Leadership in the nonmetropolitan states is noticeably below par (one of their basic deficiencies) owing to the steady drainage of
homegrown
talent into the metropolitan sector.
Lundberg - The-Rich-and-the-Super-Rich-by-Ferdinand-Lundberg
) the arrangements under which popular elections have been held since their inception have been as crooked as a fixed wheel in a low gambling house.
Long asserted by the tough-minded, denied by the tender-minded, the plain fact was only recently underscored in terse decisions by the United States Supreme Court.
Various transparent devices, the Court found, were traditionally used in many states to keep Negroes and other a priori undesirables from voting, thus trammeling gloriously free even if obtuse popular expression at the very source.
A wider and subtler abuse was found in the legislative districts, federal and state, which had been traditionally gerrymandered by one-party and two-party establishment- controlled state legislatures so that in some cases enormous numbers of distraught voters, mostly urban and suburban dwellers, had only one dubious representative; while in other cases very few voters, mostly functionally illiterate rural hinds, also had a dubious representative.
A handful of rustics thus were the means for stifling the representatives of thousands of trapped city patsies.
The consequence was that even if a majority of a legislative body was allowed to prevail (not always the case, as we shall see) the majority did not reflect the majority of the voting population either in its wisdom, folly or confusion.
Although the Court has now issued its ukase against these practices, the men borne to prominence by them will remain on the scene and in office until they wilt; and there is no guarantee that something equally objectionable, or more so, will not be devised by the always cunning pubpols.
Americans, it is often said unthinkingly, believe in majority rule. Yet, oddly, they never have had it; they have always had oligarchic rule, usually of a rather low order. The farther one moves away from a gerrymandered, intimidated, meagerly educated, emotionally immature and partly disqualified electorate the fewer become the participants in any decision until in the legislatures it is always and invariably far less than a majority, either representatively or among those present. For all those brain-
laundered with the doctrine of majority rule this is, admittedly, a strange, even unpatriotic notion. Yet it is an exact statement of the case.
"The primary and overriding duty and responsibility of each member of the House of Representatives is to get re-elected," it has been well said by Adam Clayton Powell, long a proficient preacher of the Gospel and a successful and highly affluent congressman since 1945. 5
The Establishment legislator in Congress-and some not so classifiable--has three further informal, off-the-record duties: (1) to work loyally with the legislative Establishment as an organization man; (2) to insure his own position whenever possible as a member in good standing of the affluent sector of society by acquiring any available cash, securities, real estate, franchises, market tips or whatever else may be of value; and (3) to share his affluence with indispensable offstage key figures of his home district organization grouped around the state or district party chairman. Nobody, it is plainly evident, plays the game alone.
Not to do this is to leave himself at the mercy of the shifting whims and moods of a potentially unstable constituency, wide open to the claims of eager rivals for his office, Despite careful planning by the legislator, he is at times the victim of political upsets and internal feuds. Yet if he is of the Establishment he is never wholly extinguished even if he has not had time to become affluent, because he has made many Establishment friends who remember him as a "regular. " They see to it that his post- legislative life is enriched by various appointments suitable to a "lame duck"-- commissionerships, judgeships, receiverships, lobby clients and the like. He belongs to a bund.
The Congressional Establishment, as Senator Clark proves, has a life of its own, policies of its own, aims of its own. These either have no connection with the needs or desires of the nation as a whole or harmonize with them only occasionally, fitfully, incidentally and, as it were, accidentally. It is a parasitical oligarchy. It produces results of its own predetermined stamp. It explains much about the chills, fevers and shudders of American society--its volume of crime, riots and lynchings.
The Bottom of the Bird Cage
"The trouble with Congress today,". writes Senator Clark, "is that it exercises negative and unjust powers to which the governed, the people of the United States, have never consented. . . . The heart of the trouble is that the power is exercised by minority, not majority rule. " 6
As in Soviet Russia and Red China, power is in the hands of solidly installed intriguing manipulators, with the difference that in the United States the intrigue takes place behind a facade of reasoned if blurry constitutionality. In Russia and China the bayonets show through the periodic purges. The difference is enough to make the reasonable man prefer the American system with all its blemishes, about as one would unjoyfully prefer dysentery to cholera.
"Our forms of government are heavily weighted against any kind of action, and especially any that might alter significantly the status quo. It takes too many units of government to consent before anything can be done. " 7 This, of course, is a truism. The constitutional bulwarks against tyranny, placed there by the Founders' hands, are used to produce a creeping, low-key tyranny.
It is the third branch of government, the legislative, where things have gone awry. Whether we look at city councils, the state legislatures or the Congress of the United States, we react to what we see with scarcely concealed contempt. This is the area where democratic government is breaking down. This is where the vested-interest
lobbies tend to run riot, where conflict of interest is concealed from the public, where demagoguery, sophisticated or primitive, knows few bounds, where political lag keeps needed action often a generation behind the times, where the nineteenth century sometimes reigns supreme in committees, where the evil influence of arrogant and corrupt political machines, at the local and state level, ignores most successfully the general welfare, where the lust for patronage and favors for the faithful do the greatest damage to the public interest.
. . . the legislatures of America, local, state and national, are presently the greatest menace in our country to the successful operation of the democratic process. 8
Lest the sheltered reader, tucked away in his bower, think that Senator Clark here delivers himself of an extravagant opinion or resorts to hyperbole, it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures--state, county and municipal--are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff or what police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving. " Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody they are what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the racetrack, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep-show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights.
The New York Times, customarily referred to as staid, has vouched editorially that the Massachusetts legislature is the most corrupt in the country. If this is so, the Commonwealth lawmakers have nosed out many others, including neighboring Rhode Island, merely by millimeters, The Times based its opinion on a solid report of the Massachusetts Crime Commission, submitted by impeccable leading citizens of the Bay State to Governor John Volpe in response to frenetic public clamor. "Corruption permeates the state, the report said, from town governments to the state house and involves politicians, business men, lawyers and ordinary citizens. " 9
This official report, a state document, cited wide-scale bribery by corporations and lawyers and the fact that legislators are on the payrolls of companies doing business with the state. Corruption was encouraged, the report said, because of "the lack of backbone" in the legislature.
As to this particular legislature, the Boston Globe analyzed it during the week of April 11, 1966, revealing elements of a pestilent tale. Most of the legislature, the Globe indicated, is composed of Babbittian local real estate dealers, insurance brokers, fixing lawyers, loan sharks, used-car entrepreneurs, miscellaneous fast-buck operators and obscure local hangers-on and roustabouts--many of them types who if they could not become attached to a public payroll, there to divert commerce their way, would be local misfits and perhaps panhandlers, vagrants, con men, family dependents, procurers or on local relief or unemployment rolls. The net impression given by the Globe (a rather reserved family paper) was of a political lumpenproletariat, a scabrous crew.
As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five or more years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non- Mafians.
Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures-- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois--and the impression is
thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone and not many in the low-level populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere--no states excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves. 10
The territorial base of the Establishment lies in the low-down one-party states. Ten have been found by careful political scientists to be generally one-party. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. Twelve were found to be practically one-party: Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Tennessee. 11 Ignoring for the moment still others that alternate over long periods as one-party jobs, like Florida recently, it is noticeable that the above array is nominally Republican as well as Democratic. Among the clearly Republican one-party strongholds are Vermont, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon and South Dakota. At least twenty-two states, then, or nearly half, are one-party setups, with some dozen others coming very close to qualifying. Public political scandals, it will be noted, are much less frequently heard of in the one- party states. Here it is as in one-party countries.
The single point to emphasize here is that Senator Clark is entirely correct, even reserved, in his sweeping reference to the legislatures. He does not exaggerate. As the lawyers would say, he is a sound witness. He does not, however, delve into the processes that brought such uncomely personnel into the legislative bodies. How did the honest electorate come to elect such canaille? That is, manifestly, another story, and is left to the next chapter.
As Senator Clark sees it, there is no continuing discipline in Congress whereby a majority of the members of a party are able, by simple vote, to discipline recalcitrant members interested only in blocking national measures and in feathering their own nests. The recent Powell and Dodd cases were token ceremonies. Although the parties have various committees, the policy committees give out no policies, the steering committees do not steer but block; and, in general, every man is for himself. And yet, important decisions are made.
The Congressional Establishment
The Congressional Establishment "consists of those Democratic chairmen and ranking Republican members of the important legislative committees who, through seniority and pressures exerted on junior colleagues, control the institutional machinery of Congress. . . . The official leadership group of the Congress--Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, et al. are usually captives of the Establishment, although they can sometimes be found looking out over the walls of their prison, plotting escape. " 12
"It is important to note that the views of the Congressional Establishment are not shared by a majority of their colleagues, who, left to their own devices, would be prepared to bring the Congress into line to cope with the necessities of our times. " 13 This, as we shall see) may be gravely questionable.
The Senate Establishment is "almost the antithesis of democracy. It is not selected by any democratic process. It appears to be quite unresponsive to the caucuses of the two parties. . . . It is what might be called a self-perpetuating oligarchy with mild, but only mild, overtones of plutocracy.
"There are plenty of rich men in the Senate, but only a few of them are high in the ranks of the Establishment; and none of them would admit [sic! ] to a belief that the accumulation of great wealth is a principal object of life. This is another distinction between the American and the Congressional Establishments. The former [consisting of the prime beneficiaries of the status quo] has, despite its slightly liberal orientation, definite overtones of plutocracy, although its tolerance is much more for inherited than for recently acquired wealth. " 14
Senator Clark now comes to the ties that bind the Congressional Establishment. They are: a common militant belief in white supremacy, a stronger devotion to property- ownership rights than to rights of the person, strong support of the military establishment at all times, marked belligerence in foreign affairs and an absolute determination to block internal congressional reform.
"A substantial number of the members of Congress in both parties are the product of political forces which give them a rural, pro-business, anti-labor, isolationist, conservative perspective with an attitude toward civil rights which ranges from passive unconcern to outright hostility. " 15
It is plain that the legislative strength of the Big-Business Establishment is, ironically, mainly in the agrarian districts. What are the "political forces" to which Senator Clark here refers in a somewhat opaque manner? They may be summed up in a word: money. The rural legislator--not directly tied to the business system, which is invariably weak in his home district (few stockholders, consumers, corporation employees or factories are found there)--has something to sell: his vote. And he sells it in a circumlocutional way, wrapped in some rococo principle such as states' rights, sacred privacy, economy, government anti-centralism, economic individualism or plain pure Americanism. This is the kernel of support by rustic solons for softly regulated big-city industrialism.
Politics, popularly thought to consist mainly of elections, really begins only after elections, when those elected come together to divide the spoils. The meetings of any legislative body, as of a floating crap game, must be under rules, which like laws themselves must emanate from the legislative body itself. The Constitution does not stipulate how Congress must govern itself. This is a "political question," wide open.
One of the Senate rules is that there may be unlimited debate; no senator may be silenced, unless, under Rule XXII, two-thirds of the senators present vote to terminate debate. With all senators present, this rule requires 66 votes to end debate. If only 35 refuse to limit debate, those who have the floor may go on talking endlessly, in relays. Such filibustering blocks all business until an agreement is reached to withdraw some proposal disliked by a sometimes very small minority.
As Senator Clark notes, the United States Senate is the only open legislative body in the world under such an extravagantly absurd rule, which calls to mind the veto power held by any member in the House of Nobles of the old Polish Kingdom. There the rule, more severe than ours, so effectively paralyzed the country as to leave it an easy prey to neighboring Prussia, Russia and Austria.
From 1789 to 1806 the Senate rules included the motion for the previous question, as provided for in Jefferson's Manual. On two occasions it was used to close debate. Since 1811 the motion has been used frequently in the House to end debate and is provided for in House Rule XVII. Virtually all the state legislatures allow the procedure, which,
as Jefferson pointed out, was used in the British Parliament as early as 1604. It is not, as Senator Clark reminds us, alien to hallowed Anglo-Saxon parliamentary procedure. It is, in truth, almost sacred and not to allow it full rein is ground for the deepest suspicion.
May a majority of the Senate at the beginning of a new Congress vote to terminate debate in order to pass on a change in the standing rules? This question was put point- blank as recently as 1963 by the vice president as the presiding Senate officer. In response there were only 44 ayes and 53 nays, with no roll call. The Establishment had triumphed, by a clear majority. (The question has since been put at the opening of every term with a similar outcome. )
Early in 1964 on a cloture petition that would have ended further debate on the question of a change of the rule--and which, under the rule, required a favorable vote of two-thirds of those present--the Clarkian majority lost by 54 for and 42 opposed. Senator Clark draws comfort from the fact that, including 4 absentees, the Senate at the time stood 56-44 in favor of cloture, only 10 short of the necessary two-thirds. But the earlier vote, with 53 nays, showed the full fire-power of the Establishment on the bedrock issue. On such showdowns the Establishment has thus far been able to muster far more than a third--pointedly, more than a half.
The Establishment itself is not a majority but it can, owing to the many strings in its octopal fingers, pull many unhappy non-Establishment senators into line when all the chips go down. On basic questions affecting its own power it is, in sober fact, a majority.
The sole contemporary full-face defeat of the Establishment was on the Test Ban Treaty, which came to a vote September 24, 1963, after a long debate. Two-thirds of those present and voting were required for ratification under the Constitution. The vote was 80 to 19 in favor.
Those who voted "No" at the time constituted the stone-faced core of the Senate Establishment in Senator Clark's view: Russell and Talmadge of Georgia, Stennis and Eastland of Mississippi, Long of Louisiana, Byrd and Robertson of Virginia, Byrd of West Virginia, McClellan of Arkansas, Thurmond of South Carolina, Curtis of Nebraska, Goldwater of Arizona, Simpson of Wyoming, Jordan of Idaho, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, Bennett of Utah and Tower of Texas. Most of these were from rule-by-terror states, nearly all from one-party states. Mundt of South Dakota, who usually votes down the line with the Establishment, defected.
But for changes in Rule XXII and cloture all of these, with Mundt, voted "No," including the following Establishment people who had defected momentarily on the Test Ban Treaty: Ellender of Louisiana, Hayden of Arizona, Holland of Florida, Johnston of South Carolina, Hill and Sparkman of Alabama, Cannon of Nevada, Cotton of New Hampshire, Williams of Delaware and Dirksen of Illinois. Half of these were also from rule-by-terror states; most were from one-party states.
It is the men mentioned in these two paragraphs, according to Senator Clark, who constitute the nucleus of the present Senate Establishment, which has its counterpart in the House. How one stands on Rule XXII determines whether one is for or against the Establishment.
A few of those mentioned are not present as of 1968. Such absence makes no difference to the Establishment because fresh replacements are always available approximately from the same states. When death approached Byrd of Virginia, the ailing senator retired and had his fifty-year-old son appointed in his place--an hereditary senator! Hardly any of the states represented by Establishment senators are
industrialized--only Illinois and Delaware. The rest are predominantly rural and agricultural or extractive; most are nonurbanized and are of exceptionally low general educational levels--defective schools, few libraries and bookstores, mediocre newspapers, poor radio-television programs, etc. Money for these is shot away nationally in wars. The core of the group is the southern Democratic bloc, which has been said to be the South's revenge on the rest of the country for the loss of the Civil War. But it has many members from parts of the country that are as economically and culturally retarded--in general, the Bible Belt, which tends to look indulgently on terror and intimidation.
The Establishment people are not men of parts; they are devoid of generally esteemed talents. None, possibly excepting McClellan and Sparkman, is a persuasive speaker. Many such as Eastland show themselves conspicuously deficient in reasoning powers, confidently propounding howlers in elementary logic that would shame most college freshmen. Nearly all appear to be quite innocent of acquaintance with semantics. Although most are members of the bar, none is rated high as a practicing lawyer. Few seem to be well read. None, as far as the record shows, is a writer; Goldwaters books of shabby notions were ghost-written. Few if any are soundly schooled. Their knowledge of the world--and of the language itself--appears to be meager. Their talents lean almost entirely to simple intrigue. Everett Dirksen is their prototype of a prophet. They are a drab crew.
If these people did not band together as they do behind Rule XXII, if they relied on their own capabilities in open debate on the merits of issues, they would stand forth in all hollowness among more talented men. And this is one reason for the Establishment: It is a refuge for the untalented, a closed trade union of the meagerly endowed.
What do Establishment members want? Are they merely interested in preserving the ties that bind them together and give them factitious substance: Rule XXII, white supremacy, the celebration of property and military derring-do and a truculent stance in foreign affairs? So to suppose would be to credit them with very limited, purely symbolical objectives. Actually, as Senator Clark stresses, many members of the Establishment go along with other measures, some with quite liberal measures, as long as Rule XXII and white supremacy remain inviolate. They are political traders, keen for cheapjack opportunities.
When blockages arise under Rule XXII, the Establishment is in a position to trade. In return for concessions it becomes its turn to make demands, to enforce its gloomy will on the country.
Customary analyses of Congress distinguish Republicans from Democrats, Southerners from Northerners and Westerners and conservatives from liberals. The latter distinction suggests, misleadingly, that there are reasoned attitudes present rather than rationalization for narrowly pecuniary self-interest. Political scientists are united in believing that national party affiliations are meaningless, that congressmen nearly all stem from purely local state and district factions. 16 Nor is the regional distinction fundamentally any more important than that of party.
There are, in truth, more fundamental distinctions to be observed. There is, first, the Establishment and anti-Establishment distinction that Senator Clark brings to view, with most of the Establishment people organization men from Soviet-style one-party districts or states. As unchaperoned strangers in them quickly discover, most of these states have extremely inquisitive polizei. Few such states are industrialized, few are very rich, and the rich ones, like Texas, are largely absentee-owned, obvious colonies of Wall Street and State Street. In all, organized politics offers one of the few sure roads to personal
affluence, functional latitude and renown. In the industrial states there are many such roads.
Much about American politics would be clearer if one thought of a metropolitan and a colonial or provincial United States. Metropolitan United States consists of southern New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, California, perhaps the state of Washington and the very eastern portions of Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota. just about everything else is nonmetropolitan, culturally below par and holds nearly all one-party politics. It is more like eastern Europe than like eastern United States.
Economically, this division is generally made as between agrarian and industrial states. Yet the congressional politics of the representatives of the agrarian states are not distinctively agrarian. Elected by a politically illiterate, often very small electorate unaware of the true drift of affairs and with few vital demands of its own to make, congressmen from these states are far freer than those of the metropolitan states to place their votes where the most money is, on the side of big property. For doing this they are allowed to join the propertied class by backstairs methods and are impressively referred to as conservatives.
Leadership in the nonmetropolitan states is noticeably below par (one of their basic deficiencies) owing to the steady drainage of homegrown talent into the metropolitan sector. It is not that the nonmetropolitan region fails to produce talented leadership material. It does produce it but discourages it and loses it steadily to the metropolitan sector, culturally more attractive. New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and other metropolitan centers fairly crawl with talented people from Georgia, Mississippi, Kansas and other retrograde provinces. On trips back home they are careful to keep a tight rein on their tongues lest they face the prospect of being expertly tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail by the local authorities, acting through local thugs.
Many organization politicians inside and outside Metropolia are known to feel, self- righteously, that their party ties provide a democratic device for the distribution of some of the industrial wealth--to themselves. They are sadly mistaken. No distribution of wealth to public-spirited connivers is taking place by this route. What is available, in various ways, is only a small percentage of the untaxed industrial revenues in the form of "campaign" contributions, gifts, fees and retainers. These are tips to menials.
It is not being suggested here that members of the Establishment and their veiled supporters are in all cases primarily trying to gain affluence for its own sake. Rather is it a fact that they must have affluence in order to function on their chosen level. The organization men split their "take" with other organization men in the home party organization. Many, it can be plainly shown, are eager estate builders--Johnsons, Dodds, Dirksens, Kerrs et al. Some, probably most, are a combination of the two. The prospect of money is definitely in the picture except in a very few cases.
Money is needed to get into electoral politics. Money is needed to remain there. And money is needed to carry one over the bleak days if one is voted out.
In saying this, one is not saying something that would have astounded the Founding Fathers. Under the Constitution as it originally stood, there were property qualifications for voting even for members of the House of Representatives and the state legislatures. Only as the various states gave the franchise to the nonpropertied in the early nineteenth century was this qualification removed, thus opening the way to office for poor men. This was a dangerous development because the poor newcomers to politics, seldom themselves partisans of the poor, needed money going far beyond the paltry pay of office, originally designed purely as honoraria for men of property and still on this level
in many jurisdictions. The unpropertied man in politics was in time, according to an unwritten convention, expected to use ingenuity in providing for himself. Imaginative and defensible schemes were devised by some, but the sheer logical possibilities of making adequate monetary provision outside of meager salary without going beyond the law or the proprieties are few and largely boil down to writing, lecturing, making after- dinner speeches or practicing ordinary law--all of which take some talent. Promotions in which the name of the officeholder was used to confer prestige were legitimate--when the promotions themselves were legitimate. But for most of the new off-the-soil officeholders, always with noteworthy exceptions. it all boiled down to acquiring money in some questionable way. They were necessarily purchasable men. In the practice of law the purchase price took the form of heavy retainers from big interests.
In order to attain congressional or any political office one must, as many experts have attested: (1) be independently wealthy either as an inheritor or a builder of better booby traps; (2) have the backing of a wealthy individual, group or organization; or (3) have the backing of a local party organization which in turn has access to suspect supporting funds. Sometimes a "bad" organization supports a man of impeccable probity as a way of disarming critics. The supporting funds, it is true, could come from thousands of "little people" chipping in quarters or dollars; but the "little people" are either not sufficiently interested, do not understand or cannot afford to contribute--or a combination of the three. They have money for booze, soft drinks, tobacco, cosmetics, gadgets, high installment interest rates and the whole range of stuff at Woolworth's but not a cent as expense money for their tribunes. They may well suspect, too, that the candidates have already been spoken for by higher bidders.
What I say here is by no means original with me, arising from some internal distemper. It is the consensus of sophisticated observers. "Many people are asking the question," says Drew Pearson in his nationally syndicated column, "'Do Congressmen steal? ' Our answer is that they do not unlawfully take money from the government but they do take money lawfully for representing 'anti-government' interests. In this sense they do steal the right of the voters to have a man in Congress who represents them, instead of representing his law firm and its big business clients. " 17 There are, however, many ways of legally putting money into a congressman's hands apart from attorneys' "fees" and "campaign" contributions. Attention will be given this lush aspect of standard garden-variety "democratic" politics further along.
The Establishment Method
How does the Republican-Democratic Establishment extend its will over the rest of the Congress? It does this, first, by its power to block anything, which forces others to trade with it. But its general control derives from its minute control over committee appointments. As the work of Congress is quietly done by committees, not through rational debate on the floor, such control is fundamental.
Any newcomer to Congress, whatever he has rashly promised his constituents, has as much to say over surrounding affairs as if he stepped into the rush-hour crowd at Grand Central Terminal or into the midst of a Bombay riot. If he managed to get the floor to make the most rousing speech ever delivered, there would be nobody present to hear it except the bored clerks and some flabbergasted tourists in the galleries. As soon as he rose to deliver himself of his deathless remarks, all the members would walk out as they customarily walk out on each other.
What he must do, Senator Clark informs us, is to keep quiet and watch what goes on. And the way to "get along," he further tells us, is to "go along"--with the older hands. If he continually "goes along" with those who are solidly ensconced, he will soon find that he is a member of some friendly bloc. It might seem that the smart thing to do would be
to join the Establishment at once but this cannot always be managed because Establishment ideas are under some dispute in the more crowded and variegated parts of the country. The next smartest thing to do is to be against the Establishment on the record but to support it on showdowns, as many do in voting that a majority of a new Senate may not vote to close off debate in order to pass on a change in the rules. He can, also, be a "maverick" like the fortyfour senators of 1963, although not many of these are very far-ranging.
If the new member continually "goes along," particularly with the Establishment, he finds that he is able to get various things done of interest to himself and to his standing in the eyes of his constituents. He may even be allowed to get his name on bills--the "Sascha Schmaltz Bill to Exterminate Poverty in Our Time" or something similarly astonishing. Also, his bank account, if he so desires, will steadily improve. His banker and broker will know he is now running with a well-heeled crowd.
Committee appointments, especially the powerful chairmanships over (not of) the most powerful committees, are commonly supposed to go to the members with the most seniority. Senator Clark shows conclusively, citing chapter and verse, that the Establishment freely deviates from the seniority rule whenever it wishes to push some member for reasons obscure to the observer.
Committee appointments are made by two party groups--the Democratic Steering Committee and the Republican Committee on Committees. The Establishment holds a majority of both, and, through its ability to entice new members, holds its power as an hereditary fief.
The Democratic Steering Committee varies in composition from time to time. By custom its members serve until they die, resign or are defeated at the polls, the last not likely in the one-party states and districts from which they emanate. As of 1959 it had fifteen members, seven southerners plus Lyndon B. Johnson, majority leader, and Carl Hayden, president pro tempore of the Senate, thus giving the Establishment a majority of nine. Johnson all along has been a 200-proof, sour-mash Establishment man.
Because the composition of Congress changed with the election of 1960, bringing in more Democrats, Senator Clark wanted the Steering Committee changed. He did get himself and three others put on, but the Establishment still controlled with nine votes. In 1963 at a Democratic Conference, composed of all the Democrats in the Senate, he proposed that the Steering Committee be increased to nineteen members.
Such an increase would have brought about geographical and ideological balance, in Clark's view, and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield promised to support him. "To my chagrin and surprise, Mansfield opposed my motion and [Hubert] Humphrey failed to support it. They told me later Bobby Baker had told them the votes were not there to approve the increase. Perhaps this was right. . . . Had the Majority Leader and Whip supported Senator Anderson and me, I believe we would have won. " 18 The point, though, is that they did not. On the secret ballot the Establishment vote was highest.
Within the Democratic Conference itself on a secret ballot the forces of reform represented by Clark were outnumbered nearly 2 to 1. The Republicans, the nonurban element of them Establishment people from the cradle up, have no need of such stacking in their Committee on Committees, which Senator Clark finds to be regionally and ideologically representative. With the Democratic Party in the majority, the Republicans get few committee appointments anyhow. Yet their members plus the southern Democrats constitute the Establishment power.
As the Republican Party has been deflated to a minority since 1932, it is clearly the congressional wing of the Democratic Party that is now the chief block to legislative
forthrightness. Yet the Democratic Party is the one that is popularly regarded as liberal, even radical. When the Republicans have a president he usually sees pretty much eye to eye with the Establishment; but since the accession of Democratic Lyndon B. Johnson as president, the Establishment is now in closest harmony with the White House. On the basis of Senator Clark's analysis, it would appear that the Establishment controls all the positions except the Supreme Court.
Through its power of appointment the Establishment in both houses "stacks" the committees of Congress with its supporters. "In the Eighty-sixth Congress [House] members from seven [backward] states controlled 97 of the 153 committee votes. " 19 As Senator Clark shows, the Establishment dominates all vital committees and keeps off non-Establishment men with seniority.
In the crucial committees of both houses there is a frequent installation of the same pro-Establishment men, although in the Senate no person may be a chairman of more than one committee. A small percentage of pro-Establishment men hold majority votes, with few exceptions.
The effect throughout, from the party committees to the standing legislative committees, with only minor exceptions, is as though a permanent bureaucracy were installed, Senator Clark notes. In Russia the same sort of phenomenon, differently arrived at, is known as the Politburo. What Senator Clark calls the Establishment is indeed very much like the Politburo in its permanence and indestructibility, although not perhaps in its specific objectives. The methods of holding and wielding power are similar. But one does business in rubles, the other in dollars.
Owing to the large number of intra-party and legislative committees the Establishment people sit on, they are heavily worked. Russell, leader in recent years of the Establishment as the most senior member, always managed the opening-session struggle against changing Rule XXII, master-minded meetings of the Democratic Steering Committee, was active in the Policy Committee, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was a member of the Appropriations Committee and chairman of its subcommittee on defense, member of the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee, the joint Committee on Atomic Energy and a member of the commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination and of the Boards of Visitors to the Military, Naval and Air Force Academies. And similarly with other Establishment people. 20
Senator Clark makes much of the distinction between liberals and conservatives in the Senate, but just how little it signifies was shown in 1966 on the vote to allow the Foreign Relations Committee and Appropriations Committee to share supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency with Senator Russell's Armed Services Committee. Russell was opposed to the change; Senator Fulbright, chairman of Foreign Relations, favored it.
Russell won on the show-down, 61 to 28. While no Establishment people sided with Fulbright, plenty of liberals sided with Russell, namely: Anderson of New Mexico, Douglas of Illinois, Magnuson of Washington, Neuberger of Oregon, Pastore of Rhode Island, Ribicoff of Connecticut (all Democrats) and Kuchel of California. (It is this sort of thing that earns liberals the label of "fuzzy-mindedness. ") Clark and Scott of Pennsylvania were not present-not that it would have made the slightest difference . 21
The CIA is ideologically a straight Establishment agency, designed as an identical opposite number to the Soviet para-military intelligence network. Whatever its model, the Soviet apparatus, does the CIA can and does do as well--or better.
The committees of the Senate are rated in order of prime importance about as follows: Finance (taxes), Armed Services (military supplies), Foreign Relations (world markets),
Appropriations (domestic allocation of money), Rules and Administration, Banking and Currency (monetary policy and credit), and judiciary and Government Operations. Committees such as Agriculture and Forestry, Commerce, District of Columbia, Interior and Insular Affairs, Labor and Public Welfare, Post Office, and Civil Service and Public Service are far less important (possibly excepting Agriculture) because they exert less leverage.
It is the power to block plus leverage in vital situations, often involving stupendous amounts of money, that makes certain committees paramount. Chairmen of committees are powerful because they are permanently installed as the senior member, are alone empowered except in the case of a very few committees to call committee meetings, and alone set agendas, call up bills for consideration, regulate bearings and terminate committee debates. Within the jurisdiction of each committee the chairman is almost a dictator. He can kill any bill in his jurisdiction by simply pigeon-holing it. Although it is possible to call meetings at the demand of a majority of committee members, practically this is rarely done because most committee members are more handpicked than the chairman, with whom they have many convenient understandings. They may even have been picked by the chairman himself. Until a bill is reported out by a committee it cannot come before the Senate unless two-thirds of the senators want it out. A bill could be ordered out on a majority vote, of course, but only if the Establishment approved.
In the House the chief committees are Rules, Ways and Means (taxes), Armed Services, Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Banking and Currency, Appropriations and Judiciary. Before going to the floor, unless a hard-to-get majority votes to bring it out, a bill must first be reported out by the Rules Committee. Most proposed bills, many of them having wide public approval, are never reported out. Filed with the Rules Committee, they might just as well have been dumped in a wastebasket. A majority of the House may order a bill discharged from committee, but ordinarily such a majority is hard to get.
Even though the House does not allow unlimited debate it has a more complex set of rules than the Senate. These rules are used to strangle or whittle down proposals unwanted by the House Establishment.
"Committee and subcommittee chairmen have more naked power in the House than in the Senate," Senator Clark notes. "There is no tax legislation if Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, doesn't want any, nor a wilderness bill against Aspinall's wishes. " 22
The various committee chairmen are kingpins in the House and form the nucleus of its Establishment. "While power seems more fragmented in the House than in the Senate," Senator Clark remarks, "it is probably because the former body is so much larger. Thus it is easier for chairmen to become more powerful. For the same reason there is less cohesion. There appears to be less sense of a 'band of brothers. ' While the South is to some extent in the saddle, it seems less obviously so. " 23 Still, the men from the nonmetropolitan sector rule.
Yet the Establishment coalition "operates on many an occasion even more effectively in the House than in the Senate" and has killed or whittled down a long line of useful bills--federal aid to education in 1960, area development in 1963, the Mass Transit Bill and Youth Opportunities Act, health care for the aged in earlier versions, improvement of foreign aid. "It cannot stop civil rights legislation because of the urban and suburban Republicans. But it can usually stop if it really wants to what the Establishment likes to call 'spending programs. '" 24
It did not, however, stop or whittle down Administration requests in 1965 and 1966 for additional appropriations for the undeclared presidential war in Vietnam. Although
costing some $20 billion or more annually, the Vietnam operation is not construed as a "spending program. " It is, more properly put, a patriotic program. Opposed to expenditures for domestic improvement programs, the Establishment in both houses is religiously devoted to all military spending, sometimes votes more than is asked for by the president.
Committee control and the two-thirds rule are only part of the Establishment method. The American constitutional system at best, as all scholars know, yields a cumbersome government that operates much like a Rube Goldberg threshing machine. With everybody giving his best the machine will work according to the intention of the designers, not efficiently but surely. But when the delays inherent in the checks-and- balance system are added to, as by Rule XXII and other contrivances not found in any parliamentary manual, the machine simply stops.
Rule XXII and the dominance of committee chairmen in the House by no means constitute the only devices of delay.
As Senator Clark notes, certain procedures have been adopted that use up more than half the time of Congress with a view to keeping new business from coming up even if it could be dislodged from the dilatory committees. There is, first, a requirement that the Journal of each Senate session must be read the following day unless unanimous consent to skip it is obtained. Says Clark: "It is utilized only for purposes of delay . . . . " 25 Next, the morning period reserved for minor business, using up a valuable legislative hour or more, "makes for delay. " 26 Senators speak at exhaustive length; Clark believes speeches should be limited to two hours. Often the subjects talked about haven't the remotest connection with anything taking place; they may be a description of the scenery of the solon's native state, memories of boyhood, a disquisition on the culinary arts, the national flower or the care of dogs--all with a view to using up time.
Again, "A motion to take up a bill on the calendar made by the Majority Leaders should be determined by vote without debate. At present such a motion is subject to unlimited debate, thus giving the opponents of the bill two chances to filibuster instead of only one. . . . " 27
Establishment senators, with a keen instinct for wasting time, introduce all manner of irrelevancy in their speeches, violating the rule of Jefferson's Manual that "No one is allowed to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously. " Says Clark: "No other legislative body in the world, so far as I have been able to discover, operates without a rule of germaneness. " 28
Clark's staff in a survey of the Congressional Record for 1961 found that nongermane speeches, excluding written insertions made only for the record, took up one-third of that gangrenously swollen publication.
While the Senate is in session, committees may not sit. Thus committee work can be delayed. When quorum calls go out, senators check in on the Senate floor, then fade out, leaving nobody to vote on measures. Thus arises the amusing distinction between a "live" quorum and a pro forma or on-the-record quorum.
The Appropriations Committee, however, sits continuously. It obtains unanimous consent at the beginning of each session to sit at any time whether or not the Senate is in session. It would be just too bad if appropriation bills were not ready for railroading on time.
Still another way of slowing down the legislative process is by requiring separate House and Senate hearings on the same bills, thus making witnesses appear twice at different times. As Clark points out, such time-consuming duplication could be eliminated by joint hearings.
Again, when there are joint House and Senate conferences with a view to harmonizing different bills, Establishment leadership sees to it in both houses, very often, that the representatives of the stronger bill are men who voted against it and are unsympathetic to it. These men tend to favor the weaker bill and to compromise accordingly.
It is sometimes an election ploy by a rival for his seat to charge a House congressman especially with a long series of absences from roll calls and votes, implying that he has not been attending to business. But if he is not a member of the Establishment and does not have many committee appointments, there is really no need for him to be present most of the time. He knows the votes on most matters coming up are cut and dried in advance. There is no issue on which his presence can make a difference. The sensible thing to do is to be absent until such time as he can function meaningfully.
It would look better on the record, it is true, if he hung around and answered the roll calls. But such roll-call response can be misleading with respect to the significant activity of a congressman. Some merely sit and read and entertain visitors in their offices between roll calls and votes.
I have given here only a taste of Senator Clark's revealing work. The student of American government, steadily fed on formalistic pap, can do no better than turn to it, read it, memorize it, put it into blank verse and set it to stately music.
Why doesn't somebody, it may be asked, point out in detail to the senators themselves precisely what is taking place? As men of goodwill, the naive will suppose, they will quickly respond and mend their ways. Senator Clark, however, has already performed this bootless task, without avail. 29
Clark's books offer many concentrated grotesque details--tabulations on the stacked committees, on the ages of the principals, etc. Congress in truth is ruled by a collection of old men, like a primitive tribe. The average age of chairmen of leading Senate committees in 1963 was 67. 5 years, with one chairman aged 86 and the youngest 51. 30 In the same year the average age of chairmen of the important House committees was 68. 7 years, with the oldest 84 and the youngest 54. 31 A reason advanced by agile Establishment spokesmen against the invariable application of the seniority rule is that it would, unless relaxed from time to time, leave senile dodderers in charge. Yet such are in fact left in charge despite variations in application of the rule to others.
In general, these committee chairmen are unimaginative, insensitive, uncultivated, set in their ways and nurture a vision of social reality long since vanished--always with the inevitable exceptions such as J. William Fulbright of the Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton P. Anderson of the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee and perhaps a few others.
Although the Court has now issued its ukase against these practices, the men borne to prominence by them will remain on the scene and in office until they wilt; and there is no guarantee that something equally objectionable, or more so, will not be devised by the always cunning pubpols.
Americans, it is often said unthinkingly, believe in majority rule. Yet, oddly, they never have had it; they have always had oligarchic rule, usually of a rather low order. The farther one moves away from a gerrymandered, intimidated, meagerly educated, emotionally immature and partly disqualified electorate the fewer become the participants in any decision until in the legislatures it is always and invariably far less than a majority, either representatively or among those present. For all those brain-
laundered with the doctrine of majority rule this is, admittedly, a strange, even unpatriotic notion. Yet it is an exact statement of the case.
"The primary and overriding duty and responsibility of each member of the House of Representatives is to get re-elected," it has been well said by Adam Clayton Powell, long a proficient preacher of the Gospel and a successful and highly affluent congressman since 1945. 5
The Establishment legislator in Congress-and some not so classifiable--has three further informal, off-the-record duties: (1) to work loyally with the legislative Establishment as an organization man; (2) to insure his own position whenever possible as a member in good standing of the affluent sector of society by acquiring any available cash, securities, real estate, franchises, market tips or whatever else may be of value; and (3) to share his affluence with indispensable offstage key figures of his home district organization grouped around the state or district party chairman. Nobody, it is plainly evident, plays the game alone.
Not to do this is to leave himself at the mercy of the shifting whims and moods of a potentially unstable constituency, wide open to the claims of eager rivals for his office, Despite careful planning by the legislator, he is at times the victim of political upsets and internal feuds. Yet if he is of the Establishment he is never wholly extinguished even if he has not had time to become affluent, because he has made many Establishment friends who remember him as a "regular. " They see to it that his post- legislative life is enriched by various appointments suitable to a "lame duck"-- commissionerships, judgeships, receiverships, lobby clients and the like. He belongs to a bund.
The Congressional Establishment, as Senator Clark proves, has a life of its own, policies of its own, aims of its own. These either have no connection with the needs or desires of the nation as a whole or harmonize with them only occasionally, fitfully, incidentally and, as it were, accidentally. It is a parasitical oligarchy. It produces results of its own predetermined stamp. It explains much about the chills, fevers and shudders of American society--its volume of crime, riots and lynchings.
The Bottom of the Bird Cage
"The trouble with Congress today,". writes Senator Clark, "is that it exercises negative and unjust powers to which the governed, the people of the United States, have never consented. . . . The heart of the trouble is that the power is exercised by minority, not majority rule. " 6
As in Soviet Russia and Red China, power is in the hands of solidly installed intriguing manipulators, with the difference that in the United States the intrigue takes place behind a facade of reasoned if blurry constitutionality. In Russia and China the bayonets show through the periodic purges. The difference is enough to make the reasonable man prefer the American system with all its blemishes, about as one would unjoyfully prefer dysentery to cholera.
"Our forms of government are heavily weighted against any kind of action, and especially any that might alter significantly the status quo. It takes too many units of government to consent before anything can be done. " 7 This, of course, is a truism. The constitutional bulwarks against tyranny, placed there by the Founders' hands, are used to produce a creeping, low-key tyranny.
It is the third branch of government, the legislative, where things have gone awry. Whether we look at city councils, the state legislatures or the Congress of the United States, we react to what we see with scarcely concealed contempt. This is the area where democratic government is breaking down. This is where the vested-interest
lobbies tend to run riot, where conflict of interest is concealed from the public, where demagoguery, sophisticated or primitive, knows few bounds, where political lag keeps needed action often a generation behind the times, where the nineteenth century sometimes reigns supreme in committees, where the evil influence of arrogant and corrupt political machines, at the local and state level, ignores most successfully the general welfare, where the lust for patronage and favors for the faithful do the greatest damage to the public interest.
. . . the legislatures of America, local, state and national, are presently the greatest menace in our country to the successful operation of the democratic process. 8
Lest the sheltered reader, tucked away in his bower, think that Senator Clark here delivers himself of an extravagant opinion or resorts to hyperbole, it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures--state, county and municipal--are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff or what police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving. " Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody they are what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the racetrack, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep-show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights.
The New York Times, customarily referred to as staid, has vouched editorially that the Massachusetts legislature is the most corrupt in the country. If this is so, the Commonwealth lawmakers have nosed out many others, including neighboring Rhode Island, merely by millimeters, The Times based its opinion on a solid report of the Massachusetts Crime Commission, submitted by impeccable leading citizens of the Bay State to Governor John Volpe in response to frenetic public clamor. "Corruption permeates the state, the report said, from town governments to the state house and involves politicians, business men, lawyers and ordinary citizens. " 9
This official report, a state document, cited wide-scale bribery by corporations and lawyers and the fact that legislators are on the payrolls of companies doing business with the state. Corruption was encouraged, the report said, because of "the lack of backbone" in the legislature.
As to this particular legislature, the Boston Globe analyzed it during the week of April 11, 1966, revealing elements of a pestilent tale. Most of the legislature, the Globe indicated, is composed of Babbittian local real estate dealers, insurance brokers, fixing lawyers, loan sharks, used-car entrepreneurs, miscellaneous fast-buck operators and obscure local hangers-on and roustabouts--many of them types who if they could not become attached to a public payroll, there to divert commerce their way, would be local misfits and perhaps panhandlers, vagrants, con men, family dependents, procurers or on local relief or unemployment rolls. The net impression given by the Globe (a rather reserved family paper) was of a political lumpenproletariat, a scabrous crew.
As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five or more years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non- Mafians.
Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures-- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois--and the impression is
thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone and not many in the low-level populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere--no states excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves. 10
The territorial base of the Establishment lies in the low-down one-party states. Ten have been found by careful political scientists to be generally one-party. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. Twelve were found to be practically one-party: Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Tennessee. 11 Ignoring for the moment still others that alternate over long periods as one-party jobs, like Florida recently, it is noticeable that the above array is nominally Republican as well as Democratic. Among the clearly Republican one-party strongholds are Vermont, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon and South Dakota. At least twenty-two states, then, or nearly half, are one-party setups, with some dozen others coming very close to qualifying. Public political scandals, it will be noted, are much less frequently heard of in the one- party states. Here it is as in one-party countries.
The single point to emphasize here is that Senator Clark is entirely correct, even reserved, in his sweeping reference to the legislatures. He does not exaggerate. As the lawyers would say, he is a sound witness. He does not, however, delve into the processes that brought such uncomely personnel into the legislative bodies. How did the honest electorate come to elect such canaille? That is, manifestly, another story, and is left to the next chapter.
As Senator Clark sees it, there is no continuing discipline in Congress whereby a majority of the members of a party are able, by simple vote, to discipline recalcitrant members interested only in blocking national measures and in feathering their own nests. The recent Powell and Dodd cases were token ceremonies. Although the parties have various committees, the policy committees give out no policies, the steering committees do not steer but block; and, in general, every man is for himself. And yet, important decisions are made.
The Congressional Establishment
The Congressional Establishment "consists of those Democratic chairmen and ranking Republican members of the important legislative committees who, through seniority and pressures exerted on junior colleagues, control the institutional machinery of Congress. . . . The official leadership group of the Congress--Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, et al. are usually captives of the Establishment, although they can sometimes be found looking out over the walls of their prison, plotting escape. " 12
"It is important to note that the views of the Congressional Establishment are not shared by a majority of their colleagues, who, left to their own devices, would be prepared to bring the Congress into line to cope with the necessities of our times. " 13 This, as we shall see) may be gravely questionable.
The Senate Establishment is "almost the antithesis of democracy. It is not selected by any democratic process. It appears to be quite unresponsive to the caucuses of the two parties. . . . It is what might be called a self-perpetuating oligarchy with mild, but only mild, overtones of plutocracy.
"There are plenty of rich men in the Senate, but only a few of them are high in the ranks of the Establishment; and none of them would admit [sic! ] to a belief that the accumulation of great wealth is a principal object of life. This is another distinction between the American and the Congressional Establishments. The former [consisting of the prime beneficiaries of the status quo] has, despite its slightly liberal orientation, definite overtones of plutocracy, although its tolerance is much more for inherited than for recently acquired wealth. " 14
Senator Clark now comes to the ties that bind the Congressional Establishment. They are: a common militant belief in white supremacy, a stronger devotion to property- ownership rights than to rights of the person, strong support of the military establishment at all times, marked belligerence in foreign affairs and an absolute determination to block internal congressional reform.
"A substantial number of the members of Congress in both parties are the product of political forces which give them a rural, pro-business, anti-labor, isolationist, conservative perspective with an attitude toward civil rights which ranges from passive unconcern to outright hostility. " 15
It is plain that the legislative strength of the Big-Business Establishment is, ironically, mainly in the agrarian districts. What are the "political forces" to which Senator Clark here refers in a somewhat opaque manner? They may be summed up in a word: money. The rural legislator--not directly tied to the business system, which is invariably weak in his home district (few stockholders, consumers, corporation employees or factories are found there)--has something to sell: his vote. And he sells it in a circumlocutional way, wrapped in some rococo principle such as states' rights, sacred privacy, economy, government anti-centralism, economic individualism or plain pure Americanism. This is the kernel of support by rustic solons for softly regulated big-city industrialism.
Politics, popularly thought to consist mainly of elections, really begins only after elections, when those elected come together to divide the spoils. The meetings of any legislative body, as of a floating crap game, must be under rules, which like laws themselves must emanate from the legislative body itself. The Constitution does not stipulate how Congress must govern itself. This is a "political question," wide open.
One of the Senate rules is that there may be unlimited debate; no senator may be silenced, unless, under Rule XXII, two-thirds of the senators present vote to terminate debate. With all senators present, this rule requires 66 votes to end debate. If only 35 refuse to limit debate, those who have the floor may go on talking endlessly, in relays. Such filibustering blocks all business until an agreement is reached to withdraw some proposal disliked by a sometimes very small minority.
As Senator Clark notes, the United States Senate is the only open legislative body in the world under such an extravagantly absurd rule, which calls to mind the veto power held by any member in the House of Nobles of the old Polish Kingdom. There the rule, more severe than ours, so effectively paralyzed the country as to leave it an easy prey to neighboring Prussia, Russia and Austria.
From 1789 to 1806 the Senate rules included the motion for the previous question, as provided for in Jefferson's Manual. On two occasions it was used to close debate. Since 1811 the motion has been used frequently in the House to end debate and is provided for in House Rule XVII. Virtually all the state legislatures allow the procedure, which,
as Jefferson pointed out, was used in the British Parliament as early as 1604. It is not, as Senator Clark reminds us, alien to hallowed Anglo-Saxon parliamentary procedure. It is, in truth, almost sacred and not to allow it full rein is ground for the deepest suspicion.
May a majority of the Senate at the beginning of a new Congress vote to terminate debate in order to pass on a change in the standing rules? This question was put point- blank as recently as 1963 by the vice president as the presiding Senate officer. In response there were only 44 ayes and 53 nays, with no roll call. The Establishment had triumphed, by a clear majority. (The question has since been put at the opening of every term with a similar outcome. )
Early in 1964 on a cloture petition that would have ended further debate on the question of a change of the rule--and which, under the rule, required a favorable vote of two-thirds of those present--the Clarkian majority lost by 54 for and 42 opposed. Senator Clark draws comfort from the fact that, including 4 absentees, the Senate at the time stood 56-44 in favor of cloture, only 10 short of the necessary two-thirds. But the earlier vote, with 53 nays, showed the full fire-power of the Establishment on the bedrock issue. On such showdowns the Establishment has thus far been able to muster far more than a third--pointedly, more than a half.
The Establishment itself is not a majority but it can, owing to the many strings in its octopal fingers, pull many unhappy non-Establishment senators into line when all the chips go down. On basic questions affecting its own power it is, in sober fact, a majority.
The sole contemporary full-face defeat of the Establishment was on the Test Ban Treaty, which came to a vote September 24, 1963, after a long debate. Two-thirds of those present and voting were required for ratification under the Constitution. The vote was 80 to 19 in favor.
Those who voted "No" at the time constituted the stone-faced core of the Senate Establishment in Senator Clark's view: Russell and Talmadge of Georgia, Stennis and Eastland of Mississippi, Long of Louisiana, Byrd and Robertson of Virginia, Byrd of West Virginia, McClellan of Arkansas, Thurmond of South Carolina, Curtis of Nebraska, Goldwater of Arizona, Simpson of Wyoming, Jordan of Idaho, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, Bennett of Utah and Tower of Texas. Most of these were from rule-by-terror states, nearly all from one-party states. Mundt of South Dakota, who usually votes down the line with the Establishment, defected.
But for changes in Rule XXII and cloture all of these, with Mundt, voted "No," including the following Establishment people who had defected momentarily on the Test Ban Treaty: Ellender of Louisiana, Hayden of Arizona, Holland of Florida, Johnston of South Carolina, Hill and Sparkman of Alabama, Cannon of Nevada, Cotton of New Hampshire, Williams of Delaware and Dirksen of Illinois. Half of these were also from rule-by-terror states; most were from one-party states.
It is the men mentioned in these two paragraphs, according to Senator Clark, who constitute the nucleus of the present Senate Establishment, which has its counterpart in the House. How one stands on Rule XXII determines whether one is for or against the Establishment.
A few of those mentioned are not present as of 1968. Such absence makes no difference to the Establishment because fresh replacements are always available approximately from the same states. When death approached Byrd of Virginia, the ailing senator retired and had his fifty-year-old son appointed in his place--an hereditary senator! Hardly any of the states represented by Establishment senators are
industrialized--only Illinois and Delaware. The rest are predominantly rural and agricultural or extractive; most are nonurbanized and are of exceptionally low general educational levels--defective schools, few libraries and bookstores, mediocre newspapers, poor radio-television programs, etc. Money for these is shot away nationally in wars. The core of the group is the southern Democratic bloc, which has been said to be the South's revenge on the rest of the country for the loss of the Civil War. But it has many members from parts of the country that are as economically and culturally retarded--in general, the Bible Belt, which tends to look indulgently on terror and intimidation.
The Establishment people are not men of parts; they are devoid of generally esteemed talents. None, possibly excepting McClellan and Sparkman, is a persuasive speaker. Many such as Eastland show themselves conspicuously deficient in reasoning powers, confidently propounding howlers in elementary logic that would shame most college freshmen. Nearly all appear to be quite innocent of acquaintance with semantics. Although most are members of the bar, none is rated high as a practicing lawyer. Few seem to be well read. None, as far as the record shows, is a writer; Goldwaters books of shabby notions were ghost-written. Few if any are soundly schooled. Their knowledge of the world--and of the language itself--appears to be meager. Their talents lean almost entirely to simple intrigue. Everett Dirksen is their prototype of a prophet. They are a drab crew.
If these people did not band together as they do behind Rule XXII, if they relied on their own capabilities in open debate on the merits of issues, they would stand forth in all hollowness among more talented men. And this is one reason for the Establishment: It is a refuge for the untalented, a closed trade union of the meagerly endowed.
What do Establishment members want? Are they merely interested in preserving the ties that bind them together and give them factitious substance: Rule XXII, white supremacy, the celebration of property and military derring-do and a truculent stance in foreign affairs? So to suppose would be to credit them with very limited, purely symbolical objectives. Actually, as Senator Clark stresses, many members of the Establishment go along with other measures, some with quite liberal measures, as long as Rule XXII and white supremacy remain inviolate. They are political traders, keen for cheapjack opportunities.
When blockages arise under Rule XXII, the Establishment is in a position to trade. In return for concessions it becomes its turn to make demands, to enforce its gloomy will on the country.
Customary analyses of Congress distinguish Republicans from Democrats, Southerners from Northerners and Westerners and conservatives from liberals. The latter distinction suggests, misleadingly, that there are reasoned attitudes present rather than rationalization for narrowly pecuniary self-interest. Political scientists are united in believing that national party affiliations are meaningless, that congressmen nearly all stem from purely local state and district factions. 16 Nor is the regional distinction fundamentally any more important than that of party.
There are, in truth, more fundamental distinctions to be observed. There is, first, the Establishment and anti-Establishment distinction that Senator Clark brings to view, with most of the Establishment people organization men from Soviet-style one-party districts or states. As unchaperoned strangers in them quickly discover, most of these states have extremely inquisitive polizei. Few such states are industrialized, few are very rich, and the rich ones, like Texas, are largely absentee-owned, obvious colonies of Wall Street and State Street. In all, organized politics offers one of the few sure roads to personal
affluence, functional latitude and renown. In the industrial states there are many such roads.
Much about American politics would be clearer if one thought of a metropolitan and a colonial or provincial United States. Metropolitan United States consists of southern New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, California, perhaps the state of Washington and the very eastern portions of Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota. just about everything else is nonmetropolitan, culturally below par and holds nearly all one-party politics. It is more like eastern Europe than like eastern United States.
Economically, this division is generally made as between agrarian and industrial states. Yet the congressional politics of the representatives of the agrarian states are not distinctively agrarian. Elected by a politically illiterate, often very small electorate unaware of the true drift of affairs and with few vital demands of its own to make, congressmen from these states are far freer than those of the metropolitan states to place their votes where the most money is, on the side of big property. For doing this they are allowed to join the propertied class by backstairs methods and are impressively referred to as conservatives.
Leadership in the nonmetropolitan states is noticeably below par (one of their basic deficiencies) owing to the steady drainage of homegrown talent into the metropolitan sector. It is not that the nonmetropolitan region fails to produce talented leadership material. It does produce it but discourages it and loses it steadily to the metropolitan sector, culturally more attractive. New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and other metropolitan centers fairly crawl with talented people from Georgia, Mississippi, Kansas and other retrograde provinces. On trips back home they are careful to keep a tight rein on their tongues lest they face the prospect of being expertly tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail by the local authorities, acting through local thugs.
Many organization politicians inside and outside Metropolia are known to feel, self- righteously, that their party ties provide a democratic device for the distribution of some of the industrial wealth--to themselves. They are sadly mistaken. No distribution of wealth to public-spirited connivers is taking place by this route. What is available, in various ways, is only a small percentage of the untaxed industrial revenues in the form of "campaign" contributions, gifts, fees and retainers. These are tips to menials.
It is not being suggested here that members of the Establishment and their veiled supporters are in all cases primarily trying to gain affluence for its own sake. Rather is it a fact that they must have affluence in order to function on their chosen level. The organization men split their "take" with other organization men in the home party organization. Many, it can be plainly shown, are eager estate builders--Johnsons, Dodds, Dirksens, Kerrs et al. Some, probably most, are a combination of the two. The prospect of money is definitely in the picture except in a very few cases.
Money is needed to get into electoral politics. Money is needed to remain there. And money is needed to carry one over the bleak days if one is voted out.
In saying this, one is not saying something that would have astounded the Founding Fathers. Under the Constitution as it originally stood, there were property qualifications for voting even for members of the House of Representatives and the state legislatures. Only as the various states gave the franchise to the nonpropertied in the early nineteenth century was this qualification removed, thus opening the way to office for poor men. This was a dangerous development because the poor newcomers to politics, seldom themselves partisans of the poor, needed money going far beyond the paltry pay of office, originally designed purely as honoraria for men of property and still on this level
in many jurisdictions. The unpropertied man in politics was in time, according to an unwritten convention, expected to use ingenuity in providing for himself. Imaginative and defensible schemes were devised by some, but the sheer logical possibilities of making adequate monetary provision outside of meager salary without going beyond the law or the proprieties are few and largely boil down to writing, lecturing, making after- dinner speeches or practicing ordinary law--all of which take some talent. Promotions in which the name of the officeholder was used to confer prestige were legitimate--when the promotions themselves were legitimate. But for most of the new off-the-soil officeholders, always with noteworthy exceptions. it all boiled down to acquiring money in some questionable way. They were necessarily purchasable men. In the practice of law the purchase price took the form of heavy retainers from big interests.
In order to attain congressional or any political office one must, as many experts have attested: (1) be independently wealthy either as an inheritor or a builder of better booby traps; (2) have the backing of a wealthy individual, group or organization; or (3) have the backing of a local party organization which in turn has access to suspect supporting funds. Sometimes a "bad" organization supports a man of impeccable probity as a way of disarming critics. The supporting funds, it is true, could come from thousands of "little people" chipping in quarters or dollars; but the "little people" are either not sufficiently interested, do not understand or cannot afford to contribute--or a combination of the three. They have money for booze, soft drinks, tobacco, cosmetics, gadgets, high installment interest rates and the whole range of stuff at Woolworth's but not a cent as expense money for their tribunes. They may well suspect, too, that the candidates have already been spoken for by higher bidders.
What I say here is by no means original with me, arising from some internal distemper. It is the consensus of sophisticated observers. "Many people are asking the question," says Drew Pearson in his nationally syndicated column, "'Do Congressmen steal? ' Our answer is that they do not unlawfully take money from the government but they do take money lawfully for representing 'anti-government' interests. In this sense they do steal the right of the voters to have a man in Congress who represents them, instead of representing his law firm and its big business clients. " 17 There are, however, many ways of legally putting money into a congressman's hands apart from attorneys' "fees" and "campaign" contributions. Attention will be given this lush aspect of standard garden-variety "democratic" politics further along.
The Establishment Method
How does the Republican-Democratic Establishment extend its will over the rest of the Congress? It does this, first, by its power to block anything, which forces others to trade with it. But its general control derives from its minute control over committee appointments. As the work of Congress is quietly done by committees, not through rational debate on the floor, such control is fundamental.
Any newcomer to Congress, whatever he has rashly promised his constituents, has as much to say over surrounding affairs as if he stepped into the rush-hour crowd at Grand Central Terminal or into the midst of a Bombay riot. If he managed to get the floor to make the most rousing speech ever delivered, there would be nobody present to hear it except the bored clerks and some flabbergasted tourists in the galleries. As soon as he rose to deliver himself of his deathless remarks, all the members would walk out as they customarily walk out on each other.
What he must do, Senator Clark informs us, is to keep quiet and watch what goes on. And the way to "get along," he further tells us, is to "go along"--with the older hands. If he continually "goes along" with those who are solidly ensconced, he will soon find that he is a member of some friendly bloc. It might seem that the smart thing to do would be
to join the Establishment at once but this cannot always be managed because Establishment ideas are under some dispute in the more crowded and variegated parts of the country. The next smartest thing to do is to be against the Establishment on the record but to support it on showdowns, as many do in voting that a majority of a new Senate may not vote to close off debate in order to pass on a change in the rules. He can, also, be a "maverick" like the fortyfour senators of 1963, although not many of these are very far-ranging.
If the new member continually "goes along," particularly with the Establishment, he finds that he is able to get various things done of interest to himself and to his standing in the eyes of his constituents. He may even be allowed to get his name on bills--the "Sascha Schmaltz Bill to Exterminate Poverty in Our Time" or something similarly astonishing. Also, his bank account, if he so desires, will steadily improve. His banker and broker will know he is now running with a well-heeled crowd.
Committee appointments, especially the powerful chairmanships over (not of) the most powerful committees, are commonly supposed to go to the members with the most seniority. Senator Clark shows conclusively, citing chapter and verse, that the Establishment freely deviates from the seniority rule whenever it wishes to push some member for reasons obscure to the observer.
Committee appointments are made by two party groups--the Democratic Steering Committee and the Republican Committee on Committees. The Establishment holds a majority of both, and, through its ability to entice new members, holds its power as an hereditary fief.
The Democratic Steering Committee varies in composition from time to time. By custom its members serve until they die, resign or are defeated at the polls, the last not likely in the one-party states and districts from which they emanate. As of 1959 it had fifteen members, seven southerners plus Lyndon B. Johnson, majority leader, and Carl Hayden, president pro tempore of the Senate, thus giving the Establishment a majority of nine. Johnson all along has been a 200-proof, sour-mash Establishment man.
Because the composition of Congress changed with the election of 1960, bringing in more Democrats, Senator Clark wanted the Steering Committee changed. He did get himself and three others put on, but the Establishment still controlled with nine votes. In 1963 at a Democratic Conference, composed of all the Democrats in the Senate, he proposed that the Steering Committee be increased to nineteen members.
Such an increase would have brought about geographical and ideological balance, in Clark's view, and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield promised to support him. "To my chagrin and surprise, Mansfield opposed my motion and [Hubert] Humphrey failed to support it. They told me later Bobby Baker had told them the votes were not there to approve the increase. Perhaps this was right. . . . Had the Majority Leader and Whip supported Senator Anderson and me, I believe we would have won. " 18 The point, though, is that they did not. On the secret ballot the Establishment vote was highest.
Within the Democratic Conference itself on a secret ballot the forces of reform represented by Clark were outnumbered nearly 2 to 1. The Republicans, the nonurban element of them Establishment people from the cradle up, have no need of such stacking in their Committee on Committees, which Senator Clark finds to be regionally and ideologically representative. With the Democratic Party in the majority, the Republicans get few committee appointments anyhow. Yet their members plus the southern Democrats constitute the Establishment power.
As the Republican Party has been deflated to a minority since 1932, it is clearly the congressional wing of the Democratic Party that is now the chief block to legislative
forthrightness. Yet the Democratic Party is the one that is popularly regarded as liberal, even radical. When the Republicans have a president he usually sees pretty much eye to eye with the Establishment; but since the accession of Democratic Lyndon B. Johnson as president, the Establishment is now in closest harmony with the White House. On the basis of Senator Clark's analysis, it would appear that the Establishment controls all the positions except the Supreme Court.
Through its power of appointment the Establishment in both houses "stacks" the committees of Congress with its supporters. "In the Eighty-sixth Congress [House] members from seven [backward] states controlled 97 of the 153 committee votes. " 19 As Senator Clark shows, the Establishment dominates all vital committees and keeps off non-Establishment men with seniority.
In the crucial committees of both houses there is a frequent installation of the same pro-Establishment men, although in the Senate no person may be a chairman of more than one committee. A small percentage of pro-Establishment men hold majority votes, with few exceptions.
The effect throughout, from the party committees to the standing legislative committees, with only minor exceptions, is as though a permanent bureaucracy were installed, Senator Clark notes. In Russia the same sort of phenomenon, differently arrived at, is known as the Politburo. What Senator Clark calls the Establishment is indeed very much like the Politburo in its permanence and indestructibility, although not perhaps in its specific objectives. The methods of holding and wielding power are similar. But one does business in rubles, the other in dollars.
Owing to the large number of intra-party and legislative committees the Establishment people sit on, they are heavily worked. Russell, leader in recent years of the Establishment as the most senior member, always managed the opening-session struggle against changing Rule XXII, master-minded meetings of the Democratic Steering Committee, was active in the Policy Committee, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was a member of the Appropriations Committee and chairman of its subcommittee on defense, member of the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee, the joint Committee on Atomic Energy and a member of the commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination and of the Boards of Visitors to the Military, Naval and Air Force Academies. And similarly with other Establishment people. 20
Senator Clark makes much of the distinction between liberals and conservatives in the Senate, but just how little it signifies was shown in 1966 on the vote to allow the Foreign Relations Committee and Appropriations Committee to share supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency with Senator Russell's Armed Services Committee. Russell was opposed to the change; Senator Fulbright, chairman of Foreign Relations, favored it.
Russell won on the show-down, 61 to 28. While no Establishment people sided with Fulbright, plenty of liberals sided with Russell, namely: Anderson of New Mexico, Douglas of Illinois, Magnuson of Washington, Neuberger of Oregon, Pastore of Rhode Island, Ribicoff of Connecticut (all Democrats) and Kuchel of California. (It is this sort of thing that earns liberals the label of "fuzzy-mindedness. ") Clark and Scott of Pennsylvania were not present-not that it would have made the slightest difference . 21
The CIA is ideologically a straight Establishment agency, designed as an identical opposite number to the Soviet para-military intelligence network. Whatever its model, the Soviet apparatus, does the CIA can and does do as well--or better.
The committees of the Senate are rated in order of prime importance about as follows: Finance (taxes), Armed Services (military supplies), Foreign Relations (world markets),
Appropriations (domestic allocation of money), Rules and Administration, Banking and Currency (monetary policy and credit), and judiciary and Government Operations. Committees such as Agriculture and Forestry, Commerce, District of Columbia, Interior and Insular Affairs, Labor and Public Welfare, Post Office, and Civil Service and Public Service are far less important (possibly excepting Agriculture) because they exert less leverage.
It is the power to block plus leverage in vital situations, often involving stupendous amounts of money, that makes certain committees paramount. Chairmen of committees are powerful because they are permanently installed as the senior member, are alone empowered except in the case of a very few committees to call committee meetings, and alone set agendas, call up bills for consideration, regulate bearings and terminate committee debates. Within the jurisdiction of each committee the chairman is almost a dictator. He can kill any bill in his jurisdiction by simply pigeon-holing it. Although it is possible to call meetings at the demand of a majority of committee members, practically this is rarely done because most committee members are more handpicked than the chairman, with whom they have many convenient understandings. They may even have been picked by the chairman himself. Until a bill is reported out by a committee it cannot come before the Senate unless two-thirds of the senators want it out. A bill could be ordered out on a majority vote, of course, but only if the Establishment approved.
In the House the chief committees are Rules, Ways and Means (taxes), Armed Services, Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Banking and Currency, Appropriations and Judiciary. Before going to the floor, unless a hard-to-get majority votes to bring it out, a bill must first be reported out by the Rules Committee. Most proposed bills, many of them having wide public approval, are never reported out. Filed with the Rules Committee, they might just as well have been dumped in a wastebasket. A majority of the House may order a bill discharged from committee, but ordinarily such a majority is hard to get.
Even though the House does not allow unlimited debate it has a more complex set of rules than the Senate. These rules are used to strangle or whittle down proposals unwanted by the House Establishment.
"Committee and subcommittee chairmen have more naked power in the House than in the Senate," Senator Clark notes. "There is no tax legislation if Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, doesn't want any, nor a wilderness bill against Aspinall's wishes. " 22
The various committee chairmen are kingpins in the House and form the nucleus of its Establishment. "While power seems more fragmented in the House than in the Senate," Senator Clark remarks, "it is probably because the former body is so much larger. Thus it is easier for chairmen to become more powerful. For the same reason there is less cohesion. There appears to be less sense of a 'band of brothers. ' While the South is to some extent in the saddle, it seems less obviously so. " 23 Still, the men from the nonmetropolitan sector rule.
Yet the Establishment coalition "operates on many an occasion even more effectively in the House than in the Senate" and has killed or whittled down a long line of useful bills--federal aid to education in 1960, area development in 1963, the Mass Transit Bill and Youth Opportunities Act, health care for the aged in earlier versions, improvement of foreign aid. "It cannot stop civil rights legislation because of the urban and suburban Republicans. But it can usually stop if it really wants to what the Establishment likes to call 'spending programs. '" 24
It did not, however, stop or whittle down Administration requests in 1965 and 1966 for additional appropriations for the undeclared presidential war in Vietnam. Although
costing some $20 billion or more annually, the Vietnam operation is not construed as a "spending program. " It is, more properly put, a patriotic program. Opposed to expenditures for domestic improvement programs, the Establishment in both houses is religiously devoted to all military spending, sometimes votes more than is asked for by the president.
Committee control and the two-thirds rule are only part of the Establishment method. The American constitutional system at best, as all scholars know, yields a cumbersome government that operates much like a Rube Goldberg threshing machine. With everybody giving his best the machine will work according to the intention of the designers, not efficiently but surely. But when the delays inherent in the checks-and- balance system are added to, as by Rule XXII and other contrivances not found in any parliamentary manual, the machine simply stops.
Rule XXII and the dominance of committee chairmen in the House by no means constitute the only devices of delay.
As Senator Clark notes, certain procedures have been adopted that use up more than half the time of Congress with a view to keeping new business from coming up even if it could be dislodged from the dilatory committees. There is, first, a requirement that the Journal of each Senate session must be read the following day unless unanimous consent to skip it is obtained. Says Clark: "It is utilized only for purposes of delay . . . . " 25 Next, the morning period reserved for minor business, using up a valuable legislative hour or more, "makes for delay. " 26 Senators speak at exhaustive length; Clark believes speeches should be limited to two hours. Often the subjects talked about haven't the remotest connection with anything taking place; they may be a description of the scenery of the solon's native state, memories of boyhood, a disquisition on the culinary arts, the national flower or the care of dogs--all with a view to using up time.
Again, "A motion to take up a bill on the calendar made by the Majority Leaders should be determined by vote without debate. At present such a motion is subject to unlimited debate, thus giving the opponents of the bill two chances to filibuster instead of only one. . . . " 27
Establishment senators, with a keen instinct for wasting time, introduce all manner of irrelevancy in their speeches, violating the rule of Jefferson's Manual that "No one is allowed to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously. " Says Clark: "No other legislative body in the world, so far as I have been able to discover, operates without a rule of germaneness. " 28
Clark's staff in a survey of the Congressional Record for 1961 found that nongermane speeches, excluding written insertions made only for the record, took up one-third of that gangrenously swollen publication.
While the Senate is in session, committees may not sit. Thus committee work can be delayed. When quorum calls go out, senators check in on the Senate floor, then fade out, leaving nobody to vote on measures. Thus arises the amusing distinction between a "live" quorum and a pro forma or on-the-record quorum.
The Appropriations Committee, however, sits continuously. It obtains unanimous consent at the beginning of each session to sit at any time whether or not the Senate is in session. It would be just too bad if appropriation bills were not ready for railroading on time.
Still another way of slowing down the legislative process is by requiring separate House and Senate hearings on the same bills, thus making witnesses appear twice at different times. As Clark points out, such time-consuming duplication could be eliminated by joint hearings.
Again, when there are joint House and Senate conferences with a view to harmonizing different bills, Establishment leadership sees to it in both houses, very often, that the representatives of the stronger bill are men who voted against it and are unsympathetic to it. These men tend to favor the weaker bill and to compromise accordingly.
It is sometimes an election ploy by a rival for his seat to charge a House congressman especially with a long series of absences from roll calls and votes, implying that he has not been attending to business. But if he is not a member of the Establishment and does not have many committee appointments, there is really no need for him to be present most of the time. He knows the votes on most matters coming up are cut and dried in advance. There is no issue on which his presence can make a difference. The sensible thing to do is to be absent until such time as he can function meaningfully.
It would look better on the record, it is true, if he hung around and answered the roll calls. But such roll-call response can be misleading with respect to the significant activity of a congressman. Some merely sit and read and entertain visitors in their offices between roll calls and votes.
I have given here only a taste of Senator Clark's revealing work. The student of American government, steadily fed on formalistic pap, can do no better than turn to it, read it, memorize it, put it into blank verse and set it to stately music.
Why doesn't somebody, it may be asked, point out in detail to the senators themselves precisely what is taking place? As men of goodwill, the naive will suppose, they will quickly respond and mend their ways. Senator Clark, however, has already performed this bootless task, without avail. 29
Clark's books offer many concentrated grotesque details--tabulations on the stacked committees, on the ages of the principals, etc. Congress in truth is ruled by a collection of old men, like a primitive tribe. The average age of chairmen of leading Senate committees in 1963 was 67. 5 years, with one chairman aged 86 and the youngest 51. 30 In the same year the average age of chairmen of the important House committees was 68. 7 years, with the oldest 84 and the youngest 54. 31 A reason advanced by agile Establishment spokesmen against the invariable application of the seniority rule is that it would, unless relaxed from time to time, leave senile dodderers in charge. Yet such are in fact left in charge despite variations in application of the rule to others.
In general, these committee chairmen are unimaginative, insensitive, uncultivated, set in their ways and nurture a vision of social reality long since vanished--always with the inevitable exceptions such as J. William Fulbright of the Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton P. Anderson of the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee and perhaps a few others.
