Majority Leadership in the U.S. Senate: Balancing Constraints By ...

the office.⁶ In an interview not long after his selection as Senate majority leader, Bill Frist (R-TN) said almost plaintively, “Majority leader sounds good…but people assume you’ve got a lot of power…. There's no power to it. You learn quickly that there's no power” (Gann, 2003, p. 72). Perhaps Mike Mansfield (D-MT) revealed the limitations of the office most directly: “I didn’t want the job. I prefer being just a senator because when you are majority leader, you lose a certain amount of independence you have when you are just a senator.”⁷

A focus on constraints, counterintuitively, reveals the full extent of power. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) added nuance to discussions of power by describing its “two faces.” The “overt” face of power consists of the more obvious forms of decision making and power exercising (e.g., the Senate majority leader using his “right of first recognition”⁸). The “covert” face of power is the ability not to persuade someone to do something they otherwise would not do, as Dahl (1961) defined power, but to prevent them from “doing something” in the first place. As multiple actors are introduced in political institutions, the covert power of one actor influences the overt power of another. In the context of the Senate, one cannot understand the power of the Senate majority leader (say, the “right of first recognition”) without an understanding of the conditions within the party caucus or the Senate that may limit the application of that prerogative.

A focus on constraints also reveals more about the nature of the Senate majority leader, from which emerge inferences about the types of leaders that have held the office and the types of leaders that caucuses (and senates and presidents) will select to lead them. Specifically, an emphasis on constraints of Senate majority leadership reveals the requirement for balance inherent in the office. As the present study unfolds, it becomes apparent that majority leadership revolves around balancing multiple constituencies on which the leader depends and to which he assumes obligations. These include: the state that elected him to the Senate, the party that designated him as its leader, the Senate as a whole, whose members entrusted him with institutional responsibilities, and the president with whom he must compete, whether under unified or divided government.