“He made a point to say that he had never voted for cloture in his life and he meant not to do that.””
Frank Valeo recalls the efforts to secure cloture, limiting debate on the 1964 civil rights bill, and explains the aversion that small state senators had to supporting cloture under any circumstances.
VALEO: If you recall, I mentioned we had gotten cloture the previous year of the session, and that had been a harbinger for what might come later. One of the effects of that was to weaken the arguments that people from the West would use for not voting for cloture, although professing to believe in the content of a bill that was about to be passed in which you wanted to apply it. The reasoning went something like this: we're small states and the cloture rule is designed to protect us as small states, therefore even though I'd love to vote for gun control I just can't vote for cloture on it; if you can get it to the floor, we'll be glad to vote for it, but . . . . So it was a way of straddling and walking on both sides, although many westerners, such as Carl Hayden, took it very seriously. He made a point to say that he had never voted for cloture in his life and he meant not to do that. But it was really an escape hatch for some difficult pieces of legislation for many of them.
