Happy Talk

In their eagerness to protect and legislate for one ethnic minority group, a hearty band of Senate liberals seems prepared to jeopardize the rights of all political minorities. If the liberal changes in Senate rules are adopted when the 86th Congress convenes Wednesday, the amended procedures may someday embarass their creators and doom some of their favorite legislation.

The suggested changes are twofold. The first involves new procedures for closing Senate debate by a two-thirds majority of those present after two days of debate, or by a simple majority of those present after fifteen days. The anti-filibuster drive is headed primarily by men who fear the power of Southern conservatives in blocking civil rights legislation and who are willing to abandon a long-standing Senate tradition of talkativeness to achieve their civil rights objectives.

To effect this rules change, the liberals will need the support of Vice President Nixon in obtaining a ruling stating that the Senate is not a "continuing body" and is therefore free to adopt whatever rules it wants at the beginning of each Congress. Nixon has already given such an opinion once (in another, similar fight in the 85th Congress) and can be relied upon to stick to his guns. After he rules, the Senate will operate temporarily under standard parliamentary rules which permit closure by a simple majority. Thus the liberals can terminate a filibuster against their anti-filibuster drive without much trouble.

If the hypothesis that the Senate is not a continuing body is a reasonable one, nonetheless the belief that a majority of Senators on the floor has an indisputable hold on ultimate wisdom is not. Under the proposed change this second belief would take on the force of law. Thus, a liberal Senate minority--and there have been numbers of them--could be effectively silenced by what, at the moment, looks like a very liberal move. There is no guarantee that a simple majority of Senators on the floor of their chamber will always act wisely; there is, in fact, a far greater likelihood that such a simple majority could be stampeded into precipitate action.

To filibuster, though it has in recent times assumed the cast of evil, is a respectable safeguard against the vagaries of democracy. Instead of allowing its elimination by a small group of Senators, it would seem far wiser to establish the two-thirds-of-those-present rule as the necessary number to limit debate. Such a compromise will permit the passage of needed civil rights measures without sabotaging a truly useful protection of minority rights.