Seniority System Quotes

I am a junior senator, ninety-fifth on the seniority list, and so by Senate standards, my office in the Russell Senate Office Building is less than splendid.

The only way to get anywhere in Congress is to stay there and let seniority take its course.

The longer you're here [in Congress] the better seniority looks.

If a legislator is safe from competition, or if he represents groups with the same economic and political beliefs, he does not have to change his ideas or respond to the needs of the broader population. He can rest content with a mediocre, absentee performance knowing he will be returned to office. And as he is returned year after year the seniority system gives him immense control over people from other parts of the country whose views he need not heed at all.

We started tearing down the seniority system on Capitol Hill. All of that begins in the '70s. It accelerates and continues in the '90s, and it's going on to this day.

I think the speaker of the House in Congress should be like the Massachusetts speaker: all-powerful. He should appoint committee chairmen and remove them if they stray from the party line. He should be answerable only to the caucus, which can remove him at any time. I'd throw the seniority system out on its ear in Congress.

Some day, the public might actually revolt against the undemocratic system of seniority that allows Congress to keep the old ways of Washington ingrained into the culture of Congress.

If the notion on this is we're going to elect somebody to the United States Senate so they can be the 100th least senior person in there and be polite, and somewhere in their fourth or fifth year do some bipartisan bill that nobody cares about, don't vote for me.

Though the first admission to government employment be decided by competitive examination, it would in most cases be impossible that subsequent promotion should be so decided: and it seems proper that this should take place, as it usually does at present, on a mixed system of seniority and selection.

Everyone believed the Senate could not really be led. It used to take so long to rise up through seniority. In two years Lyndon Johnson is assistant leader of his party. In four years he is the leader of his party.

In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.

An ... important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service…

The House of Representatives is ruled by a small group of old men.

Now things have changed for the better. Our reforms end seniority and tenure so we can hire and fire based on merit and pay based on performance. That means we can put the best and the brightest in our classrooms - and we can keep them there.