The House

It is my conviction, a heresy in my trade, that the primary failures of political leadership at the Federal level are found in the United States Congress. Particularly, these failures are found in the House of Representatives, where I serve--the legislative area of civil rights excepted. The House has failed to organize itself in such a way as to exercise effectively and responsibly its share of the political leadership that the American people may fairly expect from their Federal Government. A drastic change in the House power structure and major reforms of the House as an institution are needed. The House as now constituted is ineffective. It is negative in its approach to national tasks and usually unresponsive except to parochial economic interests. Its creaky procedures are outmoded. Its organization camouflages anonymous centers of irresponsible power. It often passes legislation that is a travesty of what is really needed.

The fundamental reforms I suggest are directed at the way Democrats in the House organize themselves. In the majority during 34 of the past 38 years, the Democrats are largely responsible for the present condition of the House. The inflammations in our cities and the unresponsiveness in our schools and the effluence of our polluted environment would be much less aggravated if the Democrats had faithfully put the House in order. If the House were properly organized, such reactionaries as Howard Smith of Virginia, longtime chairman of the House Rules Committee and a Democrat in name only, could not have arbitrarily throttled school aid, housing programs and civil rights legislation in the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties. If the House were properly organized, Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, would not have been able to pigeonhole Medicare for the elderly until 1965. Congress would be a more respected body today if it, rather than the Supreme Court, had outlawed malapportioned Congressional districts and segregated public school districts. A majority of the Democratic Party in the House has permitted its minority Tories to misuse seniority in order to obstruct, damage and deflate the party's national programs. The House must assume part of the blame for ghetto fires and rioting, Birmingham bombings and the Little Rock school confrontation.

Is the Congress, especially the House, to continue as the least responsible organ of Government, responding, if at all, often 10, 20 or 30 years after social problems arise? Is the essential well-being of the nation dependent on an occasional political landslide, such as occurred in 1964 because of the Goldwater Presidential candidacy? Will the nation learn to improve itself by means of other institutions and thereby push the Congress to the outskirts of American society?

The naysaying 90th Congress of 1967-1968 is a good illustration of how a legislative body should not work. The House during those years gave one of its worst performances. The Congressional trail was dotted with the sump holes of legislative ineptitudes and misadventures. The House mangled elementary-secondary school aid, Model Cities, the promising Teacher Corps, rent-supplement and other anti-poverty programs. It amounted to a virtual war against America's poor.

The first mishap was the handling of that flamboyant Harlem grandee, Adam Clayton Powell. (continued on page 126)The House(continued from page 118) At the time, Powell was in deep trouble of his own making. He had abused his trust as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee. It distressed the country. It distressed many House members. But the Speaker of the House, John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, did not see it that way. He felt that there was no problem. Just newspaper talk, the Speaker said. Yet mail demanding Powell's head was being delivered by the truckloads to House members from irate constituents. A few of the senior bulls shared McCormack's view. Disturb Powell, they reasoned, and who knows which of us committee chairmen may someday be dislodged from our seniority shelter?

So what happened? Powell was quite properly stripped of his chairmanship of the Education and Labor Committee by a caucus of his Democratic colleagues. This action then snowballed into a successful but unconstitutional move to deprive Powell of the seat to which his Harlem constituents had elected him. Incompetent leadership was to blame for not blocking the exclusion effort. As a result, Harlem, festering with dire poverty, was not represented in the House for the two-year life of the 90th Congress.

The Powell affair was only the first in a series of bumblings. The Democratic House leadership agreed to accept an apportionment of seats among Republicans and Democrats on the key Ways and Means and Appropriations committees that doomed at the outset the liberal domestic legislative program of the President. While urban ghettos blazed during the midsummer of 1967, the House gutted remedial legislation for urban areas in mindless fashion. It refused even to discuss a bill to authorize a rat-eradication program for cities--yet a few days later, it became known that a contract had been let to eradicate rats in the office buildings occupied by House members. A bill to renew and extend the anti-poverty program--a real hope for millions of Americans, both black and white--was so incompetently scheduled that it barely survived debate on the House floor.

Finally, in late 1968, the 90th Congress ended on perhaps the most outrageous note of all. The core of parliamentary government is the vote. When it is abused or besmirched, our democracy is gravely wounded. Yet last fall, it appeared that House assistant clerks were registering as present many members who were not present--indeed, one member was in California at the time he was recorded. This scandalous ghost voting caused no great outcry among House members, although it was referred for inquiry to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. That committee has recommended a preliminary course of action that can lead to effective reform in this vital area.

Amid this bedlam, the conservative and reactionary committee chairmen prospered. One was Mills, the chairman of Ways and Means. Under the rules of the House, legislation involving tax reform, Social Security, Medicare, welfare programs and a vast array of other domestic problems are referred to this grand committee. Mills is a legislator of considerable ability and strong conservatism. At some time or other, he has voted against Medicare, minimum wage, foreign aid, Model Cities, anti-poverty funds and civil rights. He bottled up the surcharge until he forced the President into agreement on a ceiling on domestic spending, a deceptive-sounding objective that disguised its true purpose; rather than curtailing or stretching out such expenditures as postponable military construction, civil public works and highway construction, Mills assured slashes in the newer, innovative programs designed to solve the problems of our cities.

As chairman of the Committee on Committees, composed of the 15 Democrats on Ways and Means, Mills also occupies a powerful Democratic Party position in the House. Until this year, when a small halter was placed on it, this committee had, without restraint, assigned all other Democrats to seats on the other permanent committees of the House. Southern Democrats--actually, "Republicans with Southern accents"--have, until recently, been a majority on this key Committee on Committees. Over the years, this custom has enabled Southerners--many of whom are able men of great integrity, but virtually all of whom are stuck to the segregationist flypaper--to rise to head the major legislative committees and key subcommittees within these full committees. Even this year, nine of the 21 committees have Southern Democrats as chairmen and only one of the nine chairmen is what I would call a "national Democrat."

How in the devil did this regressive state of affairs develop? And why has it been permitted to continue? The story begins in 1910, when insurgent Republicans, joined by Democrats, successfully rebelled against a tyrannical and deeply conservative G.O.P. Speaker, Joseph "Uncle Joe" Cannon of Illinois. The bipartisan rebels forged a voting majority to strip the Speakership of its major powers, among them the unilateral power to appoint all members, Democrats as well as Republicans, to committees. Subsequently, House Democrats and Republicans each devised separate machinery to name their respective members to the committees. It soon became the firm practice to re-elect returning members to the committees on which they had served in the previous Congress. The Democratic committee members came to be listed in order of the length of time they had served on a particular committee. The one with the greatest service was chairman, if his party was the majority party in the House. In a broad sense, this custom was acceptable. After all, it takes time to learn to be a competent national legislator. But seniority became the overriding factor in determining appointments to committees--a custom no other state or national assembly in the world follows. Custom became Congressional "common law." Violating seniority became as unthinkable as soliciting for one's sister. Senior Congressmen, of course, enjoy the seniority system. Most of those far less senior tolerate it, in the hope they, too, someday will enjoy the trappings of chairmanships. The few who recognize its evils are outgunned in any attempt to change matters.

The present state of affairs, then, is this: For a Democrat to become a chairman, he need only live long enough and get re-elected often enough to outdistance his colleagues. Eventually, he'll make it, although he may have the morals of a Mafia capo or the mind of a moron--or both. And who among Democrats is most likely to achieve the cherished goal of chairman? The answer is easy: He is a member from a one-party Congressional district, usually in the rural South--insular, suspicious and racist. His rise on the seniority ladder is aided by the competitive nature of many Northern districts, where Democrats fare less well. Consequently, Southern Democrats generally hostile to the moderately liberal cast of their national party came to dominate the House power structure. It is as if we named George Wallace to head the United States Civil Rights Commission, a Democrat to head the Republican National Committee or someone who believes the world is flat to head the Federal space agency. (Along their way to power, it should be noted, the Southerners have the assistance of the "doughfaces"--Northern men with political appetites rather than convictions--elected from rotten districts in New York, Chicago and other large cities. Both types come to the House to feast on the spoils. They don't give a damn about issues.)

Occasionally, an aspiring Southern Democrat lets slip his mask in this farce. Both Albert Watson of South Carolina and John Bell Williams of Mississippi, for example, supported the Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, in 1964. Their actions were so blatant that a thin majority of House Democrats, in caucus, was able to strip them of their accumulated seniority. Watson then showed his true colors. He resigned his seat in the House, returned to South Carolina, ran as a Republican for the seat he had just vacated and was elected. He still sits as a Republican in the House. Williams, a much more senior member of the House, would now be the (continued on page 254)The House(continued from page 126) chairman of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce had his seniority on that committee not been taken away. Deprived of this opportunity for great national power, he chose to seek the much less important position of governor of Mississippi. He succeeded, and now the people of that sad state are the exclusive beneficiaries of his reactionary tendencies. This year, Representative John Rarick of Louisiana, who had supported George Wallace, was like-wise stripped of his seniority at a Democratic caucus--an action energetically fought by the House Democratic leadership, including Speaker McCormack.

But these are only dents in the iron system of seniority, a system with very real rewards. From his cockpit as committee chairman, a member may and does thumb his nose at the President, the Speaker and a majority of his own party. A chairman usually decided which bills will be granted hearings. He controls the timing of the hearings and the selection of witnesses. By absenting himself or refusing to call committee meetings, he often can deny a bill passage through his committee. It's that simple--and that arbitrary.

Among the most right-wing chairmen is Mendel Rivers of Charleston, South Carolina, a Snopes who whispered support for Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 Presidential election while winking at the supporters of George Wallace. During a TV interview, he once said, "I don't put myself on a parity with a Government employee. The people, in the Constitution, put me above them." He supported his party's national program only 37 percent of the time during 1965-1966, and hasn't changed since. He chairs the Armed Services Committee, which seldom gives searching thought to the major military matters within its jurisdiction but acts, instead, primarily as a committee on military real estate, parceling out military installations to districts of "deserving members." John McMillan of South Carolina heads the District of Columbia Committee, which has made our national seat of Government a national disgrace. William Colmer of Mississippi heads the powerful Rules Committee, through which most legislation reported favorably by committees must pass before reaching the House floor for final action. And this is only a partial list.

The result has been a grand deception of the American people. For 34 of the past 38 years, as I noted earlier, the Democrats have been the "majority party" in the House. In the present 91st Congress for example, there are 243 "Democrats' and 192 "Republicans" in the House. However, at least 60 of the 243 Democrats are opposed to the Democratic National Party platform. These 60 are Southerners almost without exception. And there are perhaps ten John Lintsay types among the 192 Republicans. Therefore, the true equation on major domestic remedial legislation is not 243 Democrats to 192 Republicans. In fact, 193 members are generally in favor of progress and 242 are usually opposed. Consequently, the Southerners still maintain a balance of power in those dozen or so hotly contested domestic legislative rows that erupt during each session of Congress. Their pivotal position is being eroded, but it still often thwarts the national, as opposed to the regional, interest.

This ratio is reflected within the key committees as well. Usually, the gutting of bills to aid the poor and mistreated takes place beyond the glare of publicity, behind the closed doors of the committee room. The truncated bill then comes to the floor--where it is very difficult to restore the lost features.

The condition of committee appointments has two faces, actually. One aspect is packing a committee, so that humane legislation does not get a fair chance to be considered. The second aspect is equally disastrous to fairness and justice. Certain House committees, as in the Senate, have become zealous watchdogs of special, high-powered economic interests. When a committee is dominated by special interests, "tunnel vision" develops in respect to the national interests. Our farm-subsidy program, few example, which is dominated by the House Agriculture Committee, benefits a few special crop interests at the expense of the national interest. As the President's National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty has noted, our policy favors tobacco, cotton, corn and peanuts over the rural and urban poor. Instead of worrying about the hungry, the Committee engages in chronic, fierce sectarian fights among, for example, partisans of three varieties of peanuts--Spanish, Virginia and runner. Its Democratic members are almost always Southerners, almost always representative of crop interests--the Virginia peanut, the Georgia peach, the Texas cotton. The consumer aspect is ignored. Powerful outside farm groups work their will. Democratic Representative Joseph Resnick of New York discovered this in 1967. As chairman of the larger committee's Rural Development Subcommittee, he expressed the view that the right-wing American Farm Bureau Federation is, in fact, "not a farm organization but a large group of insurance companies without primary interest in the welfare of the Agriculture Department ... using [the farmer] to build one of the largest insurance and financial empires in the United States, an empire bringing great profit to a select handful of men." The Farm Bureau struck back. Its long arm reached into the compliant Agriculture Committee and produced a resolution, with only one courageous dissent, that rebuked Resnick. House members, instead of being collectively outraged at this bold violation of Congressional sanctuary, sat silent when the Agriculture Committee danced a jig to the Farm Bureau's call. Resnick had erred: He had attacked an entrenched economic power. If he had attacked the defenseless poor, there would have been no retaliation.

Study the unpardonable problem of malnutrition and even starvation in this country and you'll encounter Representative Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture and lord of certain operations of the Agriculture Department. No Secretary of Agriculture, whether Democratic or Republican, can hope to administer his department without coming to terms with Jamie Whitten. Why the difficulty with obtaining an adequately funded and adequately administered food-stamp program? Why are there virtually no Negro county extension agents in supervisory positions? Why is it difficult for the Negro farmer in the Mississippi delta to obtain the same array of useful services, including valuable crop advice, as the white farmer? Why do nearly one out of four counties in the nation have no food program for the needy? Why do only 6,000,000 of an estimated 27,000,000 poor receive Federal food benefits? Why does the national school-lunch program serve free lunches to only one out of three needy pupils? Why did the Congress last fall kill the diversion of agriculture subsidies to feed the hungry? Why did it eliminate an open-end authorization for food stamps? Why did it kill a school-lunch-program amendment? And why is the Agriculture Department so staffed that it seems to have become one of the Confederate states--with social attitudes to match? One could do worse than to study the actions of Whitten's subcommittee of Appropriations and the Committee on Agriculture for answers to all of these questions.

Of course, the abuses are not limited to agricultural affairs. Until this summer, Congress tolerated a grossly unfair hodgepodge tax structure that permitted 21 persons, each with incomes of more than $1,000,000 in 1967, to escape paying a penny of Federal income taxes. So did more than 130 Americans who made more than $200,000 that year. These happy Americans lived in tax shelters while 27,000,000 Americans lived in poverty. It's a demonstrable case of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. The tax-writing committees of the Congress--Ways and Means in the House and Finance in the Senate--are too often manned by members pledged to protect such major economic advantages as lucrative tax benefits for oil and gas companies. In the face of a nationwide revulsion against tax injustices, the House did pass a major tax-reform bill last August; this article went to press before action was taken on the reform in the Senate. By Congressional custom, tax bills cannot be amended in the House. They can be amended in the Senate, however, and it is there that the special-interest groups threatened by the reform will launch their campaign to water down the bill.

The problems within the Congress cannot be attributed only to men of narrow vision and blurred ethics. There are also the timeservers who wave Old Glory and vote for appropriations for their districts; the fence straddlers who rhetorically favor brotherly love, Government solvency and pensions for all; the intellectuals who dream of "systems so perfect no one needs to be good"; and, finally, the smooth dealers for whom politics is largely a matter of exchanging favors. These members butter up the senior bulls and eventually will be asked to help staff the back door through which the House is robbed--the hidden channels by which special favors are dispensed to special interests. All these types make the backbreaking job of Congressional reform more difficult.

Too few members are willing to stand up to the oligarchs of the committees. The seniors tend to regard new members as fraternity brothers regard pledges. A junior member is quickly made aware--by a chance remark, a gesture or a Dutch-uncle talk--that his rewards will come if he goes along like a good boy. The obverse implication is that a brash junior member can expect to be treated as a pariah at any political harvest.

The mortar that binds the system consists largely of what members in private inelegantly call "boodle." Boodle includes a military installation being assigned to one's Congressional district. This means a construction payroll, followed by a steady payroll for the military and civilian employees who will live and spend in a member's district. It also includes a variety of public works--dams, rivers and harbor projects, reclamation projects, conservation projects, Federal office buildings.

These projects, in most cases, are legitimate. The hitch, of course, comes in the manner in which they are distributed. There are just not enough Federal dollars each year to finance such projects in each of the 435 Congressional districts simultaneously. So 435 hungry House members jostle for projects adequate for, perhaps, 200 districts. The conservative, ruling committee chairmen and other leaders maintain their power by determining in large measure which members will get the projects. Generally, of course, the stay-in-line member, not the rebel with a cause, profits. I know about this from personal experience. A great multimilliondollar flood-control program plays a large part in my re-election over the years. So does a $32,000,000 Federal office building. My political reputation in my district is probably more identified with these two projects than with my strong stands on behalf of civil rights, open housing and Congressional reform. Both of these projects were needed. Neither was a boondoggle. Yet I know that my district received these projects primarily because--although relatively junior in those days--I was an insider when Sam Rayburn of Texas was Speaker of the House.

In addition to autonomous seniors and their junior accomplices, hidden power centers bedevil the House. There is one man who is more influential than all but a few House members--and who is not even a member himself. He is the House parliamentarian, Lewis Deschler. The title itself generates a vision of dried parchment paper and a blinkered figure who looks at the House through the prism of its rules and precedents. Deschler, parliamentarian for more than 40 years, doesn't fit the image. He is a large-sized man with large-sized influence growing out of his encyclopedic knowledge. He cultivates anonymity, never speaking to the press for quotation. There is little written about him. One article that purported to describe his functions included the incredible inaccuracy that the parliamentarian presides from the Speaker's chair at certain times. Actually, this is just about the only thing that Deschler does not do for a Speaker. His knowledge is that of a ship's engineroom boss who knows the capacities of the boilers in all sorts of weather. The rules and older precedents of the House fill 11 large volumes, but the precedents of the past 30 years have not even been published. Thus, Deschler has a virtual monopoly on current precedents. Precedents are the 10,000 dos and don'ts of the House. Deschler, and Deschler alone, is a master of these. He may choose to be as helpful as a deaf-mute to a member who comes seeking advice on how to pursue a matter toward which the Speaker--or Deschler himself--is hostile. Deschler, not the Speaker, decides in practice to which committee a bill should be sent. I once cautiously raised this whole problem when I was a lieutenant of Speaker Rayburn. His reply was accurate but not helpful--"Deschler is loyal to me."

There is much breast beating in Congress about the loss of its power and influence to the Executive branch. The Congressional Record at least once a week carries a baleful lament to this effect by a House or Senate member, usually a Southern Democrat or equally conservative Midwestern Republican. Yet these same members, for some reason, have never insisted that Congress acquire computers for the storage and quick retrieval of information. There are 3000 computers within the departments, agencies and bureaus of the Executive branch. Thus, the Congress permits itself to be outgunned--like firemen equipped with water pistols or infantrymen equipped with peashooters.

The case for reform is obviously compelling. And a reformist mood is, in fact, growing. As a result of deaths, retirements and election defeats, 243 new members have entered the House since 1961, a turnover of 56 percent of the House membership. This postulates a membership far less willing to feed on the cake of custom. At the opening of the present Congress last January, the first effort to unseat a Speaker in nearly 50 years was launched. The candidacy of Representative Morris Udall of Arizona was not successful against 77-year-old Speaker McCormack but it is a harbinger of contests to come. In addition, there were minor rebellions this year against hoary committee rules and practices in the Judiciary and the District of Columbia committees. Banking and Currency Committee members are restive. The 30-year-long reactionary strangle hold on the Rules Committee was completely broken in 1967.

Another small step with a large potential was achieved this year. The Democratic leadership agreed to have regular monthly meetings--caucuses--with Democratic members. That agreement was forced by pressure from the Democratic Study Group, House members who are national Democrats. These caucuses, if employed wisely, can give the country the opportunity to see the difference between the appearance of Congress and the reality. In them, national Democrats may be able to propose and obtain majorities for progressive legislation. When such a majority emerges in caucus, it may begin to work effectively for a complete overhaul of the whole committee system.

For years, I have proposed simple reforms of the Democratic Party within the House that would accomplish this purpose by modifying but not junking the seniority system. The reforms are:

1. The member selected in caucus for Speaker (or Minority Leader when the Democrats are not a majority) would have the sole power to nominate the following: A. All the Democratic members of the Committee on Ways and Means and its chairman (or ranking minority member). B. All the Democratic members of the Rules Committee and its chairman (or ranking minority member).

2. After these nominations are made in caucus, a vote will be taken to confirm such nominees by majority vote. No nomination may be made from the floor. In the event that a majority rejects one or more of the nominees, the party leader will submit as many nominations as are necessary to fill the assignments.

3. The members approved for appointment to Ways and Means will continue to act as the Committee on Committees. But, at a subsequent caucus, they must submit their nominations for seats on the other committees of the House. Approval will be by majority vote. If one or more nominations are rejected in the caucus, the Committee on Committees will submit fresh nominees until all vacancies are filled.

4. The top leader, be he the Speaker or the Minority Leader, will now nominate the chairman or ranking minority member for each standing committee. If one or more are rejected, as in the other proceedings, he will continue to make nominations until all necessary appointments are approved.

These changes should lead to great improvement. But not automatically. Rearranging the political furniture is no guarantee of fair play. An open and aboveboard system of nomination does, of course, offer a greater promise of a better House of Representatives.

If the approximately 180 national Democrats in the House were all really what they seemed to be on the basis of votes cast and speeches made, the Democratic caucus would not now be accepting reactionaries and tyrants in powerful leadership positions. But of these 180, perhaps as many as half of those who vote right and talk right "sell out" at critical moments to the system for a good committee assignment or a favor, in the form of an empty honor or an important project, from the establishment. In the present circumstances, it pays to go along. Noble words can hide cheap deals. Liberal public voting records camouflage reactionary votes behind closed committee doors. In an open Democratic caucus, however, roll-call votes could be forced and members required to take public positions on leadership elections and committee-assignment selections. Under these circumstances and with public understanding of the significance of the votes on such matters, it is unthinkable that the majority would elect a reactionary or a tyrant.

There's no need for a blue-ribbon commission or a think-tank study by academicians. My reform program will work. It will provide the American people with a more effective national legislature. Currently, Congress resembles a crowded airport terminal where travelers have no planes to board because the runways are all torn up. Many members favor my reforms. Others disagree while informing me the reforms are feasible and practical. If enacted, competent seniors will continue to exercise their abilities. Other seniors, now as out of date in their comprehension of our national problems as dinosaurs, may not be so fortunate, but more junior members will be thrust into positions of responsibility without waiting until they pass retirement age.

Only then, when the power structure has been altered and the iron rule of seniority modified, will it be possible to institute a real modernization of House procedures, to strengthen the rules of ethical conduct for its members and to pass meaningful new laws controlling the threat of big money to free elections. Only then, when the power of the racists and reactionaries has been broken, will the poor and the blacks be treated as full members of American society by the House of Representatives.