“The judgment was that the Civil Rights bill’s time had come….”
Charles Ferris and Senate historian Don Ritchie discuss the “longest debate in Senate history.”
RITCHIE: I was thinking that the chief strategy that the Southerners had was to try to prevent a vote from happening, to keep the debate going as long as possible, but there got to a point where it had gone on for so long that it had to come to some resolution. In a sense by making it the longest debate in the history of the U.S. Senate, they undermined their position and strengthened the resolve of the majority to invoke cloture.
FERRIS: I think that’s true, but I think there was another perspective as well. It was the longest debate in Senate history. The Southerners put up the best fight of any minority against the bill before cloture was invoked. Politically, the length of the debate satisfied their constituencies. Nothing more could be done by them. I think that was an important perception. The majority never ceased their efforts to reach every Senator who had no political risk in voting for civil rights. Everyone was considered in play, whether it was Bourke Hickenlooper or Karl Mundt, Milton Young of North Dakota. These were Senators whose vote for civil rights did not have a downside. They were from small states. But efforts were being made to see if they could be reached and convinced. The people who said absolutely no were only those from the nine Southern states. The others, mostly from small states, were more affected by the institutional issue of cloture. The reason why the rule made sense then, when cloture was hardly ever attempted but was resorted to only when the issue was so significant and extraordinary that the small state Senators could be appealed to without significant undermining of their principles. These arguments reinforced one another to reach the same conclusion.
RITCHIE: A lot of people assumed that once you had cloture you had the vote, but wasn’t there the possibility of a rearguard action after you had cloture, with debates on amendments that had been offered. Was there any possibility that they could have done a post-cloture filibuster?
FERRIS: No, they each have an hour for debate after cloture is invoked. So they use up their hour, even if twenty Senators have twenty hours, then there is no further debate and any amendment could be completely disposed of by immediate vote. It’s finite. It was really not perceived as a problem. In later years, Jim Allen and Jesse Helms used to try and load the deck with amendments in case cloture was invoked. But those issues were insignificant by comparison. With a smaller, less nationally important bill, a strategy like that can be effective, because there’s only so much time that you can give to legislation in any one session. You have to make judgments. The judgment was that the Civil Rights bill’s time had come and no other legislation would provide any justification to displace them.
