The Congress: An Adequate Number of Democrats

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No Cliffhanging. Albert knows his Aristotle from his university days and has a great sense of the tradition of democratic legislatures, beginning with the Athenian lawmakers who met amid prayer, sacrifice and invective on the Pnyx, a hill near the Acropolis. He is too good a student of Capitol Hill, as well, to trust any kind of legislative majority by itself. He knows that Jefferson had more than 3-to-l majorities in his Ninth Congress (1805-07), yet was not able to get the money in time for one of his pet projects—buying Florida. In the 41st Congress, Ulysses S. Grant had a 56-to-11 majority in the Senate, yet could not get his own party to support his desire to annex Santo Domingo. And Franklin Roosevelt's overwhelmingly Democratic 75th Congress (1937-38) turned on the President and killed many of his New Deal bills because F.D.R. had autocratically tried to pack the Supreme Court with liberals.

Albert is convinced that Lyndon Johnson will not make any such mistakes. Says he of Lyndon's ability as a congressional strategist: "He's one of the best who ever came down the pike. He moves when you don't know that he's moving, and his greatest talent is his tenacity and his endurance. Most Administration measures will not be handled in a rubber-stamp fashion. They'll be altered in the committees and altered on the floor. But they can be passed without the cliffhanging operations we've had in the last few Congresses."

Beyond his loyalty to Lyndon and to the Democratic Party, Carl Albert has an even deeper pride in Congress as an institution. A liberal, he nevertheless scorns doctrinaire liberals—and political scientists—who seem to favor the executive and judiciary branches, rather than the legislative, as the main instruments of progress. "A legislature in a country like ours, more than either the executive or the judiciary, has the power to effectuate new policy in a democracy. Its consensus is more of a national consensus than any other. And this very fact causes the legislature to be the real corner star of a democracy."