Prepared floor statement by Senator Chuck Grassley
Mr. President, there’s been a lot of talk recently on the Senate floor about secret holds.
For a practice with so much bipartisan guilt to go around, it’s interesting that the discussion has taken on a partisan tone.
Republicans are being accused of being particularly egregious offenders when it comes to circumventing disclosure requirements.
Let me just say that if any of my colleagues have holds on either side of the aisle, they ought to have the guts to go public.
It has been my policy for years to place a brief statement in the Congressional Record each time I place a hold with a short explanation why I placed the hold. The current disclosure requirements for secret holds have been discussed quite a bit lately as has my work in a bipartisan way with Senator Wyden to address this issue.
So, I think it is important that I give a little background about how we got where we are today.
After many attempts to work with the various leaders over the years on policies to make all holds public, Senator Wyden and I decided that the only way to settle this matter once and for all is for the full Senate to adopt a clear policy.
In the 109th Congress, Senator Wyden and I were successful in passing an amendment to the ethics reform bill by a vote of 84-13 to require public disclosure of holds.
That bill was never enacted, but the identical provision was included in the ethics bill passed by the full Senate at the very beginning of the 110th Congress.
You’ll recall that the Democrats had just secured a majority in both houses of Congress.
Then, in a process that has become all too familiar under the past two Democratic Congresses, there was no conference committee.
Instead, in a twist of irony, the so-called “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act” was rewritten behind closed doors by the Democrat leadership.
Lo and behold, the public disclosure provisions Senator Wyden and I had worked so hard on, and which the Senate adopted overwhelmingly, had been altered.
Keep in mind that, under Article I, section 5 of the Constitution, "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings..."
That means that the House of Representatives has no say whatsoever about the Senate=s rules.
When the full Senate speaks on a matter of Senate procedure, that should be the final word.
I want to be very clear that the current weak disclosure requirements are not the ones originally proposed by Senator Wyden and myself.
In fact, at the time, I came to the floor and criticized the specific changes because I saw that they would be ineffective.
Let me reiterate some of those criticisms that I initially aired to the Senate on two occasions, August 2, 2007, and September 19, 2007.
In the version the Senate originally passed, we allowed three days for senators to submit a simple public disclosure form for the Record, just like adding a cosponsor to a bill.
This was intended simply to give time to perform the administrative function of getting the disclosure form to the Senate floor, not to legitimize secrecy.
The rewritten provision gives senators 6 session days.
It doesn’t take over a week to send an intern down to the floor with a simple form.
The change that I find most troubling is that the 6 days until the disclosure requirement is triggered begins only after a unanimous consent request is made and objected to on the Senate floor.
That's too late.
By that point, a hold could have existed for some time, perhaps without the sponsor of the bill even realizing it.
In fact, most holds never get to the point where an objection is made on the floor because the threat of the hold prevents a unanimous consent request from being made in the first place.
The original Wyden-Grassley provision required disclosure at the time the hold was placed.
We’ve heard lately about how the minority party has used the weak disclosure requirements to avoid making holds public.
However, this change made it far less likely that majority party holds would ever become public.
Since the Majority Leader controls the Senate schedule, he would hardly object to his own request to bring up a bill or nominee.
He would simply not bring up a bill or nominee being held up by a member of his own party and we might never know there was a hold at all.
So why were these provisions changed?
I don’t know.
I don’t even know who does know because I can’t be sure who it was who rewrote these provisions behind closed doors.
I will say that the majority party should be careful now as they complain about Republicans exploiting loopholes in the disclosure requirements for holds.
Both parties are guilty of using secret holds, but you can’t blame Republicans for the fact that the current disclosure requirements are weak and ineffective.
Again, there’s plenty of blame to go around when it comes to using secret holds.
But I am hopeful that this recent attention to the problem can result in a bipartisan consensus to end secret holds once and for all.
I for one am happy to work with anyone on either side of the aisle toward that end.