NYC aid bill passed

Well, the perishing west wind is whistling across the land these days and the snowbound hinterland and then coming on across the Jersey Flats and it ripples up the Hudson River and whirls through the cross-town streets of New York before it blows out to sea, inverting umbrellas and making the girls' slacks flap against their legs where once it ruffled up their skirts.

And if there is still an energy crisis, or the likelihood of one, nobody would ever know about it. The department stores are ablaze, inside and out, and the 65-foot tree at Rockefeller Center causes rubbernecks from Connecticut and New Jersey to clog up the traffic along Fifth Avenue. And the cashiers at the big stores are drooping with fatigue from the jostling lines of shoppers carrying everything these days, from calendars to baby carriages, since they abandoned shop assistants and left everything to self-service. 

The Santa Clauses shaking their little bells have had orders from their union this year. For the first time, they're expected to observe a code of conduct which says, among other colourful admonitions, that they must not be drunk on duty. They must keep their money deep inside the recesses of their uniform, that they must shave off a natural beard in favour of a false one, unless God has blessed them with a natural that is snow-white and fully packed. They're warned also not to make expensive promises to the young that their parents are unlikely to keep. 

The Christmas shopping is brisker than it's been for years on the English principle of making the most of tonight, since tomorrow we may go broke. 'Going broke' is not a phrase we like to bandy about in this city, but the actuality that threatened us for so many months has now been banished by the certainty that Congress would pass the president's bill to lend New York City $2.3 billion a year for the next three years. The bill squeezed through the House by ten votes only in 416, but the real danger of its defeat came in the Senate, when a rally of conservatives promised a filibuster and a last-ditch apostle of thrift from Alabama, Senator Allen, a Democrat, offered to stand up and talk and talk and talk the bill into extinction. 

Filibustering is an American folk tradition which, like many others, seems doomed to vanish. Its theory is impeccably democratic. Why should a majority, just because it's a majority, impose its will on a sincere, high-minded minority? The filibuster achieved its finest years in the decades following the general acceptance of a theory of government which was put forward in the early nineteenth century when the pioneers were breaking into the West and running into all sorts of regional troubles and ways of life that Washington could not know about. In other words, to give you a saucy – but extreme – example, why should Washington decide to give the states small, equal amounts of money for public roads through public forests when some states, like Kansas, say, have no forests – very few trees, for that matter – while the people of Florida cannot cross a wood without the risk of being bitten by snakes? 

This sort of grievance, as it developed into a political theory, became known as 'the theory of the concurrent minority'. Perhaps to call it a theory is unfair. It was a conviction, reached after long experience of some very pesky facts. A democracy, it concluded, is going to perpetuate injustice if the majority can always dictate its will to a determined minority and when the minority is sufficiently inflamed on principle or as a special case, it would be better to think again about the majority's wishes. And out of this conviction grew the filibuster which was a deliberate device for obstructing the passage of legislation that violated the passionate convictions of a minority. 

In 1917, before the Germans announced unrestricted submarine warfare and so practically invited the Americans into the war, President Wilson put up an act to arm American merchant vessels. The bill came first before the House of Representatives and was passed by an overwhelming vote of 403 to 14. And then it went to the Senate and its passage was a foregone thing when 75 senators, out of the sitting 96, announced beforehand that they would vote for it. But it didn't pass. Seven senators, who shared the fear that it would invite a German declaration of war and were determined to stay out of the war at all costs, these seven took it in turn to stand on their feet and talk and talk, offer numerous amendments which were defeated on a roll call but no matter. The main aim was achieved. To talk and talk till the term of Congress had expired and the bill was still being debated. 

Well, 80-odd years ago, the House stiffened its rules that permit a filibuster and it has since been abandoned there. And though the Senate has also tightened its rules, a filibuster, if it can arouse enough willing and healthy speakers, can still talk a bill into the ground. Until quite recently, the Senate had an unlimited freedom of debate. When, for instance, in 1938, an anti-lynching bill came up, a senator from Louisiana got up and talked for six successive days. There's no rule in the Senate that says that you must speak to the motion. I remember a senator from Tennessee, in the process of filibustering against a tax bill, fished out an enormous memorandum on the different ways that various obscure members of the government's Engraving and Printing Bureau had been dismissed. 

Certainly, the most shameless and amusing of all modern filibusterers was the comic and outrageous demagogue from Louisiana, the late Huey Long. When, after two years of Roosevelt, a bill came up in the Senate to extend the life of the so-called 'national recovery' administration – which was the emergency lifeblood Roosevelt had pumped into the wilting body of American government – Long defeated it with a continuous speech of 15 hours and 35 minutes. He didn't, as I recall, talk for long about the sins of the administration. He took to reading doom-ridden passages from the Bible. He took up the current condition of baseball and, at the end, he wiped a tear from his eye, recalled his dear old Mom and, taking out a dog-eared diary or handbook, he began to read aloud with Shakespearean intonations his mother's recipes for pot liquor and fried oysters. 

I don't know if, last week, Senator Allen of Alabama was prepared to enlighten us about his mother's recipe for corn muffins or black-eyed peas. If so, his hopes were soon shattered. The Senate had canvassed itself and found that most of its members were thoroughly sick of the New York City financial mess and enough of them were scared with what the city's bankruptcy might do to other cities by way of contagion and Senator Allen couldn't recruit enough relay runners for his talking marathon. Moreover, as a matter of practical politics, the bill was almost passed. 

Bills come up in two stages. First, the so-called 'authorisation' bill. The Senate has to say whether it approves the notion of passing a bill and that is commonly the time to kill it. If the authorisation bill passes, the nearest thing to a kill that you can achieve is to reduce drastically the amount of money appropriated in the second stage, the 'appropriation' bill. Poor Senator Allen stood up last Monday in a nearly empty Senate chamber and moaned, quite sensibly, 'If we could not defeat the authorisation where this matter was decided on its merits, how in the world can we defeat the appropriation bill?' And he fulfilled his own fears. There was no way. And the Republican senators, even the ones who'd been picturing New York as a spendthrift Sodom and Gomorrah which ought to be taught a painful lesson, they concluded that if President Ford, the loudest of the preachers, had decided that 2.3 billions a year was not too much, then they gave up. And so did Senator Allen. 

From then on, the bill followed its ceremonial routine. A vote to approve, then to a joint conference of the appropriate House and Senate committees, then a quick vote on the compromised bill in both Houses and then the president’s signature. 

Whether or not President Ford changed his mind, his supporters and his campaign managers will be very vocal in their insistence that he never changed his tune. He said in the beginning, 'No help for New York unless it helped itself in painful, self-disciplining ways' and New York is doing that. Mayor Beame is dismissing city employees right and left. Most telling of all, New York State has promised to increase the already considerable state income tax and New York City is going to jab the third and most painful flag in the bull's neck – it will increase the tax which we, alone, among American city dwellers, have to pay – the New York City income tax. 

No wonder, then, the word came from Washington this week that congressmen are being swamped with protests against money that the American taxpayer will have to fork out next year for the following federal projects: a federal study on the impact of rural road construction in Poland – $85,000. Poland, Europe, that is, not Poland, Wisconsin or Warsaw, Indiana, and you may well ask, 'How can such things come about?'. 

Well, the answer would occur to you quite quickly if you looked through the congressional record and saw a list of names of the present members of Congress. In Rhode Island, it helps to get elected if you have an Italian name. In Nevada, there are constituencies made up entirely of Greeks. 

Well, to go on, a government dictionary on witchcraft – $46,089; a grant to Central College, Iowa to report on the enhancement of the self-image of freshman women – $22,470; a study on teaching American mothers how to play with their children – cost $576,969. And here's a vital government study to which I, for one, had no idea I was contributing – for a study of bisexual Polish frogs – $6,000.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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