The Congress: When Is a Majority a Majority?

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Never in his time as majority leader has Mansfield had to cope with so important and controversial a measure. The 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills that Lyndon Johnson got through the Senate covered limited areas—voting rights and school desegregation—and had few teeth by the time the Senate's dentists got through with them. But this bill covers the field. It would bar discrimination in voting rights, public accommodations, schools, jobs and Government-aided welfare programs, would also give the U.S. Attorney General substantial enforcement powers.

To Democratic segregationists, the rights bill is, in the words of Georgia's Russell, a "hideous" thing, "an instrument of unparalleled tyranny and persecution." It would, Russell predicted, "upset the historic division of powers among the three branches of the Government." It would sanction "such vast governmental control over free enterprise in this country as to commence the processes of socialism." It would, moreover, lead to the "mongrelization of our people," and Russell could not recall a single instance "in all of human history in which a mongrel race has been able to preserve a great civilization, much less to build one."

To the Last Ditch. When the bells clanged at noon last week, summoning the Senators, the atmosphere in the gold and mahogany Chamber was deceptively relaxed. Mansfield chatted quietly with a knot of reporters. Republican Leader Dirksen huddled with his lieutenants on the other side of the aisle, occasionally padding across the Chamber's carpeted floor to fling a bearlike arm around a colleague's shoulders and whisper a few honeyed words into his ear.

Shortly after the session got under way, Russell successfully pulled off his first parliamentary coup. Under the Senate rules, a motion to introduce a bill is not debatable and therefore not subject to filibuster during the "morning hour"—which actually begins at noon and lasts for two hours. Mans field wanted to call up the civil rights bill during the morning hour and plunge right into the debate. But when he asked for unanimous consent to dispense with the reading of the previous day's Journal, Russell objected.

"I trust the clerk will read the Jour nal slowly and clearly," he drawled with a sly wink at Hubert Humphrey. The clerk did, thereby used up the better part of an hour. As soon as he finished,

Russell was on his feet again, this time with an amendment to the Journal. His "amendment" turned into a two-hour monologue, while Alabama's John Sparkman snoozed at his desk and other Senators sat glassy-eyed. At 3:15, Russell addressed a parliamentary inquiry to Wyoming Republican Milward Simpson, who was sitting in as the Senate's presiding officer.

Russell: Is the morning hour concluded?

Simpson: The morning hour has been concluded since 2 o'clock.

Russell: At this time would a motion to proceed to the consideration of a bill on the calendar be debatable?

Simpson: The Senator is correct.