August 23, 2011
Interviewed by Senate historian Donald Ritchie
The following is an excerpt from the oral history interview with Senator Edward E. (Ted) Kaufman describing the daunting task of presiding over the Senate.
Transcript:
RITCHIE: You’ve mentioned a couple of times presiding over the Senate, which freshmen senators spend a good amount of time doing. What’s it like presiding in the Senate?
KAUFMAN: Well, you know, it’s daunting because you’re there and the C-SPAN cameras are on, and these are very complex decisions that go on. First, beginning, you’ve got to make sure that you recognize a senator you’ve got the right state the senator is from, just to start with. Then what they say, and who you recognize, and how it works and the rest of it. You take a slight orientation course and then you’re into the mix and you’re presiding. What I learned very quickly, and I think most of my colleagues learned very quickly, is that if you listen to that voice that’s sitting right in front of you [the Senate parliamentarian and his staff], you will avoid having any problems.
It is daunting when you start. It is truly daunting because so many things can happen and you don’t know how to deal with them. There are so many questions. And you’re on television. So it’s daunting. But after you do it for a while it gets to be not a totally negative experience. It gives you time during a very busy day to kind of join your thoughts together. But also it’s interesting to listen to the debate. A number of the positions I took—Wyden-Bennett, which was the major amendment to the healthcare reform bill put in by Ron Wyden and Bob Bennett to deal with healthcare reform, I got interested in that by hearing Ron Wyden give a speech on the floor. I learned a lot, sharpened my arguments many times when the Republicans were speaking—or the Democrats—but mostly what the Republicans were saying. I would listen to what they were saying and say, “Well, that really makes sense, but that doesn’t comport with this.”
So it was a good opportunity to do that, so I look on presiding as a very positive thing that you do. I think, as you get to be more senior—which gets to the real problem in the Senate, which is now that people are on too many committees and have too many responsibilities. I mean, when I came to the Senate in 1984, when Senator Biden was thinking about running for president in ’88, he dropped down to just two committees, and that was the smartest thing he ever did. I never felt he was constrained in any way by just being on two committees, and limiting the subcommittees, too. So when I came to the Senate, I said, “I want to be on just two committees.” When Harry Reid called me, I said I thought that would make a lot of sense. I was only going to be there for two years. I understood the substance of most of the issues on Foreign Relations and Judiciary, having dealt with them for most of the 22 years I was on the Senate staff, so I felt comfortable with that. Maybe I should get on a different committee, but I thought it would take an investment of time to learn the new issues—even though I knew most of the Senate issues, because I had been there for so long, and had dealt with them, and had been interested in them. So I just said I wanted to be on two committees. It turned out to be a great decision. I got to sit in on a lot of hearings that other people missed.
One of the problems with senators being on so many committees is they can’t go to the hearings. I remember one day something important was going on in both Judiciary and Foreign Relations and I was going back and forth between them. I can’t imagine if you had four committees and all the subcommittees on top of it. It’s a real mistake, and I spoke about this in the caucus, I spoke to everybody I could about it. What had happened, there were rules to limit how many committees a senator could serve on, but the waivers had just grown and grown. Then Senator Mark Pryor was appointed by Senator Reid, after I left, to come up with a report on that. He called me and I spent a lot of time talking with him on the phone. And now they are beginning to cut down on the waivers on the committees. I thought that was really extraordinarily important.
When you’re in Washington for only three days and you’re on four committees, and subcommittees and the rest of that, you don’t have a whole lot of time to be doing anything except that. It’s interesting, some of my colleagues thought we could schedule our way around it. I said, “Look, you’re only here from Tuesday through Thursday, and you’re on four committees, that’s not a scheduling problem. That’s trying to get ten pounds into a two-pound bag. There’s no way that can work.” One of the great things was that I actually got to sit in committee hearings. I can remember before the president made his decision about Afghanistan, Senator [Chairman John] Kerry put together a great set of hearings on Afghanistan. A number of us sat through them all. Senator [Jeanne] Shaheen was at a lot of them, and Senator [John] Barrasso and Senator [James] Risch on the other side. Senator Kerry was at every single one of them, and Senator [Ranking Member Richard] Lugar. But after the president made his decision, a number of my colleagues came in and had not been able to go to any of the hearings, literally none, and some of the things they said were based on what they read in the newspapers or what their staff told them. They never would have said that if they had sat in the hearings. So I found it to be extraordinarily helpful to have the time to be able to sit in the committees.
Disclaimer: The Senate Historical Office has a strong commitment to oral history as an important part of its efforts to document institutional change over time. Oral histories are a natural component to historical research and enhance the archival holdings of the Senate and its members. Oral histories represent the personal recollections and opinions of the interviewees, however, and should not be considered as the official views or opinions of the U.S. Senate, of the Senate Historical Office, or of other senators and/or staff members. The transcripts of these oral histories are made available by the Senate Historical Office as a public service.
