“Cloture protects the small states. It was like the constitutional compromise of two Senators from each state, the cloture vote was a corollary of the same concept.”
Charles Ferris describes the challenges of persuading senators from some western states to vote for cloture on the civil rights bill in 1964.
FERRIS: Every week there were new assignments. Hubert would keep things moving. He had more energy than anyone else and he could energize the group. Looking back, this was an idea whose time had come. The Senate had to give it the opportunity to run its course, and that’s what it did. Part of running its course was doing your grassroots homework so that everyone was presented with the reasons why this made sense, and the reasons why within your state you could do what we hoped you would.
We weren’t making the case to the Southern Senators, but certainly were to the Western Senators, who had a small-state history on cloture votes. Cloture protects the small states. It was like the constitutional compromise of two Senators from each state, the cloture vote was a corollary of the same concept. They had this tremendous sense of standing firm on cloture, because they might need it to protect their own state’s interests. That inhibition had to be overcome. There were some with whom we were unsuccessful. Alan Bible of Nevada never voted for cloture. Howard Cannon did. He did it on the Equal Housing bill of ‘68. I’m not sure if he did it on Voting Rights of ‘65, but I know in ‘68 the big factor with Cannon was that kids were going over to fight in Vietnam and if they came back they should be able to get the same housing as the other guys they fought with side-by-side. If they fought side-by-side over there they could live side-by-side back here. But Nevada never had a Senator that voted for cloture before.
We also had Ted Moss from Utah and Frank Church from Idaho, who were open advocates of civil rights, and we had Lee Metcalf and Mansfield from Montana. In Colorado you had [Gordon] Allott and [Peter] Dominick. Allott, I think, ultimately voted for the legislation. The Western states were hard nuts to crack because of that institutional small state predisposition to limiting debate by cloture. For them it wasn’t civil rights, it was cloture or maybe some hid behind the small state attitude on cloture.
