Because of Lyndon Johnson’s unprecedented intervention in committee work, the wording of the bills was often to an unprecedented extent a creation of the Majority Leader. He would previously have acted as a mediator between individual senators, or between blocs of senators, who were in conflict over an issue. Once the conflict would have been thrashed out on the Senate floor, but now Johnson would meet alone with each of the senators, or get them together privately, explore their differences to find areas of agreement, and finally would ask, and if asking did not work, would urge, and if urging did not work, would demand, and, finally, if all else failed, would use his raw power to threaten the senators to force them to consent (and to produce the consent of their allies) to the compromise he proposed—would, one way or another, arrange some wording on which they could agree, and for which he felt he could line up a majority of the Senate for passage. He would have been able to do this because of the power—the power of Ray burn, the power of campaign funds, the power of scheduling, the power of office space—with which he had previously surrounded himself. The quid pro quo was seldom stated, seldom precise, seldom the offer, of, say, a dam in return for a compromise on a specific bill. But the senator who needed the dam, or the campaign funds, or a private bill called off the Calendar would know that the man asking for this favor had the power to grant the other favor. Now the bills that were already the creations of the Majority Leader, creations made possible by his new powers, would under this additional new power be managed on the floor by the Majority Leader.
And Lyndon Johnson made sure, in each instance, that he had that power, beyond any question. When he resolved a point with a senator, he—or Reedy or Siegel—took notes on what the agreement entailed. Then the notes would be formally typed up. Recalls Riddick: “Johnson would come up to me: ‘Now look, I want you to type an agreement.’ And he would tell me what he wanted in it. For example: ‘And I want to make sure there are no non-germane [amendments].’ … I would go down to Skeeter’s office [and have the agreement typed up]. Then I would find him, and give it to him. He would read it, and he might say, ‘Well, now, change this so it will do so-and-so.’” In words that would equally apply to Johnson’s maneuvers on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution ten years later, Riddick says:
Johnson wanted everything written to back him up as a record. He would get us [the parliamentarians] to sign the damned thing. He wanted it written down so he would be able to say [if anyone objected], “Well, you gave me this power.”
And, Riddick says, Johnson would take the formal document “around and show it to senators. He would say, ‘I hope you won’t object….’” He would make it very difficult for a senator to object; everyone else had agreed, he would say; we can’t waste days debating this bill; we’ve got to make the Senate function. After he had secured everyone’s consent, he would go to his front-row center seat and stand by it—never for very long—until the presiding senator said, “The chair recognizes the distinguished Majority Leader.”
“Mr. President,” Johnson would say, “I ask unanimous consent that a proposed unanimous consent agreement, which is offered on behalf of myself and the distinguished Minority Leader, be read.” He would hold out the order that Riddick had typed, and a page would hurry over, take it, and give it to one of the clerks on the lower dais, who would read it into the record. “Is there any objection?” the presiding officer would ask. “The chair hears none. Without objection, so ordered.”
LYNDON JOHNSON’S USE of the unanimous consent agreement to drastically limit debate ran contrary to the principles on which the Senate had been founded, and to the customs which had, during the previous century and a half of its existence, been most fundamental in its functioning. Unlimited debate had been sacred Senate custom, the device by which, more than any other, it fulfilled the Founding Fathers’ vision of it as the bulwark against the “fickleness” and “transient impressions” of the majority, as the guarantor of the sovereignty of the individual states. And it was debate—in its highest sense: unhurried, thoughtful discussion to educate first the Senate and then the people, to raise issues and examine them in depth and at length—that had made the Senate a great deliberative body. Johnson’s agreements limited debate so drastically that with their increased use the very nature of the Senate was altered. From the moment a motion for one of his agreements was made on the Senate floor, the body’s normally loose functioning was transformed into something very strict indeed.
Amendments to a Unanimous Consent Agreement—Out of Order is the laconic title of the section of Senate precedents relating to the matter. That means all amendments. “There is,” the precedents state flatly, “no rule providing for amendment of unanimous consent requests.” And not only can the agreement therefore not be modified, once the agreement has been approved (“Without objection, so ordered”), there is no appeal from it except by unanimous vote (“A unanimous consent agreement can be set aside” only “by another unanimous consent agreement”)—by a vote that would be unobtainable should even one of the proponents of the original agreement want it to stand intact.
As for the measure—the bill itself—covered by a unanimous consent agreement, its consideration is hedged about by rules very different from the normal Senate procedure which allows virtually unlimited amendments and virtually unlimited debate. What if the senator who had introduced the bill now, listening to even the limited debate allowed, had a new thought—and, contrary to his earlier belief, realized that the bill should be amended? Under many agreements, no new amendment whatsoever could be introduced. Even in the rare cases in which new amendments were in order, they could only be introduced, not debated—which meant that their purpose could not be explained or discussed on the floor. Most Senate precedents dealing with unanimous consent agreements say that amendments “must be presented and voted on without debate.” What if a senator who has introduced an amendment on the floor before the agreement was ordered thinks that this proposed new amendment, modifying his, is a good idea? That does not change anything: even “Where an amendment proposed by a Senator to an amendment is accepted by the mover of the first amendment as a modification, further debate on such latter amendment is not in order.” And in the even rarer cases in which discussion is in order, it could only be cursory; the time for debate on the “modification” of an amendment had to be subtracted from the already meagre time—often a single hour—already allotted to the amendment.
As employed by Lyndon Johnson, the unanimous consent agreement was even eliminating the tradition that a senator could introduce an amendment on any subject he wished, at any time he wished. Under Rule 14, one of the Senate’s supposedly immutable rules, “germaneness of amendments to bills is not required.”* Nothing was more important to the guardians of the Senate traditions than that tradition. “Russell held that the sacredness of Senate procedure was that you could amend anything,” Riddick says. “You could tack anything onto a farm subsidy bill, for example…. There were no restrictions.” But among the few exceptions to Rule 14 was the unanimous consent agreement. “If a unanimous consent agreement…contains a provision for germaneness of amendments, an amendment not germane is out of order.” Most of Lyndon Johnson’s unanimous consent agreements contained that provision. No amendment that is not germane to the provisions of the bill shall be received, Riddick would type.
And the provisions of an agreement which gave control to a single senator—and, more and more, that senator was Lyndon Johnson—were, more and more, designed to ensure that that control was firm. Once the agreement was voted, the presiding officer no longer had authority to recognize a senator. “A Senator cannot be recognized unless time is yielded to him by one of the Senators having control,” the Senate Rules state. So firm were such provisions that, as Riddick’s chief assistant, Secretary to the Parliamentarian Murray Zweben, puts it,
Because of the unanimous consent agreements he devised, he [Lyndon Johnson] could keep major legislation from coming up. A senator could not i
ntroduce himself a major bill with provisions Johnson didn’t like, because Johnson wouldn’t let it come to the floor. And he [the senator] couldn’t offer it as an amendment to a different major bill because of the unanimous consent agreement [on that bill].
As for minor legislation, a senator had little hope of the amendment making its way into law by that route either—thanks to Johnson’s power over scheduling. Johnson would simply not allow that bill to come to the floor; “If a senator offered it [the amendment] to some piddling minor bill, that bill was dead,” Zweben says.
The unanimous consent agreements were a culmination of all the powers that Lyndon Johnson had created over scheduling, over the content of bills, over the managing of bills, over committee assignments. The agreements were made possible—senators had no choice but to accept them—because of the combining of these internal powers with the powers he brought to bear from outside the Senate: the power of Rayburn, the power of money. And the agreements cemented his power, made it formal, as formal as the wordings of the Senate orders in which the agreements were embodied. “Of course any senator could block unanimous consent and keep the debate going,” Evans and Novak were to say. “In fact, however, few did. Debates grew shorter—and ever less important…. Thus did Lyndon Johnson revolutionize the Senate, severely modifying its proud heritage of unlimited debate without changing a single rule.”
MAJORITY LEADER LYNDON JOHNSON may have been limiting debate on the Senate floor; he was not eliminating speeches. He wanted speeches, and he wanted plenty of them, the longer the better. Speeches—which he, and his aides, and most journalists persisted in calling “debate”—had their uses for him. The Lyndon Johnson version of “debate,” however, was not at all what the Founding Fathers had intended.
The Founders had envisioned debate—thoughtful discussion—as an indispensable part of the Senate’s main work. For Johnson, “debate” was a device to divert attention from the main work, and to buy time for him to do it. As George Reedy explains, “As long as somebody on the Senate floor is talking, the Senate cannot vote.” From the time he became Majority Leader, therefore, Johnson began using talk on the floor as what Reedy calls “a diversionary device, which enabled him to stay out of the spotlight while horse-trading,” as a smoke screen for the maneuvering that was taking place in the cloakrooms, or, more and more, in his top-floor Capitol office, as a method of stalling the Senate to give him time to work out his deals.
There were of course senators who liked—loved—to talk, and he used them. “Hubert prepares for a major address by taking a deep breath,” Johnson was to say, and “whenever Johnson needed extra time for horse-trading and a vote was inconveniently near, he invariably sent out Hubert H. Humphrey, who could stand up and deliver a discourse” of two hours or more “without previous preparation,” Reedy recalls. Another was Molly Malone, that “relic of Smoot-Hawley days,” who could still rise at his desk to deliver a passionate—and lengthy—explanation of the need for high tariffs. Although Johnson held the opposite view of tariffs, when he needed to buy time because he didn’t yet have the necessary votes for an upcoming vote on some non-tariff measure, he would often encourage Malone to give his views; “it was the interlude he wanted, not the message,” Harry McPherson says.
While the quorum calls and speeches were droning on meaninglessly on the Senate floor, therefore, the action that mattered was taking place off the floor. When it was completed—the compromises made, the deal closed, the unanimous consent agreement in place—the time for talking was over, and Johnson had little patience with any senator who failed to understand that. A senator heading onto the floor to discuss the upcoming bill would be intercepted by Bobby Baker. “Keep it short, keep it short or the Leader will be mad,” Baker would say. If the senator failed to take the hint, the Leader, seeing him raising his hand for recognition, would hurry over to his desk. “We’ve got the votes, don’t talk, don’t talk,” he would whisper. “Under Johnson, the Senate functions like a Greek tragedy,” Paul Douglas was to say. “All the action takes place offstage, before the play begins. Nothing is left to open and spontaneous debate, nothing is left for the participants but the enactment of their prescribed roles.”
THIS CHANGE IN THE NATURE of the Senate had a further implication. It was offstage, of course—in secret—that Lyndon Johnson himself liked to work. Debate was about goals, issues, about “principled things.” “It is the politician’s task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things,” he said, repeating that credo over and over. George Reedy was to write that “He [Johnson] regarded public discussion as dangerous to the conduct of government…. He was absolutely convinced that achievement was possible only through careful negotiations in quiet backrooms where public passions did not intrude.” And, as Reedy notes, “This attitude left no room in the LBJ philosophy for the Senate as a deliberative body in which speeches could change the outcome of legislation or as an educational body in which speeches were intended to inform the public on the issues of the day…. The role of public debate in securing popular assent to policies and, ultimately, national unity was a concept he could not grasp.”
Under this cloaking of Johnson’s methods in governmental philosophy, however, lay something personal—and deeper. The unanimous consent agreement, the key device by which Lyndon Johnson was changing the fundamental character of the Senate, was, in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s words, “a natural extension of his personality. Because he himself felt uncomfortable in larger groups and formal debate, he gradually shifted senatorial and public attention away from the floor to the places where he felt most at home—the cloakroom, the office, the hallways.”
Some of his assistants understood this fact. “Discussions of goals and ethics were merely exercises in posturing, and he had no patience with such goings-on,” Reedy was to write. “He abhorred dissent to a point where he sought to quell it long before protagonists had talked themselves out.” Disagreement, to this man to whom everything was personal, was disagreement not with his point of view but with him—and, Colonel BeLieu says, “he had zero tolerance for disagreement.” He abhorred dissent. He had no patience with discussions of goals and ethics. Even the loyal McPherson was to acknowledge that “His constant pressure for unanimous consent agreements…often came close to harassment.”*
Other thoughtful men were as concerned as Paul Douglas about the consequences of this pressure. “Lyndon Johnson did not believe it was a function of the Senate to inform and instruct the public,” Julius Edelstein says. “He believed it was the function of the Senate to pass legislation. But of course the Senate had always been the forum of the nation. The great tradition of the Senate was the tradition of Norris, and Borah and La Follette….” Such concern no longer had much significance, however. Lyndon Johnson had looked for power in the Senate, and had found it—and now that he was Majority Leader, he was using it. During his first six years in the Senate, he had concealed certain aspects of his character, adapting his personality to the institutional personality of the Senate, but now, in the seventh year, he was forcing the Senate to adapt its personality to his.
The adapting was, furthermore, taking place with remarkable rapidity. By June, 1955, within six months of his election as Majority Leader, the unanimous consent agreements that were the legislative embodiment of Lyndon Johnson’s personality had become, as Howard Shuman observes, “the standard operating procedure … on all big Senate bills.” Debate “beyond a sparse allotment of time became a favor which a Senator had to request from the Majority Leader,” Goodwin writes. The right to offer amendments? “If Lyndon Johnson didn’t want your amendment, you couldn’t even offer it,” Shuman says. He hated debate, and now in the Senate, once the very home of debate, debate was no longer important. In what had once been called the greatest deliberative body in the world there was now very little real deliberation. So creative was Lyndon Johnson’s political genius that it had transformed every political institution of which he had been the Leader.
Now it had transformed the United States Senate—remade that body, seemingly so immutable, in his own image. He could run it now, run it as he wanted to run it.
*Except in the case of general appropriation bills, or of bills being considered under the cloture rule.
*Although McPherson adds, “But I could not fault him. Senators who raised objections had frequently benefited from his power. Complaints about limiting debate…often turned out to be based on a plaintiff’s annoyance that he must either miss a vote or forgo a speaking engagement back home. And besides, who knew better than liberals the enervating consequences of unlimited debate?”
25
The Leader
ON THE SENATE FLOOR, LATE EACH MORNING, a clerk might be desultorily shuffling papers on the dais, pages might be strolling through the deserted arcs of desks, laying out the Daily Calendar and the drafts of bills, one or two senators might be standing chatting near the door of each cloakroom, down in the well a little knot of journalists, assembled for the daily briefing by the party leaders, might be listening to Minority Leader William Knowland talk, in his ponderous, droning way, about the day’s schedule—the Senate Chamber was the sleepy, slow-moving place it had always been.
And then, shortly before noon, the tall double doors at the rear of the Chamber’s center aisle would swing open—wide open, so hard had they been pushed—and Lyndon Johnson would be coming through them. As they swung, he would, without pausing, snatch the brown file folder Gerry Siegel was holding out to him, and toss an order to George Reedy out of the side of his mouth. And then he would be coming down the aisle’s four broad steps with a long, fast stride. Seeing the journalists’ heads turn, Knowland, realizing Johnson was approaching, would stop talking. He would sit down at his desk, waiting to hear what the Majority Leader had to say.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 92