The legislative process on the Senate floor is governed by a set of standing rules, a body of precedents created by rulings of Presiding Officers or by votes of the Senate, a variety of established and customary practices, and ad hoc arrangements the Senate makes to meet specific parliamentary and political circumstances. A knowledge of the Senate's formal rules is not sufficient to understand Senate procedures, and Senate practices cannot be understood without knowing the rules to which the practices relate.

The essential characteristic of the Senate's rules, and the characteristic that most clearly distinguishes its procedures from those of the House of Representatives, is their emphasis on the rights and prerogatives of individual Senators. Like any legislative institution, the Senate is both a deliberative and a decision-making body; its procedures must embody some balance between the opportunity to deliberate or debate and the need to decide. Characteristically, the Senate's rules give greater weight to the value of full and free deliberation than they give to the value of expeditious decisions. Put differently, legislative rules also must strike a balance between minority rights and majority prerogatives. The Senate's standing rules place greater emphasis on the rights of individual Senators — and, therefore, of minorities within the Senate — than on the powers of the majority. The Senate's legislative agenda and its policy decisions are influenced not merely by the preferences of its members but also by the intensity of their preferences.

Precisely because of the nature of its standing rules, the Senate cannot rely on them exclusively. If all Senators took full advantage of their rights under the rules whenever it might be in their immediate interests, the Senate would have great difficulty reaching timely decisions. Therefore, the Senate has developed a variety of practices by which it sets aside some of its rules to expedite the conduct of its business or to accommodate the needs and interests of its members. Some of these practices have become well-established by precedent; others are arranged to suit the particular circumstances the Senate confronts from day to day and from issue to issue. In most cases, these alternative arrangements require the unanimous consent of the Senate — the explicit or implicit concurrence of each of the one hundred Senators. The Senate relies on unanimous consent agreements every day for many purposes — purposes great and small, important and routine. However, Senators can protect their rights under Senate rules simply by objecting to a unanimous consent request to waive one or more of the rules.

Generally, the Senate can act more efficiently and expeditiously when its members agree by unanimous consent to operate outside of its standing rules. Generally also, Senators insist that the rules be enforced strictly only when the questions before it are divisive and controversial. Compromise and accommodation normally prevail. Senators exercise great self-restraint by not taking full advantage of their rights and opportunities under the standing rules, and often by agreeing to unanimous consent requests for arrangements that may not promote their individual legislative interests. But the standing rules remain available for Senators to invoke when, in their judgment, the costs of compromise and accommodation become too great.

Thus, the legislative procedures on the Senate floor reflect a balance — and sometimes an uneasy balance — between the operation of its rules and the principles they embody, on the one hand, and pragmatic arrangements to expedite the conduct of business, on the other. The interplay between the principles of the Senate's standing rules and the pragmatism of its daily practices will be a theme running throughout the following sections of this report.

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