The Senate’s Essential Referees

I began my career in the Senate chamber as a page, the junior-most staff member in the body. From the start, I loved the chamber and all its arcane ways. I stayed in and around the Senate for decades, retiring as one of the body’s elected party officers.

In that time, I have observed how the quiet, often unseen role of the Senate’s teenage pages is critical to the chamber’s function. In this way, a Senate page’s job is similar to a housemaid in a wealthy prewar London home: You are expected to wake up early and set the stage for others but also hold a position that puts you near the most interesting conversations. One of those conversations occurred in 1986 when my father, then the Senate’s parliamentarian, was fired.

My dad had a famous catchphrase: “You can love the Senate, but she will never love you back.”

The Senate routinely asks its parliamentarians to make subjective judgment calls on what activities existing precedents may limit or allow. Sometimes, the policymakers publicly second-guess and even demand the removal of controversial guidance. My father, Robert Dove, was fired twice—once by the Senate Democrats in 1986 and again by the Republicans in 2001. In an odd way, the fact that both sides found his rulings untenable reinforced the role’s nonpartisan nature.

My father’s position made the Senate a family business, in a way. He joined the Senate parliamentarian’s office in 1966, and I grew up in the US Capitol in the years that followed. My parents raised all of their children to prioritize public service. Putting on a blue pantsuit and reporting to the chamber was a rite of passage.

Six months of page duties—sitting on the rostrum, filling water glasses, delivering messages, copying amendments, and roaming the building with the ultimate all-access pass—hooked me for life. The Rubik’s Cube of rules, precedents, and personalities that govern Senate proceedings is mesmerizing. Amid this complex web of procedures, a loosely organized body of 100 individuals with a gamut of backgrounds and priorities manages to produce the impossible: responsive and lasting policies that are durable in scope.

Operating in this environment, it is an understatement to describe the Senate parliamentarian’s role as unique. While it has been compared to a referee at the Super Bowl or an umpire in the World Series, the vocation is much more than a series of high-profile calls that end up on the front page of The New York Times. The parliamentarian’s role is a pillar of how our country balances political power and ensures deliberation. It’s the most visible example of the Senate’s procedural mechanisms and offers a window into how these mechanisms shape the legislative process.

The Constitution delegates to the Senate authority over its own rules, and the body regularly exercises this authority by rewriting and reinterpreting them. The Senate’s independence in this rulemaking was affirmed by the 2014 Supreme Court ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, which reinforced this separation of powers. The Court unanimously ruled that the president cannot bypass the Senate’s Constitutional role over appointments unless the chamber is in recess and unable to transact business. Despite this existing ruling, this debate will likely reignite, this time with an ideologically different administration in charge.

The Senate’s attachment to its own rules is well-encapsulated by the history of unfettered debate in the chamber, known as the “filibuster rule.” It is not a policy spelled out in the Senate’s official rules but a by-product of the body’s existing and interlocking web of rules and procedures. The only written filibuster rules are provisions that curtail debate in onerous and limited circumstances. Rule 19 of the Standing Rules of the Senate, for example, is the key underlying rule that permits unlimited debate. Rule 22 curtails it when a supermajority of senators spend several days cutting off debate through what is known as “cloture.”

The filibuster forces senators to speak—sometimes on the floor, but always to one another—to advance policies. This sets the table for negotiation and substantive bipartisan policymaking. It exists to ensure that laws will be thoroughly considered and will not necessarily be repealed when the partisan pendulum swings back. This balance is deeply beneficial for our country. Many senators arrive in Washington predisposed to limit or abolish the filibuster, but the rhetoric on the campaign trail is almost always tempered after a few years of hands-on legislating.

Bipartisan legislative dealmaking is responsible for many of the Senate’s signature achievements. Leader Robert Dole worked across the aisle with liberal lion Edward Kennedy (most notably on the Americans with Disabilities Act but on many other areas in the decades they served together). Leaders Bill Frist and Thomas Daschle worked together on national security policy in the wake of September 11, with Susan Collins assembling a bipartisan coalition to enact sweeping laws. In 2014, then-Leader Mitch McConnell partnered with Barbara Boxer to break the logjam on long-term transportation policy and forged an unlikely partnership with Democrats on tobacco and hemp policy. Senators who choose to stay in a partisan silo have an extremely difficult time making law. As Senator McConnell frequently notes: “Some Senators are here to make a point, and some are here to make a difference.”

The founders envisioned a Senate with a considered approach, including the famous analogy of the Senate’s cooling saucer to moderate the hot coffee of the House of Representatives. The Senate is one of James Madison’s “auxiliary precautions” to ensure checks and balances on untrammeled majority rule. The Connecticut Compromise—which established America’s bicameral legislature and the unique structure of Senate representation—is the most visible example of this. There is a reason it is frescoed on the wall of the Senate wing of the Capitol

To navigate this often-confounding set of rules, the body relies on a small band of staff in the parliamentarian’s office to advise the chair. To grasp how the office operates today, it is helpful to examine its beginning. In an oral history with the Senate’s historian after he had left Senate service for the final time, my father explained the origins of the office:

Well, this is a story which . . . if it didn’t happen that way, it should have. I am told that the reason there is a parliamentarian’s office is because of Vice President John Nance Garner, who, having been Speaker of the House and having absolutely no role in the Roosevelt administration, basically had nothing to do and decided to try to turn the office of the Vice President into something more like the Speaker of the House. He started making pronouncements from the chair about things that he was going to do, one of which was that when you get the normal request to go to conference, which is to disagree to the amendment and agree to a conference and to authorize the chair to appoint conferees, that he was going to take that literally and he was going to decide who the conferees were.

This caused a bit of consternation on the part of members of the Senate, which did not have a parliamentarian’s office at that point. But they did have an official, Charles Watkins, who had been journal clerk and on his own had compiled all of the procedural events, starting in 1884, that had occurred in the Senate up to that point, and kind of informally advised the chair on things. I am told that the Senate thought we need to formalize this, we need to have an office where the Vice President, in a sense, can be checked.

The parliamentarian’s advice to the chair has always functioned as a consistent check on the executive branch and the House of Representatives, but it is only more recently that the Senate has taken the extreme step of attempting to replace its referees. That is because the implementation of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 created what is now known as “reconciliation.” When the question of replacing the parliamentarian arises, it is almost always because of the thankless task of interpreting this law on the Senate floor.

The Congressional Budget Act created fast-track procedures in the Senate that circumvent the filibuster, setting the body up for partisan policy clashes decades later. As my father recounted in an interview with the Dole Institute in 2008:

The rules and precedents were not all that difficult to learn in the 1960s. . .

That all changed in the 1970s. Congress decided that a number of very vexing problems would be dealt with through procedural means. To me, probably the most important one was the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which set up a very complicated procedure for dealing with the budget.

When my father offered this warning, the parliamentarian’s role in advising the chair on rules and precedents was set to collide with majority rule. This impending tension contrasted starkly with the Senate and parliamentarian’s dynamic in earlier decades, as he explains:

Basically, what the parliamentarian was doing in the mid ’60s was confirming for Senators basically what they already knew. . .  That was not a dangerous thing. Frankly, in some respects, it was not all that interesting a thing.

I look at that office now with nostalgia. At the time I didn’t, but given the options, yes, that was a time when people just praised the parliamentarian to the skies because basically all he was doing was telling them what they already knew. I think the crucial change was the advent of the Budget Act. Arcane does not begin to describe the procedures that have been created in the Senate and continue to be created. The Budget Act contains within it this extraordinary power to change procedures in the budget resolution, a resolution which cannot be filibustered, which cannot be amended with non-germane amendments. It makes the Budget Committee a kind of House Rules Committee with regard to Budget Act points of order, which they create on budget resolutions every year. And they change. And who is supposed to understand them and interpret them? The parliamentarian’s office. As a result, people are continually surprised, not to say appalled, but the advice they get from the parliamentarian’s office with regard to the budget process. That will continue to be true.

Nearly 40 years after reporting to work in the Capitol as a teenager, I still spend time engaging with college students about the constructive role of the filibuster. Recently, in these conversations, there has been a renewed interest in the unsung role of the Senate parliamentarian. As Congress considered the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act under the notoriously arcane procedures set out in the Congressional Budget Act, the Senate parliamentarian once again became the focus of fascination and anger.

The interest in the parliamentarian’s role in the broader context of Senate procedure is positive, but the frustration is misplaced. Even when parliamentarians are swapped out, the office continues to provide consistent advice. The Senate has chosen, and continues to choose, to create and operate under vague and complex rules while delegating significant authority to interpret them.

This practice is present on both sides of the aisle. In 2021, congressional Democrats knew that a minimum wage increase and a path to citizenship for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients would not comply with the Byrd Rule in reconciliation, which limits the inclusion of provisions that are not strictly budgetary. Similarly, Republicans in 2025 understood that many of the provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would run afoul of Senate procedure and would be scrubbed out in the “Byrd bath.” However, in both cases, it was the parliamentarian’s advice that kept the legislative process on track.

It is these same frustrated majorities that try to pare back the filibuster in the interest of efficiency without realizing that the Senate’s time-intensive processes are cumbersome by design. It is the only legislative body in the world that can stop a proposal in its tracks and force meaningful compromise in order to proceed. Past efforts to impose efficiency—most notably Leader Harry Reid’s successful attempt to remove the filibuster for executive nominations in 2013—have led to more partisanship and polarization.

To those who believe that the majority should erode the filibuster under the guise of efficiency, I would quote a man who never stopped marveling at our amazing legislative system: “You can love the Senate, but she will never love you back.”

In the current political climate, the parliamentarian’s public role as the Senate’s referee will continue to rise and fall with the political tides. Collaborative lawmaking tends to smooth out procedural disagreements, while winner-takes-all partisan conflict escalates the stakes for what is ruled in and out of bounds. The most functional Senate is a place where lawmakers seek substantive engagement on policy with their allies and their adversaries, including those in the House and the executive branch, and resolve differences by voting up or down on legislation.

As the Senate’s rules continue to evolve, it is essential to recognize the parliamentarian as a human being in a role of public trust who leads a team of other qualified, but fallible, professionals providing frequently difficult and subjective guidance. As history has shown, replacing the person in the parliamentarian’s seat (as happened in 1981, 1987, and 2001) did not change the advice that the office provided nor any of the Senate’s rules. Senators should have confidence in their referee and refrain from politicizing their advice, ensuring the support they provide to the chair remains consistent and transparent. These decisions and this function are a cornerstone of the Senate’s structure and the healthy separation of powers.

Laura Dove is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where her work focuses on Congress, congressional reform, and the separation of powers.