Tables turned

The Senate was regarded in the 108th and 109th Congresses, as well as many others, as the graveyard of House legislation.
Bills would pass through the lower chamber, then languish for a few months before being killed by the upper chamber.

There were exceptions, such as legislation to reform litigation over asbestos-related claims; Republican House leadership refused to take action until the Senate had passed a bill. Their thinking was that it would be a waste of time and energy getting a controversial measure through the House only to see it demolished in “another place.” The asbestos reform legislation, though, never made it to the House, much to the dismay of then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

But this was an exception that proved the general rule that bills started in the House and were taken up only afterward by the Senate.

The same legislating pitfalls exist today in the 110th Congress, but the Democratic majorities appear to be handling them differently. True, House Democrats set off at a rapid pace and passed a number of bills in their first 100 hours to fulfill election promises. True, too, these bills, such as the minimum-wage hike, followed the customary path into legislative limbo, and will probably emerge as parts of other legislative vehicles  — a minimum-wage hike is attached to supplemental funding for the Iraq war, for example.

But there is greater coordination between the House and Senate now than there was among Republicans, and nothing so obviously antagonistic as the mutual enmity between Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa.).

In consequence, more legislation is being initiated in the Senate. A case in point is the Senate’s bill this week that would allow the Food and Drug Administration to monitor drug safety better. What gets through the Senate can be rammed through the House, but not vice versa. So Democrats appear to have decided that the Senate is the more productive starting point for legislating much of their agenda.

Naturally, there are knock-on consequences, not least on K Street. When the House is a legislative launch pad, K Street gets a good look at the things it does not like in legislation and then undertakes strenuous and well-focused lobbying to kill or dilute the measure in the Senate.

Now, however, the House is not providing markers for lobbyists in this way, and K Street has less to work with. Whatever emerges from the fine filter of the Senate is far more likely to get through the broad gauge of the House.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that the change in the political tide last November should reverse the legislative flow. But it is intriguing to see the new majority deal so differently with the Senate’s consistent tendency to be a harder place to pass bills.