So you seem to be under the impression that the senate was where legislation was passed, since you place the tribunician intercessio strictly within the senate but then talk about vetoing bills. Legislation in the Republic was written and proposed by magistrates and carried to the citizen assemblies, especially the tribal and plebeian assemblies (the centuriate assembly formally held legislative, as well as electoral, powers, but the former lapsed at a quite early date). It was traditional, though hardly legally necessary--as tribune in 232 C. Flaminius promulgated an agrarian bill against the senatorial review--to bring legislation before the senate for debate and review prior to an actual vote, as well as for public contiones to be held debating (or supporting, depending on how you think contiones worked) the bill--no actual debate was allowed at the assembly. The tribunician veto (intercessio, "going between," a reference to the sacrosanctity of the tribune's person) applied not only to the assembly and the tribune's colleagues, but also against the actions of magistrates outside the tribunate and senatus consultum, which effectively gave the tribune the right (since the consuls ordered senatorial procedure) to veto discussion in the senate as well. But that does not imply or mean that the senate had formal legislative powers, and when we find tribunes exercising their vetoes against legislation (as, for example, M. Octavius did against Ti. Gracchus' agrarian bill) they are, naturally, at the citizen assemblies, the only place that legislation could legally be passed.

Your details on magisterial details are a little fuzzy. Collegiate veto was not restricted only to the consulship, but to all collegiate magistracies. Part of the problem with Sulla's increase in the number of elected magistracies was that the number of consuls was still only 2, which meant more people were competing for higher office and more friction was likely to occur. But another part was that more colleagues at each level below the consulship meant more chances for conflict between magistrates of the same level, who could prevent action by any of their colleagues. Collegiate veto was rarely exercised, and when it was it appears usually to have been the consular veto, but nevertheless it was not restricted to the consuls. Indeed, the tribunes (again, using M. Octavius as an example) could veto their own colleagues.

Was it that hard to ensure that one, single person from your faction was elected a Tribune, so that you could veto the kinds of bills you did not want?

So with this statement you're implying a model of the Republic which is heavily debated right now. In 1984 Fergus Millar published a very influential article called "The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic" in which he said that basically Polybius' model of a tripartite constitution was essentially accurate, and that the Republican voting assemblies held a great deal more independent power than had previously been supposed. Prior to Millar the prevailing model had been one of strict, hierarchical top-down control, whereby the senatorial class exercised strict control over the voting assemblies via their networks of clients, and that all political power existed within the small circle of nobiles, with the citizen assemblies existing more or less as smoke-and-mirrors. That clientage model was already breaking down (Brunt dealt it some pretty major blows, and assaulted the reliance on prosopography that supported it), but Millar's article dealt the clientage model's death blow when it came to our understanding of the political ideology of the Republican constitution, to use the common shorthand. Against Millar, sometime later, Mouritsen published Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic in which he tried to demonstrate that though the clientage model was thoroughly obsolete nevertheless political power was concentrated in the hands of the nobiles, as a result of the inherent unfairness of block voting, the economic, temporal, and spacial limitations on the ability of most voters to assemble en masse, and the general lack of awareness of and interest in politics that Mouritsen saw in Roman society at large. Mouritsen's argument has helped sober perception of Millar's (especially since as time went on Millar got more and more taken away with his argument, eventually calling the Republic a "democracy" when he had explicitly stated in his original article that the Republic was not a democracy) but it's also caused some issues. Mouritsen's arguments about the difficulty that most voters had in assembling for the vote are reasonable, but he also argues that political ideology was essentially absent from the Republican system. Individuals might have had ideologies but, says Mouritsen, there was no underlying ideology in how the Republic was "supposed" to work, and in any case popular ideologies were manipulated by contiones, which Mouritsen sees as essentially rallies for one's own supporters, not true platforms for speech and debate. Pushing back on this one might read Morstein-Marx's Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic, which reveals a lot of the flaws in Mouritsen's ideological argument.

The point of all this is to say that we should not think of the Republic as being groups of senatorial "factions" (factio, after all, is a rare word in Republican politics, and is almost always negative) vying with each other constantly over personal squabbles. Certainly this happened sometimes, and some events can be explained at least in part by appeal to the infighting of personal cliques, but it simply fails as an overall framework for the political system in general. Nowhere is the ideological framework of the Republic so apparent, perhaps, as in the tribunate. The tribunes were originally empowered, the tradition tells us, during an early constitutional crisis over the rights of Roman citizens. The tribunes formally acted as elected representatives of the interests of the people, and their intercessio was couched as the expression of sovereign popular will. They held sacrosanctity not because some priest gave it to them or anything, but because the magistrates swore an oath on taking office to respect the rights of the people and their champions in the tribunes. We can see a degree of this ideological argument when examining individual incidents. Take, for example, the abrogation of M. Octavius' tribunate by Ti. Gracchus. According to Plutarch, in defense of his actions Ti. appealed to constitutional ideology, stating that the people elected the tribunes to be their representatives and champions in places and positions they had no access to, and that the moment a tribune countermanded the will of the people he was no longer a tribune at all and must necessarily be removed from his office, in the same way that a consul could be deprived of his office by a tribune as a representative of the citizen assemblies. It is unclear why exactly Octavius vetoed the vote on Ti. Gracchus' agrarian bill ("the people" is a rather nebulous concept, encompassing a lot of people with a lot of different interests), but, according to Plutarch's Ti., citing the right to the vote in particular, Octavius had implicitly violated his role as the executor of the people's will by refusing to allow them to hold a vote at all--if the vote was the manifestation of the will of the people, then how could preventing it from even happening possibly be a defense of popular sovereignty? Contemporaries, if we are to believe Plutarch, saw some of the flaws in this argument, namely that if tribunate sacrosanctity was not inviolable then theoretically the will of the people, as expressed by a tribunician veto, could be overridden. Thus Plutarch relates a story that T. Annius, before a speech ad populum denouncing him, asked Ti. whether, if he could produce a tribune to speak in his defense, Ti. would deprive that tribune of his office. Annius' argument, at least according to what Plutarch relates Ti. said in his defense, is pretty specious--Ti. argued specifically that the prevention of the vote was inherently against the popular will, and that this action deprived a tribune of his standing as a tribune--but nevertheless the ideological strain is there.

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