One of the more radical moves you can make as the minority party in certain state legislatures is to absent all your members from the chamber to deny the majority a quorum. This happened in Wisconsin today, where the Senate Democrats failed to show up to prevent a vote on removing collective bargaining rights from state employees. It happened in Texas several years ago. In both cases, the majority party sent state troopers out to round up the legislators and demand their appearance (which is a perfectly legal procedural option in both states). In both cases, the fugitive legislators simply left the state.

For someone like me, the first thing this calls to mind is a question of institutional design. You see, nothing like this can happen in the United States House of Representatives or United States Senate. And that’s because both of those chambers have majority-quorums; that is to say, no minority can deny a vote on something against a majority that gets all its members to the floor.***  So what’s the point of a super-majority quorum, as there is in Wisconsin and Texas?

I can’t really think of a good reason for it. The common reason — that you don’t want a rouge majority sneaking onto the floor without telling people and passing weird stuff, or a one-quarter plus one “majority” passing stuff by duping a majority quorum on the floor — can just as easily be overcome with layover rules or agenda setting regulations.  In fact, the only reason I can see for a super-majority quorum is to allow the minority to block things by preventing the quorum.

At any rate, I don’t suspect the fugitives in Wisconsin will win. I mean, how long can you really hang out in Illinois in February before you get a nasty hankering for brats and beer?

***There is one fascinating exception to this. The 12th amendment provides that, in the case of a House selection of the President following no candidate getting an electoral college majority,  the quorum is two-thirds. Which means one piece of potential leverage a minority would have (especially a minority that controlled the Senate) would be a blocking of the vote in the House (and the seating of the VP-elect from the Senate as President).