 percent chance it is going to be a Republican.

Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and others are pushing for the job. Unfortunately, there are already signs that leadership will not want to implement any of the reforms recently proposed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). The Senate is broken and in need of change. Republicans should lead that change and implement the Lee reforms.

Lee sent a letter to colleagues earlier this month in which he argued that the decision to choose a new Republican leader “is about setting the course for the Senate’s role in our nation’s future.” He suggested several reforms to “strengthen the Senate, empower individual members, and ensure that the voices of the American people are heard once more.” If the Senate continues down a path where senators lack the power to offer amendments and engage in extended debate, it will continue to be mistrusted and disliked by a large majority of Americans.

The first reform Lee proposed was to end the practice known as "filling the tree," a which Senate leaders use to block out amendments to bills. With no amendments and limited debate, bills pass quickly with little input from rank-and-file senators. Lee pointed out that when you expedite consideration of bills, the American people are marginalized. His remedy to allow for more amendments is to require a three-fourths vote of the Republican conference to permit the leader to block out amendments.

Lee’s second reform is to mandate four weeks set aside for massive omnibus spending bills if Congress can’t complete its spending bills on time. He asked that leadership map out a calendar for the spending bills, but short of that, the Senate should spend weeks on massive spending bills that they typically nowadays try to ram through in a few hours with little deliberation.

Another possible remedy, not suggested by Lee, would be the creation of points of order against bills that combine spending from the jurisdiction of different Senate Appropriations subcommittees. That would at least put some roadblocks in the way of trillion-dollar spending bills.

A third request by Lee is that the Republican Conference advance Republican policies. This seems like an easy one, yet there is resistance to any restriction on the power of the to-be-named new Republican leader. The Hill reported on Oct. 15, 2024, “North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis (R) circulated a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter Tuesday warning that some of the reforms being pushed by Senate conservatives would only weaken the next Senate Republican leader and cause the same chaos that is plaguing the House Republican majority.” Why would any senator be against the Republican leader pushing Republican policies?

There is no proposal by Lee to make it easier to depose a Republican leader, so the argument by Tillis that somehow Lee is empowering Democrats seems to be a distraction from the necessary changes needed to make the Senate better.

The fallacy is that power taken from the leader and dispersed to all members of the Senate is somehow weakening leadership. Tillis argues, “the debate among members really boils down to whether you favor a weak or strong leader model. Mike has laid out proposals that would substantially weaken the Republican leader and further empower [Senate Democratic Leader Chuck] Schumer [N.Y.], and I believe it would be unwise to go down that path.”

It is a diversion to try to make this into a partisan issue; this is more an issue of whether you think one person should have all the power, not of which party should have it.

Republicans should not be afraid of being forced to take a few tough votes because Democrats are allowed to offer amendments on bills. And reform will also allow back-bench Republicans to offer amendments and participate in the process.

It is concerning that Tillis is signaling a resistance to change before a vote has been cast for a new Republican leader. Whether Thune, Cornyn or somebody else becomes the new leader, the way they run the Senate will be far more important than the person who gets elected. Senators of both parties would be wise to listen to Mike Lee when it comes to reforming a broken U.S. Senate.

Reform will make Congress a bit more responsive to the American people and more inclusive to all members of the upper chamber. Furthermore, Lee’s reforms make a Republican leader stronger and reform a degraded U.S. Senate.

Brian Darling is former counsel for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).