The political filibuster

Let us now consider the verb 'to filibuster' in its American political sense. If you can rope in a schoolboy, he'll tell you that in its original sense, it's an English corruption of the Dutch word meaning 'freebooter' and for about two centuries it was applied to buccaneers who plundered ships on the high seas.

The English started it with men who held up and looted Spanish ships and settlements in the Caribbean and then in the nineteenth century it got used in this country for freewheeling or free-sailing American adventurers who mounted armed expeditions against countries they didn't like but which were officially at peace with the United States. 

I imagine that that all-knowing schoolboy could go on and on and bend your ear with such variations from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of it, as Americans who swiped bits of West Florida from Spain with nobody's permission and Californians who kept biting off bits of Mexico, but what we're talking about is a parliamentary tactic – some people would say an outrageously non-parliamentary tactic – practised for a very long time in the United States Senate, whereby a minority faced with the passage of some bill which they find obnoxious, defies the majority will by what is known as a filibuster, and the usual tactic is to make the most of the Senate's time-honoured rule of unlimited debate. 

Now before we get into the ingenuous and sometimes hilarious ways that this has been done, you may rightly wonder why any great legislative body should ever have adopted a rule which allows it to debate till the end of time, if the lungs and the indignation hold out. Well, like many other devices of American government invented by lawyers, this one is about as complicated as the wiring of an astronaut's instrument panel – we mustn't go into that. But the rude, original idea was a sound one. 

It's the Americans ever-present fear – ever present since the break with Britain – fear of dictatorship, and this began with the fear of a president with enough power to call on his own standing army, but it developed into the fear of a majority in Congress that might be able, at all times, to impose its will on a minority. 

A cantankerous but wise Southerner, in the early nineteenth century, developed a theory based on this healthy fear that democracy, or that part of it which submits to the vote or the will of a majority, is not going to work if it can always crush minority opinion and leave that minority frustrated and embittered. He believed that democracy will work so long as a minority has a sporting chance of proving that the majority can be wrong. 

And this produced in the senior house, the Senate, a rule which said that in matters of great moment, there shall be no limit on debate. Well, since then all sorts of checks and bypasses have been invented, but if a filibustering minority is strong enough, has enough people who are prepared to go till Doomsday offering irrelevant amendments to a bill they don't want, or is healthy enough to stand and talk and talk through many nights, the bill can be defeated. 

I remember hearing about this strange custom, which seemed like something invented by a Hollywood crowd director, some time in late 1937. As a young British correspondent new to the halls and the cloakrooms of Congress, I was eager to see it at work and, in 1938, it happened. The Roosevelt administration had put up a bill to make lynching illegal and may I hasten to point out to any listeners in Eastern Europe that, before the Second War, lynching had become a criminal offence. 

Well, one quiet day while the anti-lynching bill seemed to be moving slowly towards passage, a bell rang in the press room of the Senate and the magic word went out – 'Filibuster.' On to his feet went the senior senator from Louisiana and he spoke for 28 hours, spread over six successive days. He could take a breather by challenging a quorum, drafting a subordinate talker, calling for a natural recess and so on. 

A filibusterer is under no compulsion to address himself to the subject matter. Over the winter of 1922/3, for instance, President Harding wanted a federal subsidy for shipbuilding. Four powerful senators were adamant against it. They got up and spoke in rotation. One of them gave an interminable speech about the League of Nations; the second appeared to have only one aim in life which was to establish an official home, a sort of second White House, for the vice president. The third spoke at vast length on the burning issue of recognising the Soviet Union. And the fourth, a Southerner with long experience of filibusters, made a passionate speech in defence of three employees of the government's Bureau of Engraving and Printing who'd been fired. 

I wish I'd been present, but I wasn't. In 1935 when the late Senator Huey Long got up to fight any extension of the Roosevelt administration's main recipe for curing the Depression, the National Recovery Act, he killed it by talking for 15 hours and 35 minutes continuously. And a very moving passage in that continuous burst of eloquence was the recital of his mother's recipe for frying oysters. 

To give you a final example of how effective the filibuster can be when, in 1917, President Wilson, before America was in the war, asked Congress to approve the arming of American merchant ships. The bill was overwhelmingly approved by the House, 403–14, but when it went to the Senate there were seven of the then 96 members against it. But these men took turn and they talked and talked and talked until that term of Congress expired. And the president's bill expired with it. 

Well, this past week, we've had a filibuster – historic, in more ways than one – which might well lead to a revision of the Senate rules. In fact a couple of senators have already moved to set up a committee to do that, but not to abolish the filibuster, rather to see that the vice president, who's the presiding officer over the Senate, and the administration’s Senate leader cannot again conspire to defeat a filibuster by twisting the rules about unlimited debate. 

Let me anticipate your correct inference that filibusters are always, nearly always, staged obviously by the Opposition party. But take the present case. The Senate had before it a bill to take the controls off the price of natural gas. Most senators, of whichever party, from gas-producing states said that this would give an incentive to more production and America needs all it can get. President Carter had been against the bill since the beginning. He says that abolishing price controls would not produce all that much more gas and would send the price to the consumers sky-high. So, two of Mr Carter's party, two liberal Democrats, went to work to block or kill the bill in the old way. They staged a filibuster believing they were fighting as loyal soldiers on the president’s front line and it seemed for a time they might succeed, but then an odd, an unprecedented, thing happened. 

Their filibuster was broken not by the Republicans, not by a majority of the opposition, but by the president's leader in the Senate, Senator Byrd, the man whose main job is to push the president's will over all opposition. So these two filibustering senators came to look on that leader as a traitor. And, of course, they bitterly assumed that Senator Byrd was taking his orders from the White House. They were aghast at what appeared to be treachery on the part of the president, himself. 

Now the technical way it was done was for Senator Byrd to be recognised by the Senate's presiding officer, Vice President Mondale, and to hold the floor and then to have the vice president invoke various overriding rules that the Senate had either forgotten about or that many veterans thought to be illegal. Anyway, it was a railroading tactic and pretty brutal and, at the end of it, people were saying, 'What happened to President Carter's brave stand on behalf of the consumer?' For, in the end, when the filibuster was broken, with the cooperation of Senator Byrd, the Senate voted 50–46 to put an end to price controls on natural gas. 

What seems to have happened is this. At some point during the stubborn eloquence of the two liberal filibusterers, the president was privately told that the filibuster would not succeed. The two liberals say, understandably, that the president should have got the word to them – two words, one of congratulation on their brave battle, another, a warning word that if they succeeded there would be no energy bill at all, for this natural gas controversy is only one big item in the president's bill to force the conservation of energy. 

But they didn't hear a word from the president. They went on fighting assuming the president was urging them on from base headquarters. Well, it was Senator Byrd who warned the president that, if the filibuster succeeded, the Senate would take its revenge by voting down other provisions of the energy bill and the president then gave the nod for Senator Byrd and the vice president, between them, to override the rules and bully their own men into submission. 

As you can imagine, the Republicans were saying in public that the administration has outraged the dignity of the Senate by bending its rules. The Republicans are tickled pink in private because they have seen a bad break set in between the leaders of the Democrats and the body of the party. And the whole operation seems to have been very ineptly handled, a gross failure not only of communication, but of generalship between the White House and the Senate. All the bitter feelings are being expressed against by the Democrats against their own leaders. 

This is only one of the devious – unwittingly devious no doubt – ways in which President Carter seems to be losing the backing of many of his own party. For instance, he no sooner put out the joint American-Soviet statement on the terms for a Middle Eastern settlement, or conference, than a congressman who is going to be the next mayor of New York wrote a letter to the president declaring the terms to be, quote, 'outrageous and a betrayal of the American commitment to Israel'. And when the president came to New York to talk to the United Nations, he snubbed Mr Koch. 

It's much too early to take solemnly the passing thought of an old Republican, 'I think I see before me a one-term president.' But if this goes on, Mr Carter is going to hear an avalanche a year from now – it will be the sound of Republicans moving into Congress in large numbers in the elections of 1978.

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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