One of the most frequently asked questions about Senate procedure these days is, WTF with these "holds?" Or more accurately, "How come Harry Reid blew off Chris Dodd's hold on the FISA bill, but Tom Coburn gets to have 100 bills on hold and nobody bats an eyelash?"

Well, aside from the fact that eyelashes are, in fact, now batting on the Coburn holds, it seems clear that not all holds are created equal. Here's my attempt to explain why. I tried making this more formal, but it just kept getting bogged down. So here it is, quick and dirty, pretty much the way I discussed it with a friend in e-mail.

Holds, like everything in the Senate, actually have a lot of moving parts. When you put a hold on a bill, the Majority Leader does a private mental calculus, sometimes informed by other political intelligence, whip counts, outright threats, or what have you, and sometimes not.

It goes something like this:

A Senator tells Reid (or tells McConnell to tell Reid) he wants to put a hold on a bill.

Reid asks himself whether enough people give a shit about the bill for him to spend the amount of time it's going to take either to: 1) figure out how many Senators give a shit, or; 2) go through the process of voting on it despite the hold.

Why might Reid want to go through the process of voting on it despite the hold? Well, he might not want to, per se, but the job of Majority Leader in the Senate is different from that of Majority Leader in the House in that in the House, bills come to the floor backed by a decision of a majority. That is, bills that come to the floor under a rule have already had a vote in which some majority has said they want it there. So majorities routinely tell the minority that it's tough luck if they don't like it, it's coming anyway. In the Senate, the normal mode of bringing something to the floor is by unanimous consent.

That's where the hold comes from. It's just an indication to the Majority Leader, whose job it is to keep the schedule moving, that a Senator will, if necessary, object to a unanimous consent request to bring the bill to the floor.

Now, that's not the only way bills get to the Senate floor. It's just the preferred way. Because if you have a unanimous consent agreement, you can build the equivalent of a House rule into it -- how much debate time will there be, how many amendments, which ones, and so forth. But if you don't have such an agreement, then everything's under the Senate's very open debate rules, including the possibility of a filibuster. If the Senate agrees to a unanimous consent agreement limiting debate time before bringing a bill to the floor, it can't be filibustered after that. Without the agreement, there's a danger of filibuster.

So if one Senator says he'll object to a unanimous consent agreement, it's also an implied signal that if the Majority Leader brings the bill to the floor anyway, the objecting Senator may filibuster.

Now the Majority Leader starts calculating. One Senator filibustering all by himself is a pain in the ass, but nobody can stay on their feet forever. And if the filibustering Senator sits down and stops talking, the floor is open to make a motion that the Senate immediately proceed to a vote. So the next question is, does he have allies? Will they also stay on their feet for hours or even days at a time if necessary? How many allies are there? Enough so that nobody will really even have to work all that hard, and can just take, say, a two hour shift and keep the debate going forever? Or more importantly, does he have so many allies that the Majority Leader would lose a cloture vote? In considering this, the calculation has to include not only how many allies the Senator has on the substantive issues, but also how many Senators would support the filibuster just to screw with the Majority Leader? Or because they have a hold on something too, and need the other Senator's support for it?

The other calculation is about time. If the schedule is busy, and especially if there are any deadlines looming, even a failed filibuster with no allies at all can ruin your week. If the Majority Leader can't get a unanimous consent agreement, his only other choice if he wants to move the bill is to make a motion to proceed to consider. That's just a motion that the Senate start debate on whatever the bill is. The problem is that the motion to proceed is itself subject to a filibuster. So the same calculations have to be made.

Even if the Senator is almost entirely alone, getting a bill to the floor is a pain in the ass. Because the motion to proceed is subject to a filibuster, the Majority Leader will make the motion and then immediately file a motion for cloture on the motion to proceed. That's because a cloture motion must, by rule, wait two days before there can be a vote on it. So it's two days from making the motion to proceed before you can even have a vote on whether or not to vote on that motion to proceed. Then, even if you trounce the objecting Senator in the cloture vote, the rules also allow up to 30 hours of post-cloture debate, if the objecting Senator(s) choose to claim them. So all told, it can take 78 hours of Senate time to overcome the objections of a Senator with a hold. And that's just to get to the start of debate on the bill, which will itself then be subject to a filibuster. As would all amendments to the bill.

If the objecting Senator is still making a stink, you'll want to file for cloture on the bill, too, which means waiting the same 78 hours to get that over with. So it can take a full week of the Senate's time to get to a vote on a bill that's being held -- and that's only if there are no amendments to it. If there are amendments and you file for cloture as soon as the actual bill's debate starts, it can have the effect of precluding debate on amendments, because once cloture is invoked on the bill, that ends debate, including debate on amendments. And some of those amendments are going to be things you and your colleagues want to vote on. You might even find that if you file cloture right away, some Senators who have important amendments but oppose the filibuster will vote no on cloture anyway, just so that they can get a chance to offer and debate their amendments. So you can't file cloture right away. Instead you have to let debate on the amendments begin. And if the objecting Senator just wants to blow up the whole thing, he can filibuster the amendments, and then again you take three days to get to a vote on that amendment. And so on, and so on, and so on.

Of course, someone in the position that Senator Dodd was in last December might want to filibuster the motion to proceed, and filibuster the underlying bill at the end of the process. But he wouldn't want to filibuster his own amendment to strip the immunity provisions from the FISA bill. In fact, a lot of Senators who opposed Dodd's amendment and supported the bill probably wanted to file cloture on the whole bill right away, so that very few if any amendments could have been considered. In the negotiations preceding consideration of the bill, then, that provided leverage for the other side in getting concessions back from Dodd. For instance, the 60 vote requirement for passage of certain amendments might have been something that Dodd found he had to agree to, just to get the other Senators to agree not to file for cloture on the whole bill right away, thereby preserving his opportunity to offer his immunity-stripping amendment.

So the rules actually don't allow a single Senator to simply block a bill forever just by putting a hold on it. But the practical effect of a hold and the threat it implies -- depending on how many allies the Senator has to help him hold the floor -- is that the Senate may have to spend weeks on end dealing with this one bill and its amendments. And if it's a dumb-ass bill that nobody really needs to pass, even if it would be nice to have it, the Majority Leader's mental calculus on the question of should he tell the holding Senator to go jump in the lake, is an immediate "no." It sucks, but it's better just to "honor" the hold and not bother with the time they would waste pushing this bill through. That's the case with some of what Coburn held. Everybody wanted to pass them, they were very popular (i.e., not "dumb-ass" at all), but ultimately nobody wanted to spend a whole week on it.

With Dodd and FISA, the situation was different. A large majority of the Senate wanted to pass it, didn't much care if it took two weeks to do it, and felt it was a reasonable trade-off to have to do it, since the Protect America Act was "expiring" and they'd just have to bite the bullet and be bored for two weeks.

Once that became clear, the question was whether Reid should take the responsibility of making the motion to proceed, or whether he should refuse on principle, only to see Rockefeller make it and win it over Reid's objections (assuming he really was opposed to it). Staying on top as Majority Leader is a delicate balance. The Senate Democratic Caucus is relatively small, and it's filled with egos who all believe they could and should be Majority Leader instead of you. So you want to avoid situations where sizable majorities of your own caucus side with someone else and override you because they perceive you as standing in the way of their voting on a bill that they think will save their asses from Republican attacks. If you get between them and the magic potion they think will win them reelection, they will find themselves a Majority Leader who won't do that to them.

So Reid counts the votes, sees that it's inevitable that this bill is coming to the floor in three days or less, and he can either sacrifice his leadership position on that altar, or read the writing on the wall and move it to the floor and vote against it if he doesn't like it.

And that's the story of the Senatorial hold.

But keep in mind that that whole thing is too complex for any traditional media reporter to write about. No editor would ever give a reporter that much space to explain something that complex, when he's supposed to be covering the actual bill. Instead, it's much easier to just tell people that a hold can magically keep a bill off the floor forever, since in the overwhelming number of cases, that's what the practical effect of it looks like from the outside. So people get used to believing that, and then are stunned when a hold they actually favor goes the other way.

And that's why blogs were invented, and people like them better than newspapers. The end.