OUR CRIPPLED CONGRESS
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Our Crippled Congress Tn the seven months it has been in session, the Eighty-eighth Congress has talked more and achieved...
...it is the result of minority Southern insistence on strict observance, in this one case, of the rule usually ignored on other legislation—that a committee may not meet when the Senate is in session...
...So great is the delaying and crippling power of the imperious minority that many bills introduced last winter, indeed some proposals first introduced a year and two years ago, including major measures like medical care for the aged and aid to education, remain trapped in committee and have yet to be dignified by a vote that would either pass or defeat them...
...This is not the will of the majority...
...And we are not giving a very good demonstration...
...Minority Leader Everett Mc-Kinley Dirksen of Illinois greeted the proposal with this clowning comment: "Ha, ha, ha...
...It is indeed Congress that is on trial, and it is clearly late—later than Congress may realize...
...Churchmen are not on trial...
...We have not legislated...
...If this judgment seems harsh, we suggest a reading of the record: not a single significant legislative enactment in seven months...
...Dirksen translated this to mean that only over his body would a rule of germaneness be applied to Senate orators...
...This rule is basic practice in most legislative bodies...
...Edward P. Morgan, the noted news analyst, for example, looked in on Congressional hearings on the Administration's civil rights program and found them "an exercise in frustration itself...
...The antiquated procedures of the Congress contain little to commend them to modern government...
...Congress is crippled by its rules and traditions, by the tyrannical power of its committee chairmen, by its deadening seniority system—all of which combine to defeat the will of the majority...
...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Our Crippled Congress Tn the seven months it has been in session, the Eighty-eighth Congress has talked more and achieved less than any Congress in our memory...
...Despite the urgency of the crisis, the Committee's hearings on the emergency civil rights program last only two hours each day...
...To listen to the members of the Senate Commerce Committee question an Administration spokesman on the integration legislation, he reported, "could easily convince a casual visitor that these august Senate committeemen had not been informed of the uprising in Birmingham, the murder in Jackson, Mississippi, or the new militancy sweeping the country's Negro citizens, North and South...
...Surely this will be no exaggeration if the minority continues to defy the will of the majority, and if it clings to its traditional contempt for public opinion by failing to respond with reasonable dispatch to the petitions for redress of grievances that are pouring in from the streets and squares of America...
...More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that an autocratic minority has prevented Congress from even voting on most of the major bills pending before it...
...Even efforts designed merely to study the possibility of modernizing rules and procedures are frowned upon by those in the hierarchy who prefer a crippled Congress that protects the status quo to a legislative body that could legislate...
...It is this invitation to dangerous delay, built into the Congressional system under present rules and traditions, that now threatens affirmative action on the civil rights program no less than on a host of other vital measures...
...But most correspondents seem convinced that vital provisions will have to be surrended in order to liberate the majority from the iron clutch of the minority long enough to bring what is left of the civil rights legislation to a vote...
...Speaking in the Senate after the recent arrest of distinguished churchmen at the segregated Baltimore amusement park, Senator Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota, the Democratic whip, sounded this warning to his colleagues: "Negroes are not on trial in our country...
...Legislative paralysis was serious enough before Negro pressure forced the Kennedy Administration to propose a broad civil rights program...
...A Senator's right to say what he pleases, when and as long as he pleases, he insisted, is "the only weapon which the minority has to protect itself...
...And I might add, ho, ho, ho...
...Hardly a Washington correspondent doubts that there is a clear majority in both houses of Congress for the President's civil rights program in substantially the form he sent it to Congress...
...Only last month, for example, a major drive by more than thirty Senators to set in motion a thoroughgoing study of Congressional reform was treated in the most casual and cavalier fashion by a subcommittee of the Senate Rules Committee...
...Its performance up to now is a disgrace to the nation and a mockery of the democratic process...
...It is no one Senator who paralyzes the Senate...
...it has become downright dangerous in the face of the most critical internal crisis that has confronted this country since the Civil War...
...Thoughtful members of Congress, in both political parties, notably Senators Joseph S. Clark, Pennsylvania Democrat, and Clifford Case, New Jersey Republican, have been struggling to modernize and democratize the rules of Congress, but the board of governors of the Club, largely elderly Southerners elected in one-party states by a small fraction of the vote it requires to elect members of Congress in the North, have barred the way...
...Its chairman, eighty-seven-year-old Senator Carl Hayden, Arizona Democrat, gave the sponsors of the resolution all of two hours and then adjourned the hearing without any assurance that it would ever be reconvened...
...One of the reforms sought by those who want to make Congress a more efficient lawmaking body is a requirement of germaneness that would compel Senators to stick reasonably close to the subject under debate in order to expedite the legislative process...
...But Dirksen's real concern is not so much to "protect" the minority's right to speak, which no one would deny, as it is to empower the minority to veto the will of the majority, which is the way it works out in practice...
...There is no point in making Senator Thurmond the villain of this piece...
...Resistance to even the most modest Congressional reform is automatic and decisive on the part of members of the ruling clan who brook no tampering with their power and perquisites...
...We are late, very late...
...Many of these measures would stand an excellent chance of passage if the majority could rescue them from the strangling grip of the Tory minority that controls most of the committees...
...Each day at noon, the hour the Senate convenes, Senator Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina segregationist, invokes the ancient rule to end Committee consideration of civil rights for that day...
...We are...
...Senator Clark has suggested that representative government stands in peril of breaking down at the legislative level...
...While racial tensions threaten to boil over in revolution, Congress pursues the leisurely tenor of its ancient ways, finding plenty of time to vote itself plush new office buildings with luxurious suites, expensive swimming pools, and gargantuan garages, but powerless to cope with the urgent needs of the rest of the country...
...he does well enough on his own...
...It is the system itself that permits minority rule to prevail...
Vol. 27 • August 1963 • No. 8
