The U.S. Senate: paralysis or a search for consensus?

The U.S. Senate: Paralysis Or a Search For Consensus?

After completinga tour as press secretary in the LBJ White House, George Reedy wrote one of the most celebrated studies of the executive branch, The Twilight of the Presidency. This companion volume draws upon Reedy's earlier experiences as director of the Senate Majority Policy Committee in the fifties. Judging from the dreary title, Reedy (or perhaps his publisher) apparently intended this book to be a contemporary, political-sciencey tract that makes a case for a slow-moving Senate. Although Reedy's defense of legislative paralysis remains the perverse and not terribly persuasive thesis of the book, somewhere in the process of writing, Reedy seems to have been overcome by the desire to tell old war stories. The result is a lively and penetrating memoir whose unconvincing main point is obscured by a multitude of much more compelling, smaller insights into the legislative process.

Capitol guides often tell visitorsto the galleries that the floor is empty because "most of the work is done in committees." True enough in the House, Reedy concedes. But in the Senate, with the exception of Appropriations, all committees require a special dispensation to meet during a session. In fact, Reedy argues, senators do their crucial work neither on the floor nor in committee but in casual conversations conducted while walking through the Capitol corridors, attending parties, enjoying a cup of coffee, or working the Senate cloakrooms. "The real reason visitors so rarely see the Senate filled with members," writes Reedy, "is that most of them are out engaging in these chats."

Another misconception Reedyattacks is the notion that the key to Senate power is a committee chairmanship. Again, Reedy argues, this is far less true in the Senate than in the House. The real source of power is an individual senator's ability to work the levers of power within the Senate, which are more informal and complex than in the more hierarchical lower chamber. For example, in the early fifties the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee was Harry F. Byrd--a man who was so conservative on economic matters that he found himself totally out of step with both the committee and the Senate as a whole. As a result, Reedy writes, effective power ended up in the hands of a few low-ranking senators on the committee. When Reedy had to do business with Finance, he would pay a courtesy call on Byrd--and then, "as soon as I could do so decently...head for the senators in control." This dodge was obvious even to Byrd, who "had resigned himself to his ineffectiveness."

The most widely held misconceptionReedy attacks is the notion that strong leadership in the Senate leads to the presidency--an idea that Senate minority leader Robert Dole is putting to the test. In fact, argues Reedy, the most "presidential" Senate leaders in the fifties (Estes Kefauver, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon) made their names through splashy investigations, not careful mastery of Senate politics, while those who did lead in the Senate (Richard Russell, Robert Taft) never got close to a shot at the presidency. Each party has a "presidential" branch and a "legislative" branch, and the two have little to do with each other. The exception to this rule, Lyndon Johnson, got to the White House through a complicated set of circumstances that help demonstrate this split.

Under Truman, southernDemocrats in the Senate were less interested in supporting their party's president than in blocking civil rights legislation. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, had little constituent pressure for or against civil rights legislation but were concerned about Truman's liberal economic initiatives and wary of big government in general. The two groups forged an alliance to block presidential bills on economics and civil rights. When Eisenhower was elected in 1952, the alliance crumbled: the southern Democrats were less alarmed by any initiatives a Republican president might take on civil rights, while the Republicans could count on Ike to veto big-spending bills on their behalf. A new alliance emerged between (mostly norther) liberal Senate Democrats and Eisenhower. This resulted from bickering between the isolationist Senate Republicans and the more internationalist Eisenhower (who was, after all, former Supreme Allied Commander of Europe).

Where did this leave the southernDemocrats? Isolated. After the alliance with the Republicans crumbled, the civil rights cause gathered momentum, and by 1957 the first major civil rights act became law. The southern Democrats, writes Reedy, "could not continue their opposition to consideration of civil rights legislation without accelerating the isolation process. At the same time, they could not openly toss in the sponge on civil rights without facing certain defeat at home. It was an excruciating dilemma." The solution to the dilemma, arrived at by Senator Richard Russell, leader of the southern Democrats, was to help put Senate Democrat leader Lyndon Johnson, a southerner of sorts and a liberal of sorts, in the White House.

Reedy details the efforts made byRussell and other southern Democrats to boost LBJ's power. The trick was to help Johnson achieve liberal legislative triumphs without seeming to cast a liberal vote. For example, on a public housing proposal that most southern Democrats were obliged to oppose because it smacked of welfare-statism, an amendment was introduced by the Republicans to knock the number of units from 750,000 down to 35,000. But the southern Democrats voted against the amendment, handing Johnson a prestigious victory. They then proceeded to explain to their constituents that this had been a vote against public housing.

Reedy's book bogs down in thefinal chapters, when he remembers that his thesis is supposed to be that paralysis in the Senate is good for the country. Reedy argues that the Senate must move slowly in order to perform the painstaking process of creating consensus. He writes that the dangers of moving too quickly are illustrated by America's hasty entry into Vietnam, when Congress was not given a chance to consider the issues. (What about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution?) The problem with this argument, apart from its inherent fuddy-duddiness, is that Reedy has spent the greater portion of his book telling the inspiring story of how LBJ whipped a sluggish Senate into action. That story, and Reedy's generally perceptive and well-crafted observations about the dynamics of the Senate, make his book worth reading.