[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 103 (Tuesday, July 20, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8868-S8870]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              CIVILITY AND DELIBERATION IN THE U.S. SENATE

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, on July 16, the Robert J. Dole Institute for 
Public Service and Public Policy at the University of Kansas hosted a 
discussion of civility and deliberation in the United States Senate.
  Long subjects of interest to me, I was heartened to learn of this 
event. In an age of media and money-driven politics, it is important to 
remember that what we Senators must truly strive to be about has little 
to do with either the media or money. Discussions such as this one 
remind us all of the essential nature of this body in which we are so 
privileged to serve, and of the responsibility each of us bears to help 
this great institution, the United States Senate, continue to reflect 
the Framers' intent.
  I ask unanimous consent that the remarks of the Honorable Robert J. 
Dole, and the remarks of Mr. Harry C. McPherson, former Special Counsel 
to President Lyndon B. Johnson, be inserted in the Record at this 
point.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

   Remarks of Senator Bob Dole--Introduction of Harry McPherson, the 
                         Capitol, July 16, 1999

       Thanks very much for the kind introduction, and thanks to 
     all of today's participants, many of them friends.
       Harry Truman once remarked that he felt anything but 
     comfortable as a newcomer to the Senate. Then, one day, a 
     grizzled veteran of the institution took him aside and 
     offered him the following sage advice: ``Harry,'' he said, 
     ``for the first six months you'll wonder how the hell you 
     ever got to be a United States Senator. After that, you'll 
     wonder how in Hell everyone else did.''
       I guess I'm still in the early stages when it comes to 
     having my name on a school of public policy. A professor has 
     been defined as someone who takes more words than he needs to 
     tell more than he knows. Kind of reminds me of a 
     filibustering senator. President Johnson, Harry's former boss 
     and mentor, liked to tell of the long-winded Texas politician 
     who never began any address without extolling at great length 
     the beautiful piney woods of east Texas. Then he would move 
     on to the bluebonnets and the broad plains, and down through 
     the Hill Country to the White Beaches of the Gulf Coast.
       At which point he went back to the piney woods and started 
     in all over again. On one occasion he had just completed a 
     second tour of the lone star state and he was about to launch 
     into a third when a fellow rose up in back of the room and 
     yelled out: ``The next time you pass Lubbock, how about 
     letting me off?''
       Let me assure you all: I have no intention of making more 
     than one pass at Lubbock. As you know, it's customary to 
     insert the word honorable in front of the names of public 
     servants. Sometimes it's even appropriate. The next speaker 
     is just such a case. In fact, he is one of the most honorable 
     men I know. Harry and I came to Washington about the same 
     time. As he writes in his classic memoir, ``A Political 
     Education,'' it was the era of the one party South. Come to 
     think of it, it was the era of the one party Senate as well.
       Still, even if Harry and I spent most of our careers on the 
     opposite sides of the political fence, there is much more 
     that unites us than divides us. To begin with, neither one of 
     us have ever confused personal civility with the surrender of 
     principle. One way or another, our generation has paid a 
     heavy price in resistance to all of this century's extremists 
     who didn't want to serve humanity as much as they wanted to 
     remake or oppress it. Life for us has been a series of tests: 
     whether growing up in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, or fighting 
     a war against Nazi tyranny, or waging a moral offensive 
     against Jim Crow and other hateful barriers to human 
     potential; whether sending a man to stroll on the surface of 
     the moon, or standing up for American values across four 
     decades of Cold War . . . all of these enterprises, vast as 
     they were, enlisted the common energies of a nation that is 
     never better than when tackling the impossible.
       Along the way we discovered that there was no Republican or 
     Democratic way to fight polio or even invent the Internet. 
     Almost forty years have passed since I first arrived in this 
     town as the lowest ranking creature in the political food 
     chain--a freshman Congressman. My ideological credentials 
     were validated by a local political boss in west Kansas 
     who told a friend, ``Heck, I know he's a conservative--the 
     tires on his car are threadbare.'' I never claimed to be a 
     visionary. I came to Washington to do the decent thing by 
     people in need, without bankrupting the Treasury or 
     depriving entrepreneurs of the incentive or capital with 
     which to realize their dreams. I brought from Kansas the 
     conviction that most people are mostly good most of the 
     time. Something I also learned: that an adversary is not 
     the same thing as an enemy.
       It may be hard to believe, but those days one politician 
     could challenge another's ideas without questioning his 
     motives or impugning his patriotism. As Harry will attest, we 
     may have had differences over the years, but they were 
     programmatic, not personal. In the words of the late great Ev 
     Dirksen, ``I live by my principles, and one of my principles 
     is flexibility.''
       Of course, in the great defining struggle over civil 
     rights, it was Ev Dirksen's flexibility that enabled him to 
     put aside narrow questions of party advantage and remind 
     colleagues that it was another Illinois Republican, by the 
     name of Abraham Lincoln, who gave the GOP its moral charter 
     as a party dedicated to racial justice. Throughout this 
     century, no issue has done more to call forth the better 
     angels of our nature. Whether it was Teddy Roosevelt inviting 
     Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House, or 
     my hero Dwight Eisenhower, summoning federal troops to 
     integrate Central High School in Little Rock, or Harry Truman 
     desegregating the armed forces, or LBJ speaking at a Joint 
     Session in the House and shouting, ``we shall overcome,'' or 
     the bipartisan coalition that I was privileged to lead in 
     making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday.
       All this, I think, has relevance for today's discussion. 
     The topic is ``Civility and Deliberation in the United States 
     Senate.'' As any C-Span viewer can tell you, we have too 
     little of one and too much of the other. But why should that 
     come as any surprise? We are after all, a representative 
     democracy--a mirror held up to America. In this age when 
     celebrity trumps accomplishment, and notoriety is the surest 
     route to success in a 24 hour news cycle, voters are 
     understandably turned off by a political culture that 
     measures democracy in decibels.
       Needless to say, it is pretty hard to listen when all 
     around you, people are screaming at the top of their lungs. 
     It's even harder to hear the voices of those who sent you to 
     Washington in the first place. In a democracy differences are 
     not only unavoidable--if pursued with civility as well as 
     conviction, they are downright healthy. Put another way, I'd 
     much rather deal with honest contention than creeping 
     cynicism. Yet that's exactly what afflicts our system today, 
     when millions of citizens regard all politicians as puppets 
     on a string, dancing to the music of spinmeisters.
       Fortunately, there are still men and women in this town and 
     every town across America who disprove that view. They come 
     from diverse backgrounds. They vote for different candidates. 
     They speak various languages; they worship before many 
     alters. But this much they have in common; they are patriots 
     before they are partisans. At the same time they understand 
     the dangers that arise when any leader starts to calculate 
     his chances at the expense of his conscience.
       One of the most inspiring stories I have ever read involves 
     the late Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, for over forty 
     years a lawmaker of towering integrity. In 1982 Senator 
     Stennis faced the toughest reelection fight of his career. At 
     one point early in the campaign, the Senator found himself 
     listening to a room full of experts who kept prefacing every 
     sentence with the phrase, ``to win, we will have to do 
     this.''
       Courtly as ever, Stennis heard everyone out before 
     replying, ``there is one thing you

[[Page S8869]]

     really need to understand before we go any further,'' he told 
     his political operatives. ``We don't have to win,'' John 
     Stennis understood that in a system such as ours, details can 
     be compromised, but principle never.
       In the high stakes game of history, only those who are 
     willing to lose for principle deserve to win in the polls. 
     Only those whose principles do not blind them to the search 
     for common ground, can hope to rally a political system 
     intentionally designed to frustrate utopian reformers. As LBJ 
     like to say, ``I'd rather win a convert than a fight.''
       In his memoir, Harry describes just such a confluence 
     involving Lyndon Johnson, in office less than two weeks, and 
     his onetime friend turned antagonist Jim Rowe. In the wake of 
     President Kennedy's assassination, the new President was 
     reaching out across personal and political gulfs, seeking 
     counsel and support wherever he could find them.
       This led him to Jim Rowe, who protested at length that the 
     estrangement had been his fault, not Johnson's. They went 
     back and forth, until LBJ snapped, ``Damn it, can't you be 
     content to be the first man the thirty-sixth president of the 
     United States has apologized to?''
       End of argument. And then Harry, on his own, reminds 
     readers how important it is under such circumstances to 
     swallow your feelings and smile even if it hurts. It's been 
     said that Washington lacks the fabled Wise Men of yesterday--
     those vastly experienced sages whose instincts are even more 
     valuable than their Rolodexes. I disagree. Because I have a 
     friend and partner who is one of the wisest Men around. Both 
     his shrewdness and his generosity are as large as Texas. I 
     can't imagine anyone better qualified to address this 
     gathering than the civil and deliberate Harry McPherson.
                                  ____


                       Remarks of Harry McPherson

       Many years ago, after ``A Political Education'' was first 
     published, several senators and staff people told me I'd 
     gotten the place right. John Stennis burst into another 
     senator's office, waving a copy of the book, and asked, 
     ``Have you read Harry's book? He's got us clear as can be''. 
     I was tremendously proud when I heard about that.
       But it wasn't long before other staffers, as well as a few 
     lobbyists and reporters, pointed out that I'd missed this or 
     that vital truth about the Senate; that I'd misunderstood why 
     Senator X did something that surprised me--a special 
     friendship between him and Senator Y had caused a certain 
     bill to be treated as it was; or that Senate rules and 
     precedents (which I thought I understood) required a result 
     that I had attributed to misbegotten ideology. Most of all, I 
     was told, with a pitying smile, I had completely failed to 
     take into account the importance of campaign contributions in 
     shaping what happened, or didn't happen, in the Senate.
       I was embarrassed by these observations, which I 
     acknowledged to be true. When the book was republished, years 
     later, I asked to make changes in it, that would reflect what 
     I had learned in the intervening time. But publishing 
     economics being what they are, there could be no changes in 
     the body of the book. If I wanted to write an epilogue, 
     calling attention to these things, I could. And I did, 
     getting the politics a little straighter. Still later, a 
     third publisher offered the chance to write a prologue, where 
     I could disclose still further shortcomings in my earlier 
     understanding of the Senate. I chose instead to compare the 
     Democrats who ran the Senate in the early 90's with those of 
     the mid-50's, when I started to work here. I assumed, of 
     course, that those later Democrats would continue to run the 
     place ad infinitum. That version of ``A Political Education'' 
     saw the light in early 1995, just after Senator Lott assumed 
     the responsibilities of majority leader.
       I relate these misadventures as a way of suggesting that 
     the Senate, small and visible and reported about as it is, 
     remains, at least for me, mysterious. This is not to say that 
     scholarly analyses of the Senate are inherently wrong. 
     Statistical summaries of the Senate's work can be valuable in 
     showing us how well the institution is performing. But there 
     are human factors at work in the place that aren't easily 
     captured by numbers. The Senate offers plenty of political 
     science material. But it's also a novel--simple enough, in 
     some respects, murky and ambiguous in others: like Joyce's 
     ``Ulysses,'' which is about a June day in Dublin, 1904, and a 
     Homeric saga, and God knows what else.
       ``Civility and Deliberation'' are behavioral abstractions, 
     more natural to a novelist's view of the Senate than a 
     statistician's.
       Indeed, it might seem that a statistical measure of the 
     Senate's productiveness--which would rate its ability to deal 
     effectively with major public concerns--needn't pay much 
     attention to quality-of-life considerations like ``civility'' 
     and ``deliberation''. If the Senate produces, it doesn't 
     matter--so this view would have it--whether the Chamber 
     resembles an abattoir when it does so. It isn't the public 
     concern whether Members of the Senate behave in a civil or 
     uncivil manner toward one another, or even whether they 
     gather together and deliberate before acting. What matters 
     are the results.
       There is a degree of truth in this, of course. Voters 
     aren't usually focused on electing the politest candidate to 
     represent them in the Senate, nor the one who takes the 
     longest to make up his or her mind before acting on 
     legislation. Some of the great senators have been persons of 
     such force of personality, such power of will, such 
     intellectual arrogance, such irresistible energy, that they 
     were able to ram their work through the ranks of much more 
     polite, less wilful Members--and the nation benefitted from 
     that. The measure of the Senate's success as an institution 
     isn't whether it resembles a Victorian debating society, 
     tolerant, decorous, and patient, but whether it is able to 
     appreciate and deal with vital public needs.
       On the other hand, I guess the reason we've met to discuss 
     ``Civility'' and ``Deliberation'' is that we suspect that 
     these conditions of Senate life may in fact be related to 
     Senate productivity. They aren't sufficient in themselves to 
     cause productivity, but they may be necessary to enhance it. 
     Put another way, what the Members feel about the quality of 
     their corporate lives may have something to say about how 
     well they perform as legislators. If it does, then the 
     conversations I've had with a dozen or so senators during the 
     past few days--from both parties--suggest that the modest 
     record of the Senate in recent times is the product, at least 
     in part, of inadequate civility in the Chamber, and a failure 
     to deliberate--by which I mean to discuss in a body, with the 
     possibility of changing opinions through argument--any number 
     of significant public issues.
       Rather than list all the shortcomings of contemporary 
     Senate life that I heard about in these conversations, let me 
     draw the beleaguered, cartoon senator I saw emerging from 
     them, wishing I were Pat Oliphant and could do it with a 
     flick of the pen. For simplicity, I'll make him male.
       He is obsessed by television, beginning with television 
     coverage of the Senate floor. Normally he doesn't go over to 
     the Floor except to deliver prepared remarks, and since he 
     can see what's happening on the Floor on the tube in his 
     office, he doesn't spend his time sitting there, taking in 
     the remarks of his colleagues. As a result there isn't much 
     debate, as we think of that term.
       He is on a number of committees, so his attention is 
     fractured. Stuck in committee, meeting with lobbyists, or 
     working the phone to raise money for his next campaign, he is 
     unlikely to know much about issues on the Floor that one of 
     his staffers doesn't tell him on the way over to vote. If he 
     doesn't connect with the staffer, he simply relies on his 
     Floor leader's staffer to tell him what to do.
       He doesn't bear down to learn much about any issue, with 
     exception for those indigenous and critical to his state. Why 
     should he? Why should be learn complicated arguments about 
     big issues, when a tidal wave of media talk has already 
     served to fashion public opinion? Why deliberate on 
     something, one Member asked, when everyone's already made 
     up his or her mind, thanks not to some eloquent senator, 
     but to the ubiquitous chattering classes outside the 
     Chamber?
       He is partisan, either by nature or experience. He served 
     in the House, a Republican who backed Newt and the 1994 class 
     seeking revenge for years of mistreatment by the ancient 
     Democratic majority, or a Democrat, seeking revenge for 
     mistreatment by Newt, Armey, and DeLay.
       Still, because he is, as a politician, naturally 
     gregarious, he would make friends, work, and trade with 
     senators on the other side of the aisle--except that his 
     brothers and sisters on his side tell him that those 
     senators' seats are up for grabs, and he should do nothing to 
     help them. Needing support from his own and unready to risk 
     it, he steps back. Though bipartisan support is necessary to 
     pass important legislation on tough issues, he's reluctant to 
     provide it.
       He really doesn't know many other senators, on his side or 
     the other. Used to be, senators stayed in Washington until it 
     got really hot, and then went home. During their 7-day-a-week 
     residence in town, they got to know many of the others in the 
     Chamber. Now many Members go back home on the weekends. 
     Because of the righteous indignation of public interest 
     groups--the same ones who demanded more roll calls, to put 
     senators on record, and thereby made a lot of sound 
     negotiated compromises die aborning--because those groups 
     decried ``junkets'' abroad, there are few opportunities for 
     senators to get to know each other, and something about the 
     outer world at the same time. The constant pressure to raise 
     campaign funds further reduces time for socializing. For 
     reasons I cannot fathom, there doesn't even seem to be a 
     place where the tradition of having a drink with other 
     senators takes place regularly.
       This senator isn't much of a ``deliberator,'' now, though 
     the pleasure of arguing political issues in college is one 
     reason he chose the career. Now he makes speeches written by 
     staff, attends hearings structured by the chairman and 
     interest groups to produce foreordained results, and engages 
     in few debates on the floor that might make him look bad at 
     home, or that might provide a potential opponent with a club 
     to beat him with. His every waking moment, he feels, is under 
     scrutiny. If he learns anything within the Senate, or 
     contributes to someone else's education there, it's likely to 
     be in a small group, behind closed doors.
       Learning--even more, caring--about a big issue seems less 
     and less worthwhile. He'd have to devote a ton of time to it, 
     trying to persuade other distracted fellows to pay attention. 
     This is especially true in the case of those issues--like 
     improving the quality of elementary and secondary education, 
     reducing the incidence of violent crime in poor 
     neighborhoods, finding alternatives to imprisonment for drug 
     addicts--which don't attract large political contributions. A 
     friend

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     of mine, many years ago, reasoned that we could pass major 
     civil rights legislation if we could only find a way to 
     benefit builders, construction unions, and the oil and gas 
     industry by doing so.
       The modalities of discourse--always addressing another 
     member through the Chair, for example, never saying ``you'', 
     never letting it hang entirely out--seem contrived and 
     unnatural to many Members, and it shows. But like manners in 
     society, these traditions make it possible for people to rise 
     above the harsh, wounding animosities of partisan conflict. 
     They mask the red fangs, and make communal life, particularly 
     in a spot-lighted commune like the Senate, more bearable.
       This cartoon figure is not an attractive one, and there are 
     a number of senators who would not see themselves in it. Some 
     have friends across the aisle, with whom they work amiably, 
     and in complete, mutual trust; two partners of mine, Bob Dole 
     and George Mitchell, had such a relationship when they were 
     party leaders. Some Members long for a more thorough 
     deliberation of major issues; many of them wish for the means 
     of developing friendships--more especially, building trust--
     with other Members. Several senators spoke appreciably of the 
     prayer breakfast meetings, in which senators have been known 
     to remove their togas for formal respectability, and reveal 
     the needy human beings within. I recalled a meeting with a 
     midwestern Democrat years ago, in which he told me that the 
     members of his smaller prayer group--six senators, evenly 
     divided by party--meant more to him than any other 
     association he had; he said the others often voted with him, 
     and he with them, because of that bond. It would have been 
     hard to find the cause of that voting pattern in the usual 
     statistical models. The ties that bond other senators to one 
     another are easier to discover: combat service in World War 
     II, for example, is a shared and unforgettable experience for 
     Dan Inouye, Bob Dole, and Ted Stevens, and it has always 
     shown.
       The most interesting model of what the Senate could be, the 
     wished-for example most frequently referred to in my 
     conversations, was the experience of meeting, speaking, and 
     listening to one another in the Old Senate chamber, the Old 
     Supreme Court. There was no TV coverage; no reporters at all. 
     And the subjects--in one case national security, in another, 
     the impeachment of a President--were grave indeed, worthy of 
     the fixed attention of any man or woman.
       It's too late to undo television coverage of the Senate. 
     The prayer group is not for everybody. Big government is 
     over, the President said, so there aren't many big mountains 
     of governmental effort to conceive, or to seek to tear down. 
     Campaign finance, the country's annoyance, continues to 
     depress the system with its demands on Members, would-be 
     Members, and contributors alike. The Old Senate chamber won't 
     do for daily meetings, and besides, TV and the press would 
     crowd out the Members if it were tried. Hard-edged 
     partisanship will continue for a while, even with Newt gone 
     from the House to the talk shows.
       It's a quite legitimate question, to ask whether these 
     conditions have been better in the past. I think they were, 
     prior to TV coverage of the Senate, prior to the 
     geometrically escalating demands of fundraising. And perhaps 
     in some past eras the quality of the Members was higher: not 
     necessarily measured in intellectual fire-power, but in 
     dedication to the central task of the legislator: to 
     legislate. The Democratic Policy Committee for which I 
     worked, forty years ago, included Lyndon Johnson, Richard 
     Russell, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, Lister Hill, Warren 
     Magnuson, Robert Kerr, Carl Hayden, and John Pastore. These 
     were true legislators, attentive to the task, prepared to 
     learn about that was before them and then to join battle in 
     the Chamber. Their superior qualities of attention and grasp 
     were what made the Senate of those days--at least in my 
     recollection--more serious than it often appears to be today. 
     And it is those individual qualities of senators that 
     ultimately determine the quality of the Body itself. Given 
     the nature of today's media- and money-driven politics, our 
     best hope is that our current Members, and those to come, 
     will be inspired by the best of the past to raise the level 
     of civility, and deepen the level of deliberations, in the 
     Senate they've been chosen to serve in their own day.

                          ____________________