The Word from Washington
The Word from Washington Frank Church of Idaho has served in the Senate of the United States for fifteen years—too short a time to share the power reserved for members of the gerontocracy, but...
...On theory alone, a logical and com- pelling case can be made for amend- ing Rule 22," Church concedes...
...Congress tends to institutionalize the status quo," Church says...
...Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, of all people, implored his Southern col- leagues to vote for cloture to bring the draft extension bill to a vote—and they did...
...From now on, whatever may ac- tually happen to the cost of living and the unemployment rate, the news—as disseminated by the Administration's hand-picked analysts—is sure to be good...
...I have seen the streets of rubble and filth, the open market for heroin, the whole intolerable process of neglect and rage that sends men to prey on innocent citizens...
...Vice President Agnew is off on an- other whirlwind tour of bastions of the Free World—Iran and Greece are among the high spots this time out— and maybe he'll make a little news...
...The Nixon Administration took de- cisive action last month to set the economy straight...
...Whenever the big interests line up together, by which I mean big gov- ernment, big business, and big labor, they seem always able to command a majority, no matter how unprincipled or outrageous their legislative proposal might be...
...If a Senator shows up one day on your front porch or at your PTA meeting—and it is more than likely that one will—you might ask him who's minding the store at the Capitol...
...Ho hum...
...Humphrey, whose amendment was decisively defeated, was understandably unhappy about the absentees, but he himself didn't bother to make the scene when the Senate voted to extend the draft...
...Sen- ator William Proxmire, Wisconsin Democrat, took an end run around the Administration by inviting the BLS ex- perts to the Capitol each month for a public briefing on the figures...
...Take, for example, Mr...
...We are not referring to the President's announced plans for Phase II, which we, like almost every- one else, find tantalizingly murky and vague, but to the "reorganization" or- dered in the Bureau of Labor Statis- tics...
...There is virtually no vital issue which will be before the nation next year that is not inevitably entwined with Attica...
...Less successful filibusters were mounted by Senate liberals against the Lockheed Aircraft loan guarantee and the Selective Service extension bill, but in these cases the use of Rule 22 at least provided opportunities for debate...
...Also among the missing on that occasion were McGovern, Ken- nedy, and Harris...
...That re- mains the best advice to emanate from Washington in a long time...
...A sticky business, when Northern liberals defend the filibuster and Southern conservatives abandon it— but that's the way it is with fudge...
...The occasion for the Senator's dis- sertation on fudge was a colloquy in which he sorrowfully announced that he no longer favors revising the Sen- ate's Rule 22—the filibuster rule that has long been a principal target of lib- eral reformers...
...Agnew paid his customary respects to the news media for peddling "radical revolutionary propaganda" and focus- ing attention on "the self-declared and proven enemies of our society...
...Not even the police chiefs worked them- selves into a lather...
...I have seen courts clogged with human lives, reduced to so many forms and files...
...He certainly hasn't been making much of a splash here at home...
...He called it "sort of mixed," though Secretary of Labor James D. Hodgson had pro- claimed it "favorable," "hopeful," and "indeed heartening...
...But Mr...
...Church is not the only Senator to have changed his mind about the fil- ibuster...
...With much of its membership out campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination, the Senate is having a hard time mus- tering a quorum to do its work...
...For weeks the Vice President has been roaming the chicken-and-peas circuit, issuing the same sort of thoughtful homilies that helped make his name a household word only a year or two ago...
...In an address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Mr...
...The Word from Washington Frank Church of Idaho has served in the Senate of the United States for fifteen years—too short a time to share the power reserved for members of the gerontocracy, but long enough to get to know the ways of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body...
...When he discusses the Senate, therefore, he speaks in terms of fudge...
...And perhaps the greatest issue is the failure to care: that is at the heart of our time, when all the issues dividing us four years ago, festering, ignored by our national leadership, now bring fresh tragedy and sorrow . . . All of the work we have left undone in America—all of the wreck- age spawned by blindness and fear and the failure to care—we can see in the ruins of Attica...
...With Presidential primaries ap- proaching, though, the Senate's AWOL rate is likely to go up, not down...
...He now believes the filibuster has its virtues...
...On still another outing, to the So- ciety of Former FBI Agents, the Vice President took out after "social philos- ophers," and before Texas Republicans he denounced those sure-fire losers of 1970, the "radical liberals" in Congress...
...Last month, therefore, the effort to clamp the lid on BLS entered Phase II...
...Inevitably, they ran afoul of the Administration's high- powered public relations machine...
...Mayor John V. Lindsay September 17, 1971...
...Harris, who had an- nounced his Presidential candidacy that morning in the Senate dining room, didn't bother coming upstairs for the vote on MIRV...
...And the experience of these past eighteen months states a strong case for the retention of Rule 22 in its present form...
...It took a major effort a few weeks ago to round up fifty-one of the 100 Senators to vote on the major disarm- ament issue of the year—Senator Hu- bert H. Humphrey's proposal to delay development and deployment of multi- ple warheads on U.S...
...Not that he hasn't been trying...
...Watch what we do, not what we say," the Administration proclaimed shortly after it took office...
...I have seen the hospitals where the future inmates are born, and where their mothers and fathers wait hours for medical care...
...After all, there is nothing in the Con- stitution that says the Vice President has to run around shooting his mouth off...
...Others involved in analyzing economic trends are also be- ing shifted...
...I speak of what we had better damn well start doing about these roads that lead to Attica if we want to avoid the hatred and heart- ache so tragically we have just seen...
...But the rules of the Senate, like the law itself, may have less to do with rationality than with experience...
...I sometimes think," Church recent- ly observed, "that the Senate resem- bles a fudge factory, where we shape each piece, slicing a little here, adding a little there, but where the recipe nev- er changes and the candy stays the same...
...The big problem confronting the Senate fudge factory in the next few months will not be filibusters or clo- ture but truancy...
...Gold- stein has been transferred to the less controversial task of compiling long- range analyses, and a new Nixon ap- pointee will call the shots on the monthly figures...
...I would appreciate it if they would remain in the Senate," he says, "do their jobs here first, and save pol- iticking for the weekends and holidays...
...But oc- casionally, if the public interest is be- ing too badly mauled, a determined minority in the Senate, by resort to Rule 22, can engage in a delaying ac- tion that often will force concessions and sometimes will even result in the rejection of the measure contested...
...After all, he is only Number Two...
...It didn't quite work, though...
...nuclear missiles...
...I could repeat the arguments I myself have made in the past urging modifi- cation of the rule...
...Among the absentees were Senators George McGovern, Fred Harris, Birch Bayh, Henry Jackson, Edward Ken- nedy, and Edmund Muskie—all pre- sumably preoccupied with more mo- mentous matters...
...A case in point was the Senate de- bate early this year on the supersonic transport plane, which opponents fil- ibustered against while enough public opinion was mobilized to kill the proj- ect...
...Not long ago that kind of sally would have been good for front-page play, but now hardly anyone even noticed...
...There's plenty of opportunity to gen- erate publicity in the Senate...
...People have tuned out...
...The first crisis occurred last spring, when Harold Goldstein, assistant com- missioner for labor statistics, refused to get excited about a temporary decline in the unemployment rate...
...The Senators barely bothered to issue replies...
...Sen- ator Charles Mathias, a moderate Re- publican from Maryland, says the fil- ibuster can no longer be regarded as the exclusive property of the "old- fashioned member of the Senate who is rotund, wears a black suit and a black hat and a black string tie, and pince-nez glasses on a black ribbon...
...Potomagus Crime and Punishment I have walked the breeding grounds of Attica every day I have been mayor...
...On the other hand, some of those old-fashioned members are retreating from their life-long defense of Rule 22...
...Another liberal Democrat, Sen- ator Alan Cranston of California, says the Senate's provision for virtually un- limited debate has become the main barrier to "the menacing increase in executive power" which has carried the nation "perilously close to becom- ing a constitutional dictatorship...
...The Administra- tion's response was to cancel the monthly BLS press briefings on unem- ployment statistics, as well as on the price index...
...And I have seen correction centers that do not cor- rect, but send three of every four of their graduates on an endless cycle of crime and punishment—in a nation that hires exactly one rehabilitation worker for every 2,000 people it puts into prison...
...I have seen the schools where teachers break their hearts trying to turn around generations of despair in the few years before the enthusiasm and resilience of a child takes on the hard, cynical edge of an embittered youth...
...Around this country, I have seen the policemen who struggle against this vicious plague vilified,- assaulted, shot dead in city streets, yet told to protect us from the inevitable consequences of indifference— as though a man with a badge and a gun could by himself compen- sate for what the rest of us have failed to do...
...The BLS experts who compile monthly reports on price and employ- ment levels have long enjoyed a con- siderable reputation for integrity...
...A man less dedicated to his mission might decide at this point to try an- other tack, or even to lay low a while...
...It's just that the spark seems to be gone...
...Agnew, we suppose, will just keep trying harder...
...They could be depended upon to call the shots as they saw them, regardless of the political fallout...
...Agnew's speech to the National Security Indus- trial Association, a sort of social and athletic club of the military-industrial complex, in which the Vice President deftly lumped Senators McGovern, Muskie, Kennedy, and Humphrey with Gus Hall, the general secretary of the Communist Party, because of their "reckless and appalling" efforts to curb military spending...
...Senate Majority Leader Mike Mans- field, who would like to think that Congress will wind up its work some time this year, has been fretting aloud about his absent Democratic col- leagues...
Vol. 35 • November 1971 • No. 11
