THE POLITICS OF STALEMATE

...Thus, as The Post noted, "The two Democratic Parties have arrived at a nice division of function: One makes promises and the other breaks them...

...If Congress can be remodeled along these lines, it can become a truly representative expression of Twentieth Century America...

...Because of the seniority system they dominate the key committees, where the important legislative work takes place: Seventy-four per cent of House committee chairmen come from the least-urban half of the nation's Congressional districts...

...He made a trade, therefore, for something that is more important to him—a committee assignment that can bring millions of dollars for Alaskan development...

...Hawaii includes many racial minorities, but not many Negroes, and does not experience the serious racial problems of the mainland...

...Most of these pressures, which come from members of both the House and the Senate, Democratic and Republican, have centered on rules changes, such as curbing the filibuster or forcing bills out of committee, and on restructuring the seniority system, which, more than any single factor, hobbles the progress of legislation vital to the welfare of the nation...

...Arch-reactionary Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, who has introduced a bill providing for a $39 million appropriation for a James Madison memorial...

...Furthermore, unless a member of Congress comes from a thoroughly "safe" constituency, he disregards local problems only at the peril of being defeated in the next election...

...According to Pennsylvania's Democratic Senator Joseph Clark, six of the eight non-freshman Senators who voted with the Southerners on the cloture rule were given the committee posts they requested...

...The three British parties—Conservative, Labor, Liberal—are disciplined, and their decisions usually pivot around national rather than local concerns...

...There is one aspect of change about which Democratic Representative Roman Pucin-ski of Illinois, among others, is optimistic...

...I must satisfy both if I want to be elected...

...Of the 537 members of the Eighty-seventh Congress, 307 were lawyers...

...The Journal's lengthy enumeration of examples of the "criers for economy" in general and their demands for "spending" in their own districts included: l[ Senator Everett McKinley Dirk-sen, Illinois Republican, who is pressing for a new post office in his home town and Federal aid for a hospital elsewhere in his state...

...The British Prime Minister and his cabinet are all members of Parliament, the leaders of the majority party...

...A member of parliament is elected mainly because he is a member of a particular party, pledged to a particular party's program...

...What is needed even more is a continuing drive—now under way, as a result of Supreme Court action —to reapportion Congressional districts to represent more equitably the mushrooming urban and suburban population...

...But if all this service and correspondence keeps Congressmen and Senators close to their districts, it also blurs their relationship to the nation...

...Representative Jeffrey Co-helan of California, a former official of the Teamsters Union, told me that his job is little different from his previous assignment of handling grievances for union members...

...The Wall Street Journal's list of "economy-talking" legislators who are eagerly grasping for local appropriations includes at least a dozen more of the men on Capitol Hill who are most vociferous in their condemnation of "spending...

...Smathers insists that he "scrupulously avoids" taking legal work that involves the national government, but it would take a rare idealism and quality of judgment for a Senator to divorce attitudes he acquires from handling big business accounts from the action he takes on legislation in the same fields...

...His magazine articles have appeared in Harper's, Liberation, The Yale Review, The Commonweal, Harvard Business Review, and Fellowship.—The Editors TTOr the past decade or more pres-·*· sures within Congress to reform itself have been growing steadily...

...Green would also require not only every lawmaker but every government employe making more than $12,500 a year to file an annual report listing sources of outside income...

...He is under no pressures, therefore, on civil rights...

...But in practice, the prevalent excessive attention to narrow district needs all too frequently works against, rather than for, the national good...

...When the first House of Representatives convened in New York in 1789, the House comprised just sixty-five members...

...Senator Smathers is a member of the Finance Committee, which passes on tax and reciprocal trade laws...

...Senator Hubert Humphrey added a hopeful note when he observed that the attempt in the Senate to curb the filibuster won fifty-four votes this year compared with only nineteen votes ten years ago...

...there were no such welfare measures as unemployment compensation or social security...

...A European parliament operates far more simply...

...Some of the men who come to Washington to serve their country as legislators are wealthy before they arrive...

...in return the Southerners who control the Democratic Steering Committee placed him on the important Appropriations Committee...

...When they introduce legislation it is almost certain of passage...

...What, then, are the prospects for improving the sorry state of our national legislature...

...Bartlett voted with the Dixiecrats to retain the filibuster...

...Others, however, even among the wealthy, are not so conscientious...

...I've got two constituencies," one Congressman told me...

...Three hundred Congressional committees and subcommittees now grapple with complexities never dreamed of even fifty years ago, let alone in 1789...

...but only one of the fourteen who voted against the Souih-erners—Majority Leader Mike Mansfield—gained the assignment he preferred...

...Lens is the author of A World in Revolution, The Crisis of American Labor, The Counterfeit Revolution, and Left, Right and Center...

...The task of drafting legislation falls to the Executive branch, with its large staffs and easy access to the necessary data...

...The average member of Congress cannot possibly make an intelligent assessment of the flood of legislation that flows through the House and Senate...

...In the United States, according to political scientist and New Frontiersman James MacGregor Burns, "Our splintered parties set up barriers between the people and their national government, rather than simplifying the alternatives, clarifying competing party doctrines, and allowing the victorious majority to govern...

...For public consumption these men presented lofty explanations...

...Often a Congressman has only the foggiest grasp of what he is voting for or against...

...The late Senator Robert S. Kerr, probably the most powerful man in the Senate before he died last year, made no attempt to disguise his narrow state interests—which were his own personal interests as well...

...At the same time, he must make friends and win favor with his fellow-Congressmen if he is to gain their support for legislation, committee assignments, and special projects that will sustain his popularity at home...

...Waste in government," commented a high-ranking Administration official to The Wall Street Journal, "is spending in the other guy's district...

...Between fifty and seventy-five Congressmen normally have wives or relatives on their payrolls...

...But the liberal members of Congress, both Republican and Democratic, are not content to let time alone take its toll of the conservative leadership...

...Nor can a $60 billion defense and space budget or the nation's foreign policy afford to be weighted and warped by excessive concern with state or local needs...

...The average Congressman feels he has little time and perhaps even less inclination to delve into the myriad problems of national and international interest...

...a deeper realization of what it means to be a unified nation in today's world, rather than a collection of fifty "sovereign states," frequently quarreling and often engaged in selfish and short-sighted competition...

...When a party pledges a program during the election campaign, it is similarly fairly certain of passage, if the party is voted into office...

...Representative Joseph Martin and the late Sam Rayburn, then Republican and Democratic House leaders respectively, used to tell their fellow-members always to "Vote your district first...

...In his recently published book, The Deadlock of Democracy, Burns explains this phenomenon by pointing out we have two Democratic Parties (and two Republican Parties)—one, the Presidential party elected by the people as a whole, whose will is thwarted by the Congressional party, dominated by a relatively small number of Senators and Congressmen who have come to exercise veto power through their control of the dominant committees...

...In four or five years, he points out, the aging chairmen, who now impede action on liberal legislation and Congressional reform, will be gone...

...Former Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which handled railroad legislation, while his law firm back home collected $400,000 as counsel for the Pennsylvania Railroad...

...Meanwhile, the new Congressman tries to be as meek and as accommodating as possible...

...Give-and-take compromises within each party and between the two major parties acted as a tenuous bond between essentially hostile interests...

...Other new clients included Gulf Oil, Standard Oil, Western Union, Anheuser-Busch, Seaboard Air Line Railroad, and McKesson Robbins...

...Most of them comment on legislation before the House, but 3.?00 or 4,000 are requests for personal service or information...

...Inouye's vote against opening the door to civil rights legislation was influenced largely by the fact that getting defense contracts for Hawaii seemed to him more important, and his presence on the Armed Services Committee took precedence over civil rights...

...His own qualifications are by no means irrelevant, but neither are they decisive...

...Answering such letters is often the heart of a Congressman's activity...

...Some spend as much as ninety per cent of their energies gathering information from or demanding action of one Federal agency or another...

...Senator Clark stated on the floor of the Senate recently that "unless catastrophe overtakes liberals of both parties, I predict that we are within striking distance of obtaining committee control of the Senate for the liberal and forward-looking elements on both sides of the aisle...

...In many Southern constituencies—eighty-three in the last election -—there is not even a contest at election time...

...Some have come to Washington as members of relatively small legal firms which have then mushroomed into huge, wealthy establishments...

...Today Congress lives in an entirely different world...

...The educated guesses I heard from people on the inside ranged from twenty-five to fifty per cent of the 535 members...

...government intervened only slightly in economic matters...

...District-consciousness was a palatable luxury...

...At the opening of the current Eighty-eighth Congress, eight Senators from Mountain and Western states joined the Dixiecrats in opposing a change in the filibuster rule...

...The task of a Congressman or a Senator, in their view, was, before anything else, to satisfy the special demands of his constituency...

...With many Congressmen," a Washington official told me, "the salary he gets for his job is only a retainer...

...A second basic weakness in our system stems in large part from the first: Representatives and Senators from rural-based, conservative, "safe" districts and states concern themselves more and more with the narrow demands of their constituents and become less and less responsive to national needs...

...The accounting office of the government does not investigate Congress' own expenditures, as it does those of other Federal bodies...

...In four days at the end of last year's session five bills were rushed through the House appropriating $15.8 billion...

...There are few Negroes in his state...

...Congress was fashioned for another day, different in needs and perspectives from today...

...To Southerners this was a pivotal issue...

...When one of them, Senator George A. Smathers of Florida, first came to the Senate, he represented Pan American Airways and some insurance companies...

...No one questions Congress on such things except—on rare occasions—a small segment of the press...

...But Montana's Republican Congressman James F. Battin, joined by the state's Democratic Senators Mike Mansfield and Lee Metcalf, won a reversal of the original recommendation...

...The spectacle of the policies of a Democratic President, who also is the leader of the Democratic Party, being obstructed by a Democratic Congressman, acting for the Democratic majority of a committee that is the agent of a Democratic House, is one to amaze Americans and confound foreign observers...

...Why were they joined by the eight Westerners, most of whom were openly committed to civil rights...

...A Wisconsin Congressman told me he receives 15,000 letters a year...

...The inconsistency between district-consciousness and national-consciousness is rooted in the past...

...Insulated from the wars of Europe by a great ocean, the small, fragmented nation could easily survive immersed in jts own sectional problems...

...In the ensuing years his clientele blossomed to include the airline belonging to Dictator Luis Somoza of Nicaragua and the steamship line of the late Dictator Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic...

...Only 125,000 of the nation's 3.9 million population had voted for these men, and the budget they finally approved was less than $6 million dollars—approximately the amount the United States spends today every half hour...

...Representative Edith Green and Senator Kenneth Keating have recommended that all oral and written communications between members of Congress and government agencies be made a matter of public record...

...The first weakness is that Congress is heavily weighted in favor of the nation's rural—and conservative —community...

...my district back home and my peers here in Washington...

...Most historians agree that any attempt to impose rigid party systems in the early Nineteenth Century might have severed the union...

...Furthermore, no single, national party could have represented the diverse interests of the North, the South, and the frontier West...

...In the upper house, a Senator from such thinly-populated, rural states as Vermont and Nevada wields as much power as a Senator from such urban states as California or New York, with sixty or seventy times as many citizens...

...Many, rich and poor alike, like Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania and Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, have a reputation for impeccable integrity...

...Several Congressmen and Senators have also spoken up for the urgently needed reform that would abolish seniority in favor of electing committee chairmen...

...Servicing constituents is only a minor matter...

...In the last Congress these committees issued 4,000 reports, which resulted in 3,000 hours of floor discussion and filled 60,000 pages in the Congressional Record...

...Only about 125 districts are genuinely competitive...

...The original House Committee report rejected the project, claiming also that costs were "so high as to raise serious questions of its economic soundness...

...How many are involved in conflicts of interests, payroll padding, and various forms of petty graft no one knows precisely...

...A total of 268 bills were introduced, of which 118 were passed...

...The Chamber of Commerce of Billings reflected the dilemma of the three legislators when its members applauded first a resolution against "Federal spending," and then—"most enthusiastically"— the announcement that the Federal building had been approved...

...This kind of dealing and vote-trading is an inevitable concomitant of a district-conscious Congress...

...One of the reasons he cannot is that he expends so much time and energy taking care of the personal problems of his constituents...

...In 1958 he helped push through a railroad aid bill...

...But the true reasons were more down to earth...

...House Republican Leader Charles Halleck, who wants $25 million for a deep-water port in his Indiana district...

...A score of bills, with broad support in Congress, have been introduced into both houses calling for reforms which would streamline Congressional procedures, modify the seniority system, and expose conflicts of interest...

...But not all the problems of Congress would be solved by the adoption of even these reasonable changes, most of which involve its internal rules...

...The scope of the splintering process was emphasized recently by President Kennedy when he asserted that much of his program would be approved in the House of Representatives, if the Rules Committee would permit these measures to come to a vote...

...A Chicago labor leader, world traveler, and free lance writer, Mr...

...Satisfying his fellow-Congressmen, he admits, makes him more conservative than he would be otherwise...

...But the very fact that seniority has become such an intolerable burden on Congress reveals grave weaknesses in our representative system outside the legislative chambers that are less susceptible to change...

...In 1789 at least ninety per cent of our population was rural...

...It takes at least three terms," he observed, "just to learn your way around...

...Last year, for example, Congress passed a measure to build a Federal office building in Billings, Montana...

...Federal budgets now run to nearly $100 billion annually...

...As The Washington Post observed editorially: "The Rules Committee, after all, is headed by a member of the President's own party...

...an awakening among political leaders and their followers to the necessity for party discipline at the national level...

...A survey by a government agency showed that the city was already burdened with 100,000 square feet of vacant prime office space...

...It is composed of the members of both parties, with a two-thirds majority of Democrats...

...He fought for continued oil depletion allowances on the grounds that Oklahoma was an oil state...

...What is surprising," The Wall Street Journal observed, "is the extent to which, amidst the budget-cutting furor, even the loudest criers for economy still push for more spending for their own districts, states or special interests...

...Congress has the power to put these reforms into effect, and it is widely agreed that procedural and internal reforms—particularly in the seniority system—would make Congress far more responsive to the needs of a rapidly-growing, urban-centered society...

...Senator Clair Engle, California Democrat, who voted against the Dixiecrats, who has the same seniority as Bartlett, and who comes from a state many times as populous as Alaska, was passed over for this assignment, even though he applied for it...

...He won't be punished by his voters back home if he fails to make a vigorous fight...

...He is also a member of the Commerce Committee, and chairman of a special subcommittee on railroads...

...Not only does Congress function haphazardly and inefficiently, not only is it weighted toward conservatism and conformity, but its largely "safe" party membership, its lack of party discipline, and the lobbying and dealing for district advantages—often at the expense of the national interest —create a climate which invites unethical behavior and conflicts of interest, intensifying the narrowness and fragmentation of Congressional objectives...

...The membership of Congress has grown six-fold since it was established, and it must cope with eighty times the number of bills...

...The general atmosphere of Capitol Hill lends itself to this sort of thing...

...Their places, in many instances, will be taken by forwardlooking men, many of them the very Congressmen and Senators who are now leading the fight for reform...

...Senators Clark and Clifford Case have proposed a radical overhaul of Congress which would seek, among other things, to break the bottleneck in the House Rules Committee, perhaps by reviving the twenty-one day limit on the Committee's right to hold back legislation, eliminate the filibuster, get rid of much of the petty detail that weighs on Congressmen, tighten the lobby laws, require prompt reporting of travel and other expense allowances, extend the term for Representatives, and make some provision for financing election campaigns...

...Keating and a number of other members of both houses who have disclosed their stock holdings would make disclosure mandatory...

...The result is that conservatives of both parties become entrenched in Congress...

...Before he would throw his substantial support to the Administration trade bill last year he received private assurances from the Administration that there would be no increase in foreign oil imports...

...In these early days each state jealously guarded its special interests...

...A study by Congressional Quarterly indicates that of 435 Congressmen, 250 come from districts that are rural-based...

...Many others, however, are just a means of adding to the Congressman's own income...

...Preoccupation with district problems leaves little time tor deep thinking on national issues...

...The nation pays a heavy price for its lack of a true party system...

...Many of these employes earn their pay in a legitimate manner by actually putting in a full day's work...

...Freshman Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii also cast his vote with the Southerners and was similarly rewarded with a major committee assignment—Armed Services...

...Theoretically, if the needs of all the states and districts were added together they should constitute a national consensus...

...Here is the way a liberal Midwest Senator explained it to me: "Take Senator E. L. Bartlett of Alaska," the Senator said...

...Furthermore, most Congressional districts, particularly those that are basically rural, are "safe"—about 300 seats almost never change party hands...

...Representative Ben F. Jensen of Iowa, ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, has proposed, among other far-out projects, a $20 million gift to help Canada build dams and reservoirs as havens for baby ducks so they could grow up and fly south for U.S.— particularly Iowan—duck-hunters to bag...

...Congress cannot now promote the general welfare effectively under fifty different social security laws or medical aid plans...

...if they lost the right to filibuster, a cascade of needed civil rights legislation would almost certainly follow...

...A majority of those members of Congress who hammer ceaselessly against "spending" on the national level develop amnesia when it comes to their own districts...