THE CONGRESS: The Majority Rules

As it must by law,* the House first picked up the challenge flung by Harry Truman. Its first item of business was the President’s veto of the tax-cut bill (TIME, June 23), which House Republicans were determined to override. They got a shock. Democratic Leader Sam Rayburn had done a fast job of rounding up diffident Democrats. He had also corralled two rebel Republicans—Wisconsin’s stolid ex-Progressive, Merlin Hull, and Minnesota’s sharp-faced Carl Anderson. When the vote was counted, and breathlessly recounted, Hull and Anderson represented the margin of Administration victory. If they had stayed with their party, the Republicans would have squeaked through with the two-thirds vote necessary to override.

Cheers & Boos. For two days Congress waited for the President’s decision on the labor bill. The day the message came, House & Senate galleries were packed, mostly with union sympathizers. In the House they cheered the veto message when it was read. Some Congressmen looked up and yelled “Boo” at the galleries. The vote in the House was quick and overwhelming: 331 to override (225 Republicans and 106 Democrats); 83 to sustain (11 Republicans, 71 Democrats and New York City’s man of the Labor Party, Vito Marcantonio).

It was up to the Senate after that and the Senate unrolled an extraordinary show. First, Republican Whip Kenneth Wherry tried to get an agreement on a time to vote. But Oregon’s dapper New Dealing Republican Wayne Morse, who had opposed the Taft-Hartley bill from the beginning, objected to any closing of debate. Republican Morse joined with Democrats Claude Pepper, Harley Kilgore, Glen Taylor to filibuster.

Their intention was not to prevent a vote; it was just to postpone it. They were out to wage a delaying action in the hope that President Truman’s radio appeal to the U.S. public (see above) would stir up another torrent of telegrams to the Senate and possibly win a few uncertain members to their side. Alben Barkley, Democratic leader, tried to dissuade them. “Sometimes pressures do more harm than good,” he said. But the little band of desperate men would not listen.

Communists & Cough Drops. At 3:10 p.m. Florida’s glib, long-nosed Claude Pepper began to speak. Between interruptions, he droned on until 6:50 p.m. Idaho’s Glen Taylor, the Singing Cowboy, took the stage. He went into a routine of detailed statistical exposition, interspersed with sallies at Senators, the price of autos and the difficulties of living in a truck. He told a yarn about a Communist he worked with in a war plant in 1944. It took about 500 words and several minutes for Taylor to reach the point: ”The Communist would go around talking to everybody, saying that he was for Bricker for President. He said to me, ‘Do you know why I have been arguing for Bricker? Because if we can elect Bricker we will have a revolution in short order.’ ” Ohio’s solemn Senator Bricker joined in the laugh.

Cowboy Glen munched a cough drop, took a sip of water and rambled on about how he once ate jack rabbits, and about the iniquities of Wall Street.

Snores & Shirttails. By then, it was far into the night. Wrathful Ken Wherry had organized a counterstrategy. It was simply to let the talkers talk themselves into exhaustion, keep the Senate in continuous session until they did. Senators began to drift out of the chamber, careful always to leave a dozen or so behind to watch for any break. In the cloakrooms Senators shucked collars and curled up on cots. In the corridors some bottles were passed around. But most of the Senators slept. The loudest snorer by common agreement: Rhode Island’s tiny, old (79) Theodore Green.

At 3:15 a.m.—eight Jiours and 25 minutes after he started—Glen Taylor ended his act. In a flurry of flying shirttails, Senators rushed to the chamber for a quorum call. But still the filibuster did not break. West Virginia’s sullen Harley

Kilgore went into the breach, carried on for one hour and 52 minutes.

Principles & Differences. At 6:30 a.m., Wayne Morse took up the talkathon before a gallery that had been full most of the night, was still one-third filled. Senators got shaved in the barber shop and mustered back on the floor. Morse got a rough going-over from Republicans who have been irritated by his cocksure manner of lecturing them. They needled him about the fact that he has frequently been a foe of filibusters; he and Glen Taylor were co-authors of a measure to curb such tactics. Morse sipped orange juice and harangued his tormentors, one of whom threw at him a quotation from a Morse speech in 1946 denouncing the FEPC filibuster. “I wish,” Morse had said then, “the Senate would get back to the principle of majority rule.” Morse retorted, somewhat lamely, that there were “differences” in filibusters.

The Republican leadership decided ruthlessly to let Morse sicken himself with his own medicine. They would not press for an agreed voting time. Morse kept talking until 4:29 p.m., when Ken Wherry let him off, got an agreement to adjourn over Sunday and vote this week.

Morse slumped into a chair. He had been on his feet, talking most of the time, for nine hours and 59 minutes.* Then he hurried from the chamber, ran into a delaying action by newsmen and photographers, finally escaped and hurried off to the men’s room.

At the voting session this week the Senate met before packed galleries, while a big crowd stood outside the Capitol to hear the result. House members jammed the Senate floor. Loyal Alben Barkley put in a last word for President Truman. The President, he said, was “no cheap politician”; he sincerely believed in the rightness of his veto, wanted it sustained. Georgia’s Democratic Walter George sounded a final note. The veto, he said, was a test of “whether highly organized minority groups will dictate legislation, or whether the Congress of the United States will write it.”

In tense silence the chamber awaited the result. It was a surprising 68 to 25 to override the veto, six more than the two-thirds majority required. Twenty Democrats—among them Harry Truman’s friend, New Mexico’s Carl Hatch—joined with 48 Republicans to kill the veto. Only three Republicans, Oregon’s Wayne Morse, Nevada’s George Malone and North Dakota’s William Langer, were on the losing side. The nation had a new labor law, by majority rule.

*If the President vetoes a bill, according to the Constitution of the U.S., “He shall’ return it with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall . . . proceed to reconsider it.” All tax bills originate in the House: the Taft-Hartley bill was passed by the House before it came before the Senate.

*The Senate’s record filibustering speech was 18 hours and 23 minutes, by the late Senator ‘Robert M. La Follette Sr., in 1908. Next longest: the late Huey P. Long’s 15 hours and 30 minutes, in 1935.