Organizing the Senate
The Senate ended weeks of uncertainty yesterday when it approved an organizing resolution for the 117th Congress. The breakthrough came after Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced that they had reached an agreement [1] on how to share power in the evenly divided Senate. While Schumer replaced McConnell as Senate majority leader last month thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote, his fellow Democrats had not yet assumed control of the Senate’s committees or officially appointed its principal officers (i.e., the Secretary of State, Sergeant at Arms, Doorkeeper) – all of which are typically routine transitions whenever partisan control of the Senate changes hands. The Senate’s approval of an organizing resolution (S. Res. 27 [2]) cleared the way for subsequent passage of resolutions making majority committee assignments (S. Res. 28 [3]) and minority committee assignments (S. Res.