The Senate is known as the world’s greatest deliberative body, but lately it’s not debating much and is largely holding party-line votes on nominees for the administration and the judiciary, a NOTUS review of Senate voting patterns shows.
NOTUS examined hundreds of roll-call votes taken in 2021 and 2022 under a Democratic trifecta and in 2025 and 2026 in Republican-controlled Washington and found that the Senate is voting more frequently on Cabinet and judicial appointments than on legislation, regardless of the party in power.
Data from the Congressional Research Service shows that nominations made up less than 20% of the total roll-call votes prior to 2013, when the Senate lowered the threshold to a simple majority for most federal judges and executive branch nominations. By the end of 2024, that number topped 60%.
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“There has been a decades-long transformation of [the Senate],” Casey Burgat, a politics professor at George Washington University, said. “There’s been a huge atrophying of the lawmaking power of individual senators and of the Senate as a whole.”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), the Democratic whip who has served in the Senate for nearly 30 years, told NOTUS that the increased focus on nominations has detracted from legislating.
“It’s gotten to the point where we spend most of our time talking about nominations,” Durbin said.
Gregory Koger, a political scientist who studies the Senate’s 60-vote voting threshold, the filibuster, said that greater polarization is responsible for the meltdown in the Senate’s ability to pass laws. The number of competitive seats across the country has shrunk to historic lows, according to the Cook Political Report.
Lawmakers no longer have to compete as aggressively for moderate voters or members of the opposing party, and bipartisan collaboration has become a liability rather than an asset in tenuous primaries, Koger added.
“Increasingly there’s a downside risk from an angry, disappointed partisan base, on both sides, for compromising,” he said.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia), who chairs the Senate Republican Policy Committee, agreed, telling NOTUS that bipartisanship has declined throughout her nearly 12 years in the upper chamber.
“There’s certain issues that we can go bipartisan, but most recently, even those are getting shut down. Everything is about a political advantage,” Capito said.
Senators are instead spending more time voting on partisan proposals offered by the minority party. The NOTUS review of roll-call votes found that Senate Democrats have forced more than 30% of the roll-call votes in 2026 –– up from under 20% in 2025, which was similar to the number of Republican-forced votes under Democratic control.
“Your whole goal is to make them look bad,” Burgat said. “To not help, to obstruct, because that’s what your voters want. It helps you as a party maintain a better electoral strategy heading into campaign season, and it’s always campaign season.”
Work on bipartisan legislation has been steadily decreasing since 2009. Republicans, then led by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), decided it would be politically advantageous to block any legislation and nominees proposed by then-President Barack Obama.
That strategy was followed by a change in the Senate’s nomination process, lowering the 60-vote threshold to a simple majority vote for most federal judicial nominees. Later, Republicans eliminated the filibuster for nominees to the Supreme Court.
In 2025, Senate Republicans voted to make it easier to confirm executive branch nominees in groups under a simple majority. Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced in April that the Senate had nearly cleared President Donald Trump’s nominations backlog and that leadership was set to begin a four-week push to confirm more before summer recess in August.
“It’s not like that then makes the Senate more efficient so it has more time to legislate,” Koger said. “It’s mostly so they can approve more nominations.”
A decline in bipartisanship has also led to both Democratic and Republican majorities legislating more aggressively through the budget reconciliation process over the past two decades. The maneuver allows leadership to bypass the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster and pass tax and spending priorities primarily along partisan lines.
The Senate has voted on five approved reconciliation bills since 2017 and 12 in total since 2001, including two so far this year alone. The upper chamber passed its first major party-line bill in 1980 and passed only nine over the following two decades, according to the Senate’s list of “vote-a-ramas.”
Steven Smith, a political scientist who studies the Senate, told NOTUS that today’s expanded use of the reconciliation tool began back in 2001, when congressional Republicans employed the process to pass the first wave of tax cuts under then-President George W. Bush.
“It’s gradually blossomed into one or more reconciliation bills carrying the bulk of a president’s agenda,” Smith said. “Between reconciliation, appropriations and nominations, you get a very big chunk of the roll-call voting record in the Senate.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), a moderate Democrat who has led bipartisan negotiations on issues like infrastructure, health care and foreign policy since she joined the Senate in 2009, told NOTUS that she’s seen a breakdown in good-faith talks on Capitol Hill because of the uptick in party-line bills.
“It is not a good way to approach getting things done around here,” Shaheen said. “It becomes very, by design, partisan. It doesn’t allow for debate and for working together.”
The expanded use of party-line legislating has contributed to the declining power of the Senate’s committees. In years past, individual senators from both parties negotiated legislation in groups behind closed doors. Now, Senate leadership drives bills forward, injecting a more partisan lens to the process.
“Ultimately the [outcome] of these monster reconciliation bills, that try to impose as much of the president’s program as possible, is that it limits the number of members who have a meaningful role in designing public policy,” Smith said.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the president pro tempore of the Senate, where he has served for more than 45 years, pushed back on the assertion that the number of party-line bills has increased. He said reconciliation has always been the go-to when it doesn’t seem like a bill can get to 60 votes.
“As far as reconciliation, it hasn’t changed much,” Grassley told NOTUS. “I think we’ve had ‘vote-a-ramas’ ever since I can remember.” Vote-a-ramas are a long series of amendment votes tied to reconciliation bills.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), who is in line to take over as chair of the Senate Budget Committee following the death of Lindsey Graham, said that he expects the upper chamber will continue to use the maneuver.
“It’s probably going to be the only tool because Democrats are completely obstructionist and being obnoxious and not doing what’s in the best interests of the nation,” Johnson said.
But the scope of what is included in those spending bills has expanded. For example, Senate Republicans funded the Department of Homeland Security using reconciliation after bipartisan negotiations to fund the agency fell apart. According to the Congressional Research Service, it was the first time senators replaced the traditional appropriations process with a party-line bill after they couldn’t secure funding for certain government agencies.
The unraveling of the appropriations process followed two of the longest government shutdowns in history and could drive majorities even further toward partisan funding efforts. Appropriations measures are still considered some of the few must-pass bipartisan bills and are negotiated in committee.
“That is not how it works,” Durbin said about bypassing committees for party-line bills. “We’ve ended up with a situation virtually where it’s used for everything. We’ve pushed the lever way too much.”
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