Here Lies Regular Order (2025-2025)

[Passages]

As soon as Senators tried to do their jobs to propose amendments to legislation, their colleagues didn’t like it. So that’s the end of amendments.

by David Dayen June 11, 2025

If there was one reason Sen. John Thune (R-SD) gave for why he would be the best choice to run the Senate for Republicans, it was that he was going to bring back “regular order,” the way the Senate operated for decades until the obstructionist era, best exemplified by Mitch McConnell, rolled around.

Regular order was once described to me by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who was reminiscing about his time as a summer intern for his home-state senator Mark Hatfield in 1976. His job was to run from the Senate floor, tell his boss what amendments were being offered and what the arguments were, and prepare Hatfield to vote on them. That’s because the Senate floor was a dynamic place where legislating happened. Amendments to bills would get an up-or-down vote, and the finished product would represent the views of all the senators who wanted to shape it.

This was the vision Thune set out to recreate, and he was elected to institute something like it, so that senators would be actual lawmakers again, instead of empty suits brought in to rubber-stamp somebody else’s work.

It all sounded great until one senator tried it. Then, his colleagues came to the realization that they didn’t actually want to be lawmakers if it meant that a source of future campaign donations might get mad at them. Empty suits are much safer and more pleasant.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-11-senate-amendment-legislation-genius-act-regular-order/