“The Republicans? They’re just the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.”

-variously attributed (usually to former Speaker Tip O’neil)

There’s really nothing quite like a good inter-chamber standoff on the Hill. Most of the time, I think, inter-chamber conflict is overstated; many of the disputes are partisan rather than chamber, and the chamber leaders tend to have good bargaining relationships. But when things break down, they can really break down. And that’s when you can start seeing some real fireworks, as staffers speak their minds and/or defend their respective institutions.

Now, the current politics of the payroll tax — with the House Democrats and most of the Senate pitted against most of the House Republicans —  isn’t a strictly House vs. Senate issue. A classic inter-chamber fight would have the same party in control of both House and Senate, mitigating the partisan dimension.  And we’re nowhere near the inter-chamber acrimony of the early 90’s. But many of the underlying structural and institutional factors that create classic chamber disputes are visible here, and thus it’s worth reviewing what exactly those factors are. To wit: why do two legislatures, democratically-elected by the same nation, regularly not see eye-to-eye on public policy?

Let’s break the factors into three categories: structural, institutional, and social-cultural.

Structural Factors

1. Different Member time horizons. Representatives face re-election every two years; Senators every six. As the Founders well-knew when they intentionally created this arrangement, this would put the Representatives much closer to the short-term passions of the voters, in two ways: first, new Representatives would be elected in response to temporary popular passions, while those same passions would pass over Senators not up for election; second, existing Representatives would need to more closely monitor, relative to Senators, the temporary popular passions of the people as they considered how to beset represent their constituents. Representatives are, on average, more attentive than Senators to short-term constituent positions and concerns. They tend to go home more often, they are less likely to reside in Washington, and the often dedicate a larger percentage of staff to constituent relations.

2. Different electoral cycles. This follows from the time horizons, but isn’t always appreciated. All of the Representatives are up for election next year, but only 1/3 of the Senate seats will be contested. Neither of those facts are products of the length of the term; we could elect half of the membership of the House each year, and we could elect all Senators every six years. There are two upshots to the existing arrangement. The first is compositional: only 1/3 of the Senate is composed of people elected in 2010, but the entire House was elected then, including a sizeable number of freshmen. The second aspect is prospective:  every Representative will stand election next fall, and waiting for each of them will be an opponent who is both cognizant  — and constitutive  — of the prevailing popular passions.  Not every Senator will face that test. And the entire Senate will never face that test at the same time.

3. Different constituencies. This is more or less self-explanatory, but there are a couple of sub-points here. First, there’s the Madisonian idea of larger constituencies producing more moderate Members, due to localized extremism that is washed out in aggregation. But there’s also the question of district construction in the House — i.e. gerrymandering — that is not a factor in the Senate. House districts drawn to protect incumbents may end up producing more ideologically extreme Members on both sides, while still tending to wash out the vote at the statewide Senate level.

The Founders institutional solutions for their normative desires didn’t always work out, but these, for the most part, did. The famous analogy is the Senate as  the “cooling saucer” for the “hot tea” produced in the House, which is allegedly how Washington explained the chambers to Jefferson upon his return from France, having missed the Constitutional Convention. As Madison wrote in his convention notes, “the use of the Senate is to consist in its proceedings with more coolness, with more system and with more wisdom, than the popular branch.” One intriguing aspect of this that is relevant right now is that the “Senate as saucer” theory implies House action and Senate resistance, which naturally fits with the inertia of the federal legislative process. But Madison doesn’t contemplate the opposite: Senate demands for action and House resistance. What happens when the hot tea has the inertia of inaction on its side?

Institutional Factors

1. Majoritarianism vs. consensus. The Rules of the House and the Rules of the Senate strongly influence policy outcomes in each chamber. Most people are now familiar with the key difference: the House is structured to allow a majority to work its will; the Senate is structured as to require supermajority consensus for positive action. This goes beyond the issue of the filibuster in the Senate. For example, House rules allow the majority to easily alter the rules, which in turn makes controlling the amendment process quite trivial. In the Senate, on the other hand, special rules cannot be written by the majority, meaning that the amendment process is usually negotiated by unanimous consent, which gives the minority much more leverage over the substance of the deliberations.

2. Leadership power. While it’s true that the power of the leadership ebbs and flows over time in the House, in general the backbench Representatives have less individual institutional power in the House than in the Senate. Part of this is simply a numbers game: less Senators means greater opportunity for less senior Members to hold powerful committee slots. But it’s also a product of the rules (for example, consider how important unanimous consent agreements are), the structural features of the chamber (i.e. staggered time-horizons) and the chamber culture. The party caucuses in the House usually have an easier time keeping their backbenchers in line, and they can usually afford to lose a few. In recent decades, this has grown more stark, as leadership power has increased in the House while decentralization has perhaps individual power in the Senate.

Remember, these factors are independent of the structural factors. Even if both chambers were composed of Members chosen by identical electoral systems, these factors would create a situation in which the partisan majority in the House could routinely pass its legislative agenda in a pretty clean form, while the Senate would need to accommodate wider points of view, if it could pass the legislative agenda at all.

Social-Cultural Factors

1. Citizen perception. It may be the case that citizens have different preferences for Representatives and Senators. That is, an individual voter might choose one candidate for House, but would not choose the same candidate for the Senate. I don’t have any empirical evidence for this (though it probably exists), but there’s an easy theoretical circumstantial case to be made: the Senate has a set of responsibilities that the House does not have — judicial and executive branch nominations; treaty ratification — and voters might weigh these responsibilities when assessing candidates. If this is the case, then you might find that, independent of structural and institutional factors, Representatives and Senators elected by identical constituencies might not agree on policy, if those policy disagreements correlate with voter choice discrepancies for the respective offices.

2. Chamber patriotism. There’s an old joke on the House side of the Capitol that involves a Representative winning election to the Senate. It varies in its telling, but the punch line is always  and now the average IQ of both chambers has increased.  It’s a joke that can be retold often: historically, about 30-40% of Senators in any given Congress had previously served in the House. Of course, as I wrote in this blog post, the joke is hardly ever told on the North side of the Capitol; the number of Senators who go on to serve in the House is very small.  The last Representative to have previously served in the Senate was Claude Pepper, who served in the Senate from 1936 until 1951, and in the House from 1963 until 1989.

What independent effect might this have? It’s just speculation, but my guess is that in a situation where you have two aggregate groups that are ostensibly equals in terms of power, but are structurally designed such that most individuals would prefer to be in one rather than the other and that virtually all individuals who change groups go one direction, you are bound to occasionally end up with the dual emotions/feelings of superiority and jealousy. And those two feelings can be powerful players in political outcomes, independent of the structural and institutional factors that gave rise to them.