The Congress: When Is a Majority a Majority?

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Mansfield could muster the simple majority (51 votes) necessary to pass the bill right now—if he could bring it to a vote. But captained by Georgia's Richard Brevard Russell, veteran of a dozen successful battles against civil rights legislation, the opposing Democrats aim to keep the bill from coming to a vote by talking it to death. For that purpose, they have set up three six-man talk teams, each assigned to a 24-hour shift while the other two rest.

To shut up his filibustering fellow Democrats, Mansfield must invoke Senate Rule XXII, the famed cloture rule that was adopted in 1917 after what Woodrow Wilson described as "a little group of willful men" had scuttled his proposal to arm U.S. merchant ships against marauding submarines.

"What Magic?" In all the years since then, eleven cloture petitions have been introduced to halt civil rights filibusters —and not one has succeeded. To get cloture, Mansfield needs the votes of two-thirds of the Senators present—67 if everybody is on hand. "You can immediately forget 22 or 23 Democratic Senators who will not vote for cloture," he says. "You have to get that many Republicans to make up the deficiency." What that means, says Mansfield, is that "whether we have a civil rights bill depends on the Republicans."

This is by no means a unique position for Democratic Leader Mansfield. Time and again he has been forced to rely on Republican votes for approval of measures sponsored by a Democratic Administration. Some liberal Democratic Senators criticize him for working so closely with Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, but Mansfield really has little choice. As he himself once snapped: "The difficulties are more with our own people than with the Republicans."

Even such small displays of temper are unusual for Mansfield, an easygoing type who perpetually puffs at a pipe stuffed with Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco. Although an ex-miner and an exmarine, he is one of the least combative men in the Senate. As a boy, he recalls, he tried to break up a fight, got a drubbing from a tough roustabout for his pains. "I learned not to butt into other people's fights," he says. And as Senate majority leader he relies on "persuasion, accommodation and understanding" rather than force. "The leader has no real power, none at all," he says. "What magic can change a vote?"

If that does not sound like the popular image of the arm-twisting string-pulling, push-it-through Senate floor leader, it isn't. But as a matter of fact, that image itself is flawed. The post is recognized in neither the Constitution nor the Senate Rules, and only at the beginning of the 20th century did it take its present form. Since then, the number of truly dominating majority leaders can be counted on one hand, for rarely has the Senate leader also been the most influential man in his party.