Taming the Floor : Vote Skipping and Omnibus Spending Bills in the U.S. Congress

In this paper, I explore how parties exercise power in Congress. I analyze the legislative history of the annual appropriations bills over a 33-year time period to show how party leaders routinely use their agenda-setting powers to work around pivotal voters and advance their party’s interests. A primary job of party leaders is to assess whether or not the chamber floor is a friendly or unfriendly place for meeting the party’s goals. When it is friendly, leaders are likely to allow the floor to determine legislative outcomes. When it is not, they are likely to find ways to bypass the floor and find alternative means of meeting party goals. I demonstrate this point by analyzing the decisions of leaders to pass spending bills in omnibus packages rather than individually. I first present some theoretical expectations in a series of simple spatial models that illustrate how the incentives of majority parties to pass omnibus spending bills change depending on the location of pivotal voters in the chamber. I then show how the location of pivotal voters has varied over time as partisan polarization has grown, introducing two new variables to illustrate this concept: the majority-to-median distance and the majority- to-filibuster distance. I use DW-Nominate scores to identify the majority party’s median ideological position, and the distance of that position on the -1 to 1 scale used by Poole and Rosenthal to the chamber’s median voter and the filibuster pivot in the Senate. I hypothesize that leaders are more likely to adopt an omnibus strategy when this distance is larger rather than smaller. Taken as a whole, the evidence I present tells a compelling story. It suggests that party leaders create omnibus packages when the majority party’s median voter is distant from other pivotal voters. My analysis points toward the Senate as the main driver in the creation of omnibus spending bills. The combination of loose rules and a significant ideological distance between the majority party median and other pivotal voters in the chamber gives Senate leaders a particular incentive to use omnibus bills to impose discipline on the unruly Senate floor. Leaders appear to seek control over the floor by avoiding votes on contentious appropriations bills and instead wrapping those bills into omnibus packages that are hard to amend and difficult to oppose. Consistent with theories of party power, my findings suggest that party leaders can use their control over the agenda to work around the references of pivotal voters to meet party goals