The Congress: When Is a Majority a Majority?

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So Russell yielded, but not before making it possible for his fellow Southerners to wage two filibusters against the civil rights bill—one on the motion to consider the bill, the other on the bill itself. After a week or so, Russell will probably permit Mansfield to call up the bill. Then, unless a motion to send the bill to Eastland's Judiciary Committee for ten days or so is approved, the real filibuster will begin.

Irrepressible Windbags. When it will end, nobody knows, for a filibuster is devilishly difficult to defeat. This is partly because the Senate, even without a filibuster going on, is a notably dilatory place. It took the first Senate 33 days just to muster a quorum back in 1789, and things have scarcely improved since then. In 1951, exasperated by his talkative colleagues, West Virginia Democrat Matthew Neely stacked a 100-lb. pile of the Congressional Record—the fruit of a single session—on top of his desk and pointed to it as evidence that the Senators were a bunch of "irrepressible windbags." If they had to talk so much, he suggested, they ought to do it "in highly secluded places where the only auditors will be hoot owls, turkey buzzards and shitepokes. These, when vexed, as they certainly would be, could take the wings of the morning, noon or night, and fly far, far away."

Still, many Senators are rather proud of the deliberate pace at which they proceed. The filibuster itself is often extolled as the last, best hope of avoiding domination by a tyrannical majority. The use of the filibuster is by no means confined to Southern Democrats and right-wing Republicans; liberals filibuster whenever it suits their purpose, and Oregon's Morse for a while held the record for uninterrupted windiness. For the simple reason that cloture might be invoked on them some day, many Senators are wary of imposing it on others. Thus the dean of Senate Democrats, President Pro Tempore Carl Hayden of Arizona, has never yet voted in favor of a cloture motion. Mike Mans field well understands this Senate feeling. And though he is already under pressure—some of it originating in the White House—to speed up the pace of debate, he flatly refuses. "You're not going to wear down the Southerners with such tactics," he said. "If anyone gets worn down, it will be the bill's proponents."

Nor does he intend to order round the-clock sessions, as Lyndon Johnson was apt to do, except as a last resort. "We debated a civil rights measure 24 hours a day for many days on end," he said, recalling the nine-day siege in 1960. "We debated it shaven and un shaven. We debated it without ties, with hair awry and even in bedroom slippers. In the end, we wound up with compromise legislation. And it was not the fresh and well-rested opponents of the civil rights measure who were compelled to the compromise. It was, rather, the exhausted, sleep-starved, quorum-confounded proponents who were only too happy to take it."

Three separate strategies have been shaped to conduct what could prove to be the longest filibuster since the Ship Subsidy debate, which dragged on intermittently from December 1922 until the end of February 1923.