In the past, the Senate primarily reviewed laws passed by the House of Representatives and judged them solely on their content. “But the senate has undergone a major development over the past 25 years,” says Van den Braak. Since 2010, cabinets no longer more or less automatically have a majority in the Senate. According to him, this new responsibility was also possible because the tasks of the Senate were not precisely defined. “Certainly the opposition parties have come to see the senate as a body with which extra pressure can be put on the government, which was not the case very often before 2000.”
Majority
Until the turn of the century, coalition parties almost always had a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, so that cabinets had less regard for the eventual adoption of the law even in the Senate. ‘But it’s increasingly common for the Cabinet to do business with the opposition in the House of Representatives to get legislation through the Senate. We now see that Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Deputy Prime Minister Sigrid Kaag need to take more account of what, for example, Attje Kuiken (PvdA) and Jesse Klaver (GroenLinks) think of the opposition. The result is that more laws are now being adopted with broad political support.’
Van den Braak says discussions about abolishing the Senate are futile because there is no constitutional majority in favor anyway. He thinks something has to change. “From a democratic point of view, can it still be argued that not the directly elected House of Representatives, but the indirectly elected Senate has the final say on bills?” He wonders.
Abolition?
In a previous publication, the professor discussed a possible abolition of the senate, but is not in favor of its abolition. “Perhaps it would be helpful after all if there was a body other than the House of Representatives to take another look at the legislation. But since the inception of the current cabinet, the Senate has rejected or referred only three proposals to the House of Representatives. During the previous Rutte cabinet, only five laws were rejected between 2017 and last year, which weren’t really of great importance.’