National Affairs: Maintaining Reason

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In all the long, talkative history of the U.S. Senate, only 22 attempts have been made to end filibusters by cloture, only four times (and not since 1927, on a filibuster against creation of a bureau of customs and bureau of prohibition) have the attempts been successful. But last week, for the first time, the Senate got what appeared to be a generally reasonable and workable anti-filibuster rule.

The Senate's new Rule XXII was the personal product of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. As such, it represented a middle way between the Senate's Southerners, who hold with the idea of limitless debate, and Senate liberals, who would impose cloture at the drop of a drawl. The Johnson-sponsored rule will:

1) Allow two-thirds of the Senators "present and voting" to end filibusters, as against the old requirement of two-thirds of the entire Senate membership.

2) Drop from the old Rule XXII a provision that, in effect, barred cloture on a motion to change the Senate rules.

3) Specify that the rules of the Senate shall "continue from one Congress to the next Congress," thereby giving substance to the appealing (to most Senators) notion of the Senate as a continuing body.

So skillfully did Lyndon Johnson handle his fight for his own version of Rule XXII that the final 72-22 vote left only the extreme diehards of both the liberal and Southern sides in opposition. Thus such liberals as New York Republican Jacob Javits arid Illinois Democrat Paul Douglas found themselves isolated with such bitter-end Southerners as South Carolina's Strom Thurmond and Mississippi's James Eastland.

It was a historic measure of Texan Johnson's genius for maneuver that 16 moderate Southern and border-state Senators joined him in voting for strengthening the Senate's anti-filibuster rule. And Compromiser Johnson was by no means guilty of overstatement when he said, just before the lopsided final vote: "We are perfecting our unity. We are maintaining reason."