(A freshman Senator and an old backbencher are in the back of the Senate, discussing how to bring up a bill under the Senate’s obscure, arcane, and oblate procedures….)
“And then I can bring up the bill….??”
“No no no, it hasn’t ripened yet. You can’t [eyes bulging] rush….these things.”
“So how long do we have to wait?”
“Well technically 172 hours but any Senator can request The Dance.”
“Wait what-the Dance? What the hell’s the Dance?”
“The 172 hours can be shortened to 6 minutes IF the Majority Leader files the necessary paperwork to request permission to dance, then a pro forma vote on whether the Senate “shall seee hym Danse” (party line, nothing to worry about), yadda yadda, and then finally the Dance itself.”
“Wh-what who dances?”
“Technically any Senator but by centuries-long tradition, practically speaking, it would be the Majority Leader.”
“How does he dance?”
“I mean, he hops about a bit, nothing much to it. It’s vaguely silly that’s all. Beyond three minutes is not required and the precedents say ending as close to three as possible is the preferred form.”
“And if he just does that then my bill comes up? Seems easy enough.”
“I mean, yes technically, but again, no Majority Leader has danced the Senate Dance since the Civil War. And no Senator in their right mind would demand it, unless they were particularly incensed or if it was something truly crazy like a civil rights bill.”
“So how do I get my bill on the floor?? I have to wait 172 hours?? There’s no way around it??”
“Of course there’s a way around it. Senators do not want this thing, whatever it is, to eat up 172 hours of their time. So they simply file a Demon Motion.”
“What the hell is a Demon Motion?”
“Pretty simple: a Demon Motion deems the dance as having occurred “tho’ it hath not in fact occurred.” The 172 hours are reduced to 6 minutes, no actual dance is required.
“Ok, great, so now my bill can come up?”
“Well, although the Demon Motion itself requires only a simple majority, it is subject to a Loop Resolution if any Senator offers one.”
“A Loop Resolution?”
“Yes, a Loop Resolution loops you back to the beginning of the process. Remember the 27 steps we went over yesterday? A successful Loop Resolution would take you back to Step 1.”
“Dear God….”
“Well, technically Step 6 but practically Step 4. The first three steps are ignored the second time around, no one knows why. But it all makes sense, in a way. It’s a chance for the Senate to say, collectively, hang on a minute, I wasn’t paying attention, can we go back to the beginning? And obviously with a quite elderly assembly, the utility of such resolutions is not to be discounted. And quite naturally it takes unanimous consent to waive a Loop Resolution, otherwise there’d be no point in having it. But you need not fear, Loop Resolutions are always, always waived.”
“OK, well, that’s a relief. So now my bill can come up?”
“Well yes but obviously not in the form you originally proposed. In exchange for supporting the Demon Motion and (more importantly) granting unanimous consent to waive the Loop Resolution, the minority will demand, traditionally, that you drop a little more than half of it.”
“More than half??”
“I mean, honestly, if even little bits and pieces of your bill survive the negotiations, you should take that as a big win. Look, do you want the minority to waive the Loop Resolution or not? Because without that, the whole process never gets off the ground. It’s all quite straightforward.”
“Fine fine, if this is what it takes, to get my whole bill on the floor, and fight for what I believe, and fight for what my constituents deserve, I will do the Senate Dance myself!”
“Keep your voice down! For gods sake don’t offer to do the dance yourself, and never, ever suggest publicly that you will. It is an absolutely demeaning spectacle, you’d be tearing up centuries of tradition, bring disrepute upon the Senate…have you no love of the institution man!??”
“I don’t care, I’m doing the dance.”
“If you care nothing for the hallowed Senate, think of your own standing within the party. There are perfectly logical electoral reasons why rank-and-file Senators do not challenge the Majority Leader’s right to dance. It would be basically like stabbing your own party in the back, and that’s how it would be perceived. At minimum fundraising would dry up and I doubt if any other Senators would even bother taking your calls. You’d become a pariah. It’s career suicide, plain and simple.”
“Why don’t we just get rid of the Dance? It all seems so pointless.”
“Well that’s the modern Senate for you. Of course back in the day, the Dance functioned quite differently.”
“How do you mean?”
“Those three minutes! Ah, the way that Senators back then would pack the most incredibly artistic, acrobatic dance moves into that short a period of time! Some of the choreography of the earlier Senate Majority Leaders was apparently something to behold (though of course no recordings exist of those). That’s why I could never agree to getting rid of The Dance. It would be erasing all that wonderful history!”
“But I thought the Dance was a demeaning spectacle whose purpose is to goad the Senators into a bipartisan compromise in order to avoid the Dance.”
“Quite so, in modern practice. It’s funny really, it really has come full circle. What began as simple mockery of Irish immigrants grew into a true art form that any civilized man could appreciate. A way to celebrate the end of debate on vital legislation! Now, alas, it is a relic of a bygone age, despised and discarded. Senators no longer….[weeping]….dance…..”
“Oh damn it all- I will dance! I will study those early Majority Leaders and I will dance the best dance that the Senate has ever seen! And then every word of my bill is coming to the floor, I don’t care about the consequences.”
“Ah, that’s rather unfortunate because I neglected to tell you, I mean, I didn’t think it would get this far but, technically, under the Senate’s decorum rules, it is, technically (though quite formally)…forbidden to dance.”
“What???”
“Obviously this is an untested part of the rules because no one has ever tried to dance since this particular rule was invented, but under Rule XXLVIXLLV, subparagraph b, clause 9, it is absolutely forbidden to dance on the floor of the Senate. It’s a bit of an unintended consequence that no Senator actually meant to happen, but the rules are the rules, and obviously it’d be foolish to change them just for our own convenience.”
“So if I tried…”
“The Sergeant-at-Arms would step forward and arrest you, administer the three customary lashes with the Senate Whip, and take you to the Senate Jail and/or Willards Hotel where you will be kept until the end of the session.”
“I’ll be imprisoned??”
“Of course not, you’ll be free to come and go but you will obviously be barred from the Senate, the Senate parking garage and botanical gardens, and, indeed, historically, the entire Capitol Grounds.”
“Wouldn’t that deprive my constituents of their vote in Congress?”
“You could very well believe that, and I do think that the arguments on the other side are, strictly speaking, better, but since the Supreme Court’s ruling in US v In Re Sixteen Drums of Purified Whale Oil (1845), it’s all rather academic, no?”
“Oh god, being a Senator is the worst! Why can’t I just be President??”
“There is one way I know that might be able to get your bill on the floor…….”
[ears perk up] “There is??”
“There is. But before we go down this road, how comfortable are you with ….
…..cocaine-fueled orgies?”
—both mug to the audience—
—curtain descends—