A Congressman on Congressional Reform

Congressional procedural reform can be argued from an abstract point of view: a favored set of procedures is more "democratic", or more "responsible", or more "legitimate" than others. But, like other aspects of political philosophy, the abstract proposal is usually strongly related to the substantive interests of its advocate.

If you are a liberal in 1910, democracy demands that the powers of the speaker be limited. If you are a liberal in 1937, the ability of committees block legislation should not be threatened by irresponsible use of such methods as the discharge petition (New Deal Democrats raised the number of signatures needed for discharge petitions in that year.)

And if you are a liberal Congressman in the 1960's who has enjoyed a favorable relationship with the establishment like Missouri Congressman Richard Bolling, your view will not be the same as that of a liberal senator of the same period like Pennsylvania's Joseph Clark, who has been a consistent outsider; you will both agree that the powers of the leadership should be increased to maximize "responsibility," and that every possible means--such as decreasing the number of signatures required for a discharge petition--should be used to minimize the power of committees to block legislation.

The ability of the Democratic Study Group (an organization of liberal Congressmen) to pass a number of reforms in the Democratic caucus and in the House this January brought a good deal of attention to Congressman Bolling's House Out of Order, a book written to urge passage of similar reforms. This book was especially interesting because Bolling had never been a whole-hearted supporter of reform, and his relationship with the DSG had been a curiously ambivalent one.

Bolling had been a protege of Speaker Sam Rayburn, and as such a spokesman for the establishment with which the DSG was frequently at odds. At the same time, however, Bolling, as a convinced liberal, took part in Study Group activities. DSG leaders have remarked that Bolling would come to meetings, but usually maintaining the condescending manner of one enjoying a favored relationship with the Speaker.

After Rayburn's death, Bolling tried to remain in the establishment by running for the majority leader's position but withdrew when it became obvious that he would be beaten by Carl Albert. Realizing that he would no longer occupy a favored position with the establishment, Bolling turned more unreservedly to reform and the DSG. This was a reflection either of luck or an instinct for power that originally led Bolling into Rayburn's inner group, for reform and liberalism are becoming more powerful and fashionable--the DSG now has over 100 members

In the Spring of 1963, Harvard Young Democrats were told by Bolling that he was coming out with a bold new plan to replace the seniority system. The details of the plan would be released in a new book. The book has come out, but it, and the new plan, are highly disappointing.

The first few chapters are a capsule history of the House which are badly written and often inaccurate (e.g. "the Senate was known as the 'upper body' possibly because it met in a chamber on the second floor above the House"). The general point of the history is that the House was better off when it had strong leadership.

The anecdotal descriptions of lobbies, press, and House personnel, are primarily valuable for random inside information and for Bolling's priceless characterizations: William Colmer's political position "is perhaps slightly to the left of Ivan the Terrible"; Adam Clayton Powell's attention span "has been variously estimated as ranging between forty seconds to two minutes"; the Rule's Committee is "Howard Worth Smith's efficiently run cemetery" and "that contemporary version of a French Bourban soirees."

Legislative Battles

Bolling emphasizes his position as an establishment, middle-of-the-road type in his descriptions of the Lanrum-Griffin, Civil Rights, and Rules fights. He tried to get pro-labor liberals to accept a moderate labor control bill. He implies that their failure to do so contributed to the eventual passage of the strongly anti-labor Lanrum-Griffin bill. In the civil rights fight of 1960, he again took an establishment position. He refrained from participating in the DSG tactic--which violated House rules--of publicizing names of those Republicans who hadn't signed the discharge petition. After the bill had been emasculated by the Senate he urged liberals to accept what they could get. (Compare Senator Joseph Clark's description of the 1960 fight in Congress: The Sapless Branch: "In the end, the leadership on both sides of the aisle capitulated to the Southern Generalissimo, Richard B. Russell of Georgia.")

Interestingly, Rayburn emerges from these reminiscences as a good tabulator of votes, but a fairly ineffective leader. On the fight to make the Rules Committee more responsive to the leadership, for example, Rayburn declined the best method for seemingly insubstantial reasons. A purge of Colmer from the Rules Committee for not supporting the party ticket in 1960 could have been quite easily accomplished in party caucus. Rayburn chose instead to enlarge the Committee, a move which required vote of the full House--including Republicans--and therefore brought on a long, bitter fight, apparently because of sentiment (purges aren't nice), and some kind of scruple of Rayburn's about the precedent set when Powell was not purged in 1956. (Clark lists dozens of precedents in favor of purge.)

Most of Bolling's reform proposals are unrelated to the rest of the book. Proposals for stricter conflict-of-interest controls on Congressmen, for an Administrative People's Counsel like that in Sweden--he would do most of the Congressional "messenger boy" work--and for streamlined committee procedures are all praiseworthy. But they seem peripheral to the basic power questions with which Bolling claims to be concerned.

The much-heralded replacement for the seniority system is given only a few pages at the end of the book. Bolling would have the Speaker nominate committee chairmen and members of the Ways and Means Committee (the Democrats' Committee on Committees) to be elected or rejected by the party caucus. New nominations would be made to replace rejected candidates. The caucus would also approve or reject decisions of the Ways and Means Committee on committee assignments. The advantages of this system are that they combine the effectiveness of a strong speaker and the representativeness of a powerful caucus, but use the two as a check on each other so that there is no surrender to a "Czar" Speaker or "King" Caucus.

Stronger Leadership

The thrust of the argument of Bolling the reformer, then, is not unreconcilable with Bolling the former establishment man. The main element of reform is a strengthening of the leadership. But there is no extensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the proposal, or its basis. On the procedural level, such a proposal would tend toward a party alignment on the order of rule - by - majority - of - a - majority (i.e. decisions of the party caucus), approaching the British system, which became quite popular among political scientists in the late forties. Such a view raises interesting questions about what kind of a legislature is most representative (and if, indeed, representation is the only value one ought to apply in judging legislative procedures) which Bolling never bothers to discuss. His views may be defensible, but he never really defends it.

On the substantive question--which, as I have implied, is probably more important--Bolling contends that his reforms will help liberals and hurt conservatives. This follows from certain assumptions, such as that conservatives, having more seniority, are at an advantage in the present system; that procedural obstructions help conservatives because liberals are more inclined to want to pass bills; that the leadership will tend to be more liberal than an unlead resolution of the various issues. Many of these are justifiable, but there are some reservations that could be made.

Switch

For example, in the last Congress, liberals used traditional conservative tricks--which did not work particularly well for the conservatives in that Congress--against the conservatives. Two examples of this are such traditional liberal objects of attack-- Committee obstruction and the filibuster.

Virtually every liberal bill was able to at least get to the floor for a hearing. Even the medicare bill, which Wilbur Mills and a majority of the Ways and Means Committee had bottled up, was finally added as a Senate amendment to the House-passed Social Security amendments, thus by-passing the Ways and Means Committee, though it failed to be passed after that. At the same time, however, the Becker (school prayer) amendment, which would unquestionably have passed if it had gotten to the floor, was bottled up in the Judiciary Committee by New York liberal Emmanuel Cellar. After the initial uproar and intense agitation for the amendment had died down, Cellar held hearings on the bill and got the establishment-constitutionalist and more responsible church leaders--who had been slow to begin exerting pressure against the school prayer amendments--to convince enough Committee members so that the majority switched from supporting the amendment to opposing it. From then on, the bill was dead. Traditionally conservative delaying methods had enabled liberals to prevent passage of a bill reflecting momentarily popular conservative passions.

A second example is the filibuster. In the same Congress in which conservative use of this device against its traditional target, civil rights, was dealt a death blow by the urgency and overwhelming popularity of the issue, liberals found the procedure of invaluable use. A highly conservative measure directed against Supreme Court involvement in the reaportionment issue, the Dirksen-Mansfield amendment--note the participation of bipartisan leadership in this conservative measure--had been added as a rider to the foreign aid bill and seemed sure of passage. Since the House had already passed the much more extreme Tuck amendment virtually anything passed by the Senate would have become law. Yet, the amendment was defeated, miraculously, by successful liberal use of that old shibboleth, the filibuster.

Of course, there has been no complete shift. The threat of filibuster hanging over the voting rights bill has forced the administration to rely on Dirksen and such conservative influences of his as defeat of the poll tax amendment. And conservatives will still be able to use the devices they have used in the past, although, hopefully, greater liberal majorities and a more efficient liberal machine--partially DSG organized--will at least equalize the previously disproportionate amount of parliamentarian talent which conservatives had.

The point is, that all these qualifications raise important issues with which Bolling never deals. He provides a serious analysis of neither the abstract advantages of his procedural reforms, nor the relevant factors relating to his substantive claim that stronger leadership in the House will aid liberalism.

A similar lack of clarity of analysis characterized Senator Joseph Clark's Congress: The Sapless Branch which pre-dated this by a year. Clark's history is no better than Bolling's; and he is even more prone to accept, unexamined, theories for a stronger two-party system, such as those of his close friend, James McGregor Burns.

And if you are a liberal Congressman in the 1960's who has enjoyed a favorable relationship with the establishment like Missouri Congressman Richard Bolling, your view will not be the same as that of a liberal senator of the same period like Pennsylvania's Joseph Clark, who has been a consistent outsider; you will both agree that the powers of the leadership should be increased to maximize "responsibility," and that every possible means--such as decreasing the number of signatures required for a discharge petition--should be used to minimize the power of committees to block legislation.

The ability of the Democratic Study Group (an organization of liberal Congressmen) to pass a number of reforms in the Democratic caucus and in the House this January brought a good deal of attention to Congressman Bolling's House Out of Order, a book written to urge passage of similar reforms. This book was especially interesting because Bolling had never been a whole-hearted supporter of reform, and his relationship with the DSG had been a curiously ambivalent one.

Bolling had been a protege of Speaker Sam Rayburn, and as such a spokesman for the establishment with which the DSG was frequently at odds. At the same time, however, Bolling, as a convinced liberal, took part in Study Group activities. DSG leaders have remarked that Bolling would come to meetings, but usually maintaining the condescending manner of one enjoying a favored relationship with the Speaker.

After Rayburn's death, Bolling tried to remain in the establishment by running for the majority leader's position but withdrew when it became obvious that he would be beaten by Carl Albert. Realizing that he would no longer occupy a favored position with the establishment, Bolling turned more unreservedly to reform and the DSG. This was a reflection either of luck or an instinct for power that originally led Bolling into Rayburn's inner group, for reform and liberalism are becoming more powerful and fashionable--the DSG now has over 100 members

In the Spring of 1963, Harvard Young Democrats were told by Bolling that he was coming out with a bold new plan to replace the seniority system. The details of the plan would be released in a new book. The book has come out, but it, and the new plan, are highly disappointing.

The first few chapters are a capsule history of the House which are badly written and often inaccurate (e.g. "the Senate was known as the 'upper body' possibly because it met in a chamber on the second floor above the House"). The general point of the history is that the House was better off when it had strong leadership.

The anecdotal descriptions of lobbies, press, and House personnel, are primarily valuable for random inside information and for Bolling's priceless characterizations: William Colmer's political position "is perhaps slightly to the left of Ivan the Terrible"; Adam Clayton Powell's attention span "has been variously estimated as ranging between forty seconds to two minutes"; the Rule's Committee is "Howard Worth Smith's efficiently run cemetery" and "that contemporary version of a French Bourban soirees."

Legislative Battles

Bolling emphasizes his position as an establishment, middle-of-the-road type in his descriptions of the Lanrum-Griffin, Civil Rights, and Rules fights. He tried to get pro-labor liberals to accept a moderate labor control bill. He implies that their failure to do so contributed to the eventual passage of the strongly anti-labor Lanrum-Griffin bill. In the civil rights fight of 1960, he again took an establishment position. He refrained from participating in the DSG tactic--which violated House rules--of publicizing names of those Republicans who hadn't signed the discharge petition. After the bill had been emasculated by the Senate he urged liberals to accept what they could get. (Compare Senator Joseph Clark's description of the 1960 fight in Congress: The Sapless Branch: "In the end, the leadership on both sides of the aisle capitulated to the Southern Generalissimo, Richard B. Russell of Georgia.")

Interestingly, Rayburn emerges from these reminiscences as a good tabulator of votes, but a fairly ineffective leader. On the fight to make the Rules Committee more responsive to the leadership, for example, Rayburn declined the best method for seemingly insubstantial reasons. A purge of Colmer from the Rules Committee for not supporting the party ticket in 1960 could have been quite easily accomplished in party caucus. Rayburn chose instead to enlarge the Committee, a move which required vote of the full House--including Republicans--and therefore brought on a long, bitter fight, apparently because of sentiment (purges aren't nice), and some kind of scruple of Rayburn's about the precedent set when Powell was not purged in 1956. (Clark lists dozens of precedents in favor of purge.)

Most of Bolling's reform proposals are unrelated to the rest of the book. Proposals for stricter conflict-of-interest controls on Congressmen, for an Administrative People's Counsel like that in Sweden--he would do most of the Congressional "messenger boy" work--and for streamlined committee procedures are all praiseworthy. But they seem peripheral to the basic power questions with which Bolling claims to be concerned.

The much-heralded replacement for the seniority system is given only a few pages at the end of the book. Bolling would have the Speaker nominate committee chairmen and members of the Ways and Means Committee (the Democrats' Committee on Committees) to be elected or rejected by the party caucus. New nominations would be made to replace rejected candidates. The caucus would also approve or reject decisions of the Ways and Means Committee on committee assignments. The advantages of this system are that they combine the effectiveness of a strong speaker and the representativeness of a powerful caucus, but use the two as a check on each other so that there is no surrender to a "Czar" Speaker or "King" Caucus.

Stronger Leadership

The thrust of the argument of Bolling the reformer, then, is not unreconcilable with Bolling the former establishment man. The main element of reform is a strengthening of the leadership. But there is no extensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the proposal, or its basis. On the procedural level, such a proposal would tend toward a party alignment on the order of rule - by - majority - of - a - majority (i.e. decisions of the party caucus), approaching the British system, which became quite popular among political scientists in the late forties. Such a view raises interesting questions about what kind of a legislature is most representative (and if, indeed, representation is the only value one ought to apply in judging legislative procedures) which Bolling never bothers to discuss. His views may be defensible, but he never really defends it.

On the substantive question--which, as I have implied, is probably more important--Bolling contends that his reforms will help liberals and hurt conservatives. This follows from certain assumptions, such as that conservatives, having more seniority, are at an advantage in the present system; that procedural obstructions help conservatives because liberals are more inclined to want to pass bills; that the leadership will tend to be more liberal than an unlead resolution of the various issues. Many of these are justifiable, but there are some reservations that could be made.

Switch

For example, in the last Congress, liberals used traditional conservative tricks--which did not work particularly well for the conservatives in that Congress--against the conservatives. Two examples of this are such traditional liberal objects of attack-- Committee obstruction and the filibuster.

Virtually every liberal bill was able to at least get to the floor for a hearing. Even the medicare bill, which Wilbur Mills and a majority of the Ways and Means Committee had bottled up, was finally added as a Senate amendment to the House-passed Social Security amendments, thus by-passing the Ways and Means Committee, though it failed to be passed after that. At the same time, however, the Becker (school prayer) amendment, which would unquestionably have passed if it had gotten to the floor, was bottled up in the Judiciary Committee by New York liberal Emmanuel Cellar. After the initial uproar and intense agitation for the amendment had died down, Cellar held hearings on the bill and got the establishment-constitutionalist and more responsible church leaders--who had been slow to begin exerting pressure against the school prayer amendments--to convince enough Committee members so that the majority switched from supporting the amendment to opposing it. From then on, the bill was dead. Traditionally conservative delaying methods had enabled liberals to prevent passage of a bill reflecting momentarily popular conservative passions.

A second example is the filibuster. In the same Congress in which conservative use of this device against its traditional target, civil rights, was dealt a death blow by the urgency and overwhelming popularity of the issue, liberals found the procedure of invaluable use. A highly conservative measure directed against Supreme Court involvement in the reaportionment issue, the Dirksen-Mansfield amendment--note the participation of bipartisan leadership in this conservative measure--had been added as a rider to the foreign aid bill and seemed sure of passage. Since the House had already passed the much more extreme Tuck amendment virtually anything passed by the Senate would have become law. Yet, the amendment was defeated, miraculously, by successful liberal use of that old shibboleth, the filibuster.

Of course, there has been no complete shift. The threat of filibuster hanging over the voting rights bill has forced the administration to rely on Dirksen and such conservative influences of his as defeat of the poll tax amendment. And conservatives will still be able to use the devices they have used in the past, although, hopefully, greater liberal majorities and a more efficient liberal machine--partially DSG organized--will at least equalize the previously disproportionate amount of parliamentarian talent which conservatives had.

The point is, that all these qualifications raise important issues with which Bolling never deals. He provides a serious analysis of neither the abstract advantages of his procedural reforms, nor the relevant factors relating to his substantive claim that stronger leadership in the House will aid liberalism.

A similar lack of clarity of analysis characterized Senator Joseph Clark's Congress: The Sapless Branch which pre-dated this by a year. Clark's history is no better than Bolling's; and he is even more prone to accept, unexamined, theories for a stronger two-party system, such as those of his close friend, James McGregor Burns.