Evan Bayh recalls a milder time in the Senate:
While romanticizing the Senate of yore would be a mistake, it was certainly better in my father’s time. My father, Birch Bayh, represented Indiana in the Senate from 1963 to 1981. A progressive, he nonetheless enjoyed many friendships with moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats.
One incident from his career vividly demonstrates how times have changed. In 1968, when my father was running for re-election, Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, approached him on the Senate floor, put his arm around my dad’s shoulder, and asked what he could do to help. This is unimaginable today.
One might wonder whether Dirksen was sincere, but suppose he was? Why would the leader of the Senate Republicans want to help a liberal senator from Indiana get reelected? Consider that during the 90th Congress (1967-69) the Democrats had a 64-36 advantage. Mind you, at the time the cloture rule required 67 votes to overcome a filibuster, so this was theoretically less of an advantage than you might think. For some strange reason, though, the 90th Congress was able to pass a good amount of significant legislation. But things have changed:
According to research by UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, there was an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s. That number has grown steadily since and spiked in 2007 and 2008 (the 110th Congress), when there were 52 filibusters. More broadly, according to Sinclair, while 8 percent of major legislation in the 1960s was subject to “extended-debate-related problems” like filibusters, 70 percent of major bills were so targeted during the 110th Congress.
We’re all familiar with the radical abuse of the cloture rule by contemporary Republicans, but would we prefer a political culture where Mitch McConnell works to help Al Franken get reelected? What kind of political culture is that? It’s a political culture where senators are more interested in preventing turnover in their club membership than in doing any of the things they said they wanted to do when their ran for office.
There are problems with the Senate, and Bayh identifies some of them in his piece, but a lack of extreme irrational comity is not one of those problems. People disagree about stuff. The two parties are now fairly ideologically rigid and, as a result, there is no longer any possibility of the Senate working with its old rules.
We don’t need to have lunch with each other, although I see no harm in it. We need the majority to be able to force a vote in the Senate. Maybe there should be a major cost (like the need to devote a lot of legislative days) to forcing a vote in the Senate, but the minority shouldn’t be able to stop a bill from ever getting a vote.
But Zell Miller put his arm around…
And Joe Lieberman put his arm around…
I guess that Evan Bayh just couldn’t get Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Bill Frist, or Mitch McConnell to give him a hug.
“We’re all familiar with the radical abuse of the cloture rule by contemporary Republicans, but would we prefer a political culture where Mitch McConnell works to help Al Franken get reelected? What kind of political culture is that? It’s a political culture where senators are more interested in preventing turnover in their club membership than in doing any of the things they said they wanted to do when their ran for office.”
I would say that it would depend on what gets accomplished. For instance, you note that among the significant acheivements was the civil rights act of 1968. I can’t find the role call, but I’d bet that a higher percentage of Republican Senators voted for it than Democrats. See also the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where the same occurred. That’s a long list of good acheivements for the ‘club’.
I’d take that today in a heartbeat.
The civil rights and voting rights acts were achievements of a dedicated popular movement making the pols do it — as some have called it, “a nonviolent American revolution”. Those laws changed the political landscape from a Solid South for the Dems to one for the Reps, so it’s hard to take lessons from which party voted for what at the time. Passage was a triumph for outside pressure, not for “collegiality”.
I guess I’m just partisan to the core. I’ve never quite trusted pols or others who feel so comfortable with people who stand for what they think is wrong, and lie to make their talking points to boot. It seems to indicate that neither party really cares all that much about the ideas they espouse (see Carville/Matilin for a prime example).
True enough, but consider all of the cited acheivements of that congress:
April 4, 1967: Supplemental Defense Appropriations Act, Pub.L. 90-8, 81 Stat. 8
November 7, 1967: Public Broadcasting Act, Pub.L. 90-129, 81 Stat. 365
December 15, 1967: Age Discrimination in Employment Act, Pub.L. 90-202, 81 Stat. 602
December 18, 1967: National Park Foundation Act, Pub.L. 90-209, 81 Stat. 656
1968: Bilingual Education Act, Pub.L. 90-247
April 11, 1968: Civil Rights Act of 1968, Pub.L. 90-284, 82 Stat. 73
May 29, 1968: Consumer Credit Protection Act, Pub.L. 90-321, 82 Stat. 146
June 19, 1968: Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, Pub.L. 90-351, 82 Stat. 197
June 28, 1968: Uniform Monday Holiday Act, Pub.L. 90-363
July 21, 1968: Aircraft Noise Abatement Act, Pub.L. 90-411
August 12, 1968: Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, Pub.L. 90-480, 82 Stat. 718
October 2, 1968: Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, Pub.L. 90-542, 82 Stat. 906
October 2, 1968: National Trails System Act, Pub.L. 90-543, 82 Stat. 919
October 22, 1968: Gun Control Act of 1968, Pub.L. 90-618, 82 Stat. 1213
That’s some pretty decent stuff, and in each case at the very least cloture needed to be met, which as Booman noted required bipartisan voting.
Contrast that with this Senate, in a country so polarized they get virtually nothing of import done.
I sure wish we had some return of not-insane Republicans.
I can’t find a roll call either, but I did find this:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the one that broke the ice. The vote in the Senate was:
Democrats for: 46
Democrats against: 21
Republicans for: 27
Republicans against: 6
Johnson knew to strike when the iron was hot and framed this as a tribute to Jack Kennedy the year after he was killed. Then in 1968, Richard Nixon, under the tutelage of the now-repentant Kevin Phillips, decided to pick up the furious southern states for the Republicans by making Abe Lincoln spin in his grave. This is when the Republican Party began abandoning all pretenses to decency. The process is now complete.
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the one that broke the ice.”
I think Johnson said it was ‘breaking the virginity’.
The Senate was created to ensure that state governments were represented at the federal government. With the popular election of Senators that requirement is null and void, thus there is no need for the Senate. My magic pony would be the abolition of the Senate, and while we’re at it, nationalize the banks.
Or at least make the Senate a toothless House of Lords so Americans could obsess over their clothing and hair styles and leave the substance to actual elected representatives.
Another idea behind the Senate was to have a sort of “cooling-off chamber” for the impulsiveness of the general public (as directly represented through the House). Basically, the Founders didn’t trust direct democracy and felt a “Daddy” chamber was necessary to keep things in check. They were afraid of mob mentality – a not insignificant fear given that the French Revolution happened 2 years after the US Constitution was signed.
It’s true that the function of the Senate has become terribly warped over time. But I think that was the “meta” reason for its original creation.
Part of that cooling off was having Senators elected by the state legislatures in addition to the length of terms. If the Senate is to stay then it should go back to Senators representing the state legislatures. Of course, removing the popular vote is much akin to shoveling manure back into the cow, but My Magic Pony™ has nothing to do with what’s feasible.
Besides, the French mob was right…
Ha! Point taken, I suppose. 🙂
You’re missing the bigger picture BooMan.
Baby Boomers are generally in charge now but they (as a group) are not capable of running anything, Boomers are good at fighting, arguing, and that’s about it. Boomers don’t know how to compromise or work things out, they’ve never had to and they’ve never had to live with the consequences of not working things out.
The senators in the 1960s knew what happened when people made stupid risks and couldn’t work things out, they had direct experience with The Great Depression and WWII. Humans (as a group) learn by direct experience, we don’t learn a damn thing from history so we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Things really started going to hell in the 1980s when the Boomers started taking over. Then things got worse when Gen-X started moving into influential positions in the late 1990s.
Nice way to stereotype everyone born between 1946 and 1962. Must have been some weird stuff in the Gerbers our parents fed us when we were little.
Those of us born in 1961 to 1981 must have been eating the same stuff…
yes indeedy, indicator of how completely the place has gone downhill is the election of an African American president and all those people born after 1962 (and some born before that) who took leaves from jobs (not something to risk lightly) to work for it.
There should for sure be a major cost for filibustering. It was designed to ensure the minority’s right to debate, not to block the majority’s right to debate or to vote. There is absolutely no excuse in logic or in law to allow it to be perverted the way the GOP is doing. The Harkin plan seems like a good workable way to preserve the minority’s rights without allowing them to put up impassable roadblocks. I’ve started thinking maybe it’s more cumbersome than necessary, though.
The real heart of the problem is that the rule says it takes 3/5 of the members to overcome a filibuster. There’s a simple and elegant way to fix that: make sustaining the filibuster the burden of the minority instead of making cloture the burden of the majority. Change the rule to say it takes 2/5 of members to sustain a filibuster. The minority could make its points as long as it could keep 40 members on the floor and Senate business could move on as soon as keeping the 40 on the floor inevitably failed. That small rule change will vastly increase the public’s ability to see where each senator really stands and judge them accordingly. I think it’s where the liberal/left side, and even whatever democracy fans may exist on the right, should be focusing like a laser.
Why have the rule at all?
It’s just a Senate rule that was invented to postpone abolition.
There’s a case to be made that the minority’s right to debate should be protected from majority shutout. A gopper majority wouldn’t hesitate to cut off debate on everything and just proceed to a robovote. I kind of like having a way for members to call attention to bills they feel more passionate about than is clear just from their yes or no votes.
In the House, debate is controlled on a case-by-case basis by the Rules Committee.
One could eliminate the filibuster and have the Rules Committee negotiate the scope of the debate.
A majority shutout is as much a violation of the deliberative process as the abuse of cloture. It would have the same effect if it were frustrating the public will. And if it accurately reflected the prejudices of a majority against a minority, having cloture would not protect that minority. See, laws, Jim Crow.
“Extreme irrational comity” didn’t only exist with the aim of “preventing turnover in their club membership.” It also existed because – and I know this sounds Pollyannish, but I am old enough to remember – the majority of Senators actually wanted America and Americans to succeed and to prosper. Not just white Americans or rich Americans or just American corporations, but the broad mass of citizens. Of course there were always back-slapping hypocrites. A veneer of courtliness covering over violent means of getting what you want has been a staple of the finer families of the American South and their imitators for centuries.
But in the years from 1963 to 1967, Democrats made their first real commitment to equal rights for African-Americans and Republicans had not yet abandoned their historical commitment to the cynicism of the Southern Strategy. We had a Southern President and a progressive movement which were not from those “fine families,” which were not intimidated by the legislative obstruction, violent rhetoric or even the raw violence of Southern “conservatives,” and who knew how to lead. Virtually all of the major legislative progress since the World War II era grew out of those years.
My 2 cents: in the days of yore the old white guys didn’t face actual power sharing with the previously disenfranchised. whatever differences weren’t going to the core – they were setting them in motion but had not tried living with them. Power sharing seems to have brought out a lot of haters. This too shall pass, imo, just hoping it doesn’t take another 100 years.
He was “Mr. Conservative”, yet he supported Civil Rights, was the common soldier’s defender against the brass, and a gentleman. In those days Conservative meant a political philosophy and not a synonym for Fascist or Confederate.
P.S. If you think this is an Illinois thing, think again. You won’t get Everett Dirksen from Mark Kirk.
And one of the Senators most enamored with the venerable art of oratory.
Like Obama and Dean, he knew how to make a speech.
I guess that Evan Bayh just couldn’t get Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Bill Frist, or Mitch McConnell to give him a hug.