Master of the Senate (17 page)

After two weeks of debate, Robinson suffered a heart attack in his apartment, where a maid found him dead. Following a state funeral in the Senate Chamber, thirty-eight senators accompanied the Majority Leader’s body home to Arkansas, aboard a train on which the debate raged as bitterly as ever. Vice President Garner, who had come up from Texas to travel with the senators, arrived—the senators greeted him “like a long-lost father”—counted votes, and on the return to Washington, went directly to the White House and asked the President, “Do you want it with the bark on or the bark off?” and when the President opted for the latter, told him flatly he was licked, and with his permission, arranged a “compromise” that left the Supreme Court untouched. Attempts were made to couch the result in terms that would save the President’s face, but old, sick Hiram Johnson of California stumbled heavily to his feet and asked, “The Supreme Court is out of the way?” And when Senator Logan replied solemnly, “The Supreme Court is out of the way,” Johnson said: “Glory be to God!” The old senator had spoken the words half to himself, but the galleries heard them. For a moment, the Chamber of the Senate of the United States was silent and frozen—the red-faced, white-haired little man on the dais, the men sitting at the quadruple arc of mahogany desks who had beaten the unbeatable President, the crowd in the galleries above. And then there was a burst of wild cheering. Garner still held his gavel, waiting to call for the yeas and nays. But before he did so, he let the people cheer their fill.

T
HE BATTLE OVER THE
S
UPREME
C
OURT
, like the battle over the Treaty of Versailles, ended in victory for the Senate—and the victory reverberated far beyond the issue itself. Franklin Roosevelt, who by his political genius and his popularity had stripped the Senate of its power, now had inadvertently, by his arrogance and miscalculation, handed that power back, uniting the opposition senators against him, as an historian of the Senate puts it, “in a way they would have been completely incapable of achieving on their own.” Uneasy though they were over the New Deal’s heavy spending, its support of labor and blacks, its whole liberal agenda of social reform, conservative Democratic senators, particularly from southern and border states, had been cowed by FDR’s seemingly invulnerable popularity. They were cowed no longer. Moreover, in opposing the Court-packing bill, they had worked with Republican senators—and had realized the similarity of the Republicans’ philosophy to their own.

The bipartisan conservative coalition that formed in both houses of Congress
demonstrated its strength within the year. With the number of unemployed creeping ominously upward again, in November, 1937, with the Court fight over, the President, in an attempt to end this “Roosevelt recession,” summoned Congress into special session and presented it with an ambitious package of “must” bills. Not one passed.

A President—even Roosevelt—was all but helpless to break this power. When in 1938 he attempted to “purge” Senate Democrats Walter George of Georgia, Millard Tydings of Maryland, and Ellison (Cotton Ed) Smith of South Carolina, going into their own states to campaign against them, the resentment of southern voters to presidential intervention in their states’ internal politics was summarized in newspaper headlines—in Maryland denouncing Roosevelt’s “invasion,” in Georgia likening his campaign to General Sherman’s pillaging of the state during the Civil War. And the intervention gave Roosevelt not a single victory. In George, Tydings, and Smith, moreover, Roosevelt had selected incumbents he had felt could be defeated. He never even tried to take on other, more solidly entrenched conservative senators running in 1938, such as Nevada’s Patrick McCarran and Colorado’s Alva Adams. Exasperated by “the sense that Congress did not reflect the sentiments of the country,” the New Dealers had, as the historian John Garraty puts it, “attempted to nationalize the [Democratic] party institution, to transform a decentralized party, responsible only to local electorates, into an organization responsive to the will of the national party leader and the interests of a national electorate.” But the Senate had been armored against the will of a national leader or a national electorate. It had been designed not to respond to but, should it wish to do so, to resist the “sentiments of the country.” Even if the President had succeeded in ousting George, Tydings, and Smith; even if he had fought, and defeated, McCarran and Adams; even if he had campaigned against, and defeated, every incumbent senator, of any persuasion, running in 1938, he would have changed the membership of only one-third of the Senate. Two-thirds of the Senate would still have been untouched.

The conservative Democrat-Republican coalition was formidable in both houses of Congress—in the House of Representatives its heart was the Rules Committee headed by Howard Smith of Virginia—but most of the coalition’s key figures were senators: southerners like Bailey, Tom Connally of Texas, and Carter Glass and Harry Byrd of Virginia; border-staters like Tydings; Republicans like Arthur Vandenberg and, after 1939, Robert Taft of Ohio. And year by year its strength grew. The Court fight, as Garraty says, “marked the beginning of the end of the New Deal.” During the remaining seven years of Roosevelt’s Administration, Congress blocked every major new domestic law he proposed. One by one, the older Supreme Court justices resigned, and as Roosevelt filled their places, the Court moved steadily to the left. The lower levels of the federal judiciary also moved left, as the effect of presidential appointments accumulated. Congress moved nowhere. The Senate moved nowhere. In domestic
affairs, the Senate was again what it had been with brief exceptions during the four generations since the Civil War: the stronghold of the
status quo
, the dam against which the waves of social reform dashed themselves in vain—the chief obstructive force in the federal government.

The Constitution’s Framers had given the Senate power to block legislation, to stand as the rampart against the exercise of popular and presidential will. This power was only a negative power, a naysaying power, the power to obstruct and to thwart. But it was an immense power—and the Framers had built the rampart solid enough so that it was standing, thick and strong, in the twentieth century as it had stood in the nineteenth century.

B
UT THE
F
RAMERS
had intended the Senate—had intended Congress as a whole—to have other, more constructive, powers. In the nineteenth century, the Senate had exercised these powers. In the twentieth century it didn’t.

In part the explanation lay in changes in the world outside the Senate, in the enormous growth and complexity of government which demanded a dispatch and a body of expertise possessed more by the executive than the legislature; in the activist presidents who attracted the attention of press and public at the expense of Congress.

But in part the explanation lay in the Senate itself.

“Congressional procedure,”
Life
magazine was to note in 1945, is largely “the same as it was in 1789.” As for the Senate’s basic committee and staff structure, that had been established in 1890. During the intervening decades, government had grown enormously—in 1946 the national budget was three hundred times the size it had been in 1890—but the staffs of Senate committees had grown hardly at all. To oversee that budget, the Senate Appropriations Committee staff consisted of eight persons, exactly one more than had been on that staff decades earlier. Not only were they ridiculously small, the staffs of Senate committees had little of the technical expertise necessary to understand a government which had become infinitely more complicated and technical. The salaries of congressional staff members were so low that Capitol Hill could not attract men and women of the caliber that were flocking to the executive branch. A study done in 1942 concluded that only four of the seventy-six congressional committees had “expert staffs prepared professionally even to cross-examine experts of the executive branch.” As for senators’ personal staff, as late as 1941, a senator would be entitled to hire only six employees, and only one at a salary—$3,000—which might attract someone with qualifications above those of a clerk. So little importance was attached to staff that many senators didn’t hire even the six to which they were entitled, and an astonishingly high proportion of the approximately 500 employees on senators’ personal staffs and the 144 on the staff of Senate committees were senators’ relatives. The Founding Fathers had envisioned Congress as a check on
the executive. Congress couldn’t make even a pretense of analyzing the measures the executive submitted for its approval. During the decades since 1890, when the Senate had authorized a staff of three persons for its Foreign Relations Committee, the United States had become a global power, with interests in a hundred foreign countries. In 1939, the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was still three: one full-time clerk who took dictation, typed, and ran the stenotype machine, and two part-time clerks. As one observer put it, “There could be no adversary relationship between the two branches of government [in foreign relations] because most of the professional work had to be done in the Department of State.” Anyone seeking an explanation of the Senate’s willingness to allow the rise of the executive agreement, which freed it from the details of foreign policy, need look no further: the Senate simply had no staff adequate to handle the details of foreign policy. The adversary relationship—the relationship that had lain at the heart of the Framers’ concept of the American government they thought they were creating—had become impossible in virtually all areas; even Senate Parliamentarian Floyd Riddick had to admit that “with occasional exceptions, Congress did little more than look into, slightly amend or block the bills upon which it was called to act.”

Unable to analyze legislation, Congress was equally unable to create it.

This was perhaps the most significant alteration in the power of the House and the Senate. The Framers of the Constitution had given Congress great power to make laws, vesting in it “all legislative powers,” and during the early, simpler days of the Republic, Congress had jealously guarded that power; as late as 1908, the Senate had erupted in anger when the Secretary of the Interior presumed to send it a bill already drafted in final form. But by the 1930s, with government so much more complicated, bill-drafting had become a science. Knowledge of that science was in extremely short supply on Capitol Hill. There were plenty of legislative technicians with the necessary expertise at the great law firms in New York. There were plenty at the White House, and in the executive departments—the legislative section of the Agriculture Department alone had six hundred employees. In 1939, the Legislative Drafting Service that helped both houses of Congress consisted of eight employees. And of all the scores of major statutes passed during the New Deal, approximately two per year were created by Congress—because, as Tommy Corcoran explained, Congress simply lacked the “technical equipment to draft a big, modern statute.”

To draft one—or even to explain one and defend it in detail, as was often required when major new legislation was being presented to the Senate. The Senate was going through the same rituals it had gone through in the nineteenth century, but frequently now they were rituals without meaning—as was known by those Senate insiders who understood the significance of the fact that often the new Majority Leader, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, rising to speak, would signal a page to place a small portable lectern atop his desk. His intimates knew
that Barkley, a gifted extemporaneous orator, needed a lectern only when he was reading a speech written by someone else—and that often the someone else was a White House official. Barkley was not alone. Senatorial floor managers of major legislation were relying more and more often on explanatory speeches written by White House aides. The legislative power was in effect being exercised increasingly by the executive. The Framers had vested in the Congress the power to make laws, but Congress itself had made it all but impossible for it to exercise that power. And the explanation for the lack of adequate Senate staff was as significant as the lack itself. For the fundamental explanation was that the Senate didn’t want the staff it needed. Repeated proposals to add an expert permanent staff to committees—House and Senate—were applauded in principle, and died away without action being taken.

The reason for this rested partly on philosophic considerations, extremely shortsighted ones. Describing the senatorial attitude,
Time
magazine’s longtime congressional correspondent Neil MacNeil says, “The damned staff cost money,” and conservative senators believed in reducing government spending, not increasing it. Senators who did not spend even the meager allocation for personal staff boasted when, at the end of the year, they turned the money back to the government. For many senators, large, bustling staffs fit in neither with their concept of their beloved institution—“It was a quiet, sleepy place, and they wanted to keep it that way,” MacNeil says, “and besides, they didn’t want the institution to change, and they never had
had
staff”—nor with their concept of themselves: “They were
senators
, senators of the United States, not corporation executives supervising staffs.” A senator, MacNeil says, “would go back to his office, and put his feet up on his desk, and think about what was going on in the world, and after a few weeks, he’d make a speech. He’d sit there and
think
, and come up with ideas and theories. And that didn’t work with a staff.” Most senators seemed to have no concept of what a staff could do. When the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, proposed augmenting the tiny Legislative Reference Service so that congressional committees would have “scholarly research and counsel… at least equal to that of” the witnesses from the executive branch and private industry who testified before them, Congress rejected the proposal.

There were more pragmatic considerations as well. The staff of senatorial committees was controlled by the committee chairmen; giving individual senators more staff would therefore dilute the chairmen’s power, and the chairmen were not eager to have it diluted. The press referred to the proposed administrative assistants as “assistant senators,” reinforcing senators’ apprehensions at establishing “a cadre of political assistants who would eventually be in a position to compete for their jobs.” Senior senators, entrenched in power under the old system, had, as one would put it, a “suspicion… that they had little to gain and much to lose from a change in the
status quo.”
Richard Strout of
The New Republic
was to say that “Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.”
It wasn’t outside forces that kept the Senate inefficient—fifty years out of date. It was the Senate itself, for its own reasons.