When the Senate convenes on January 3, the filibuster can be abolished or controlled as the majority desires, and the fate of civil rights legislation in the Eighty-Fifth Congress will probably hang in the balance.

A group of Senators will assert that the Senate's rules expired at adjournment last summer, and that the body is now governed by ordinary parliamentary procedure. They will seek to enact a new set of rules with more effective limitations on debate than the present requirement of 64 Senate votes to halt filibusters. If these Northern Senators can secure a majority to support their argument against the continuity of Senate rules, they can pass whatever new rules they wish without fear of filibuster on their own move.

There are now nine Senators in the group--Case, Clark, Douglas, Humphrey, Ives, McNamara, Morse, Murray, and Neuberger. They need forty more, and a decisive number of these must be Republicans, for none will be found in the South and few if any in the border states.

Southern opposition to the change will maintain that the Senate is a continuing body, and that its old rules still apply. (There is no limitation on debate whatsoever on a motion to change Rule XXII, the rule which now provides for closure.) And certain intrinsic aspects of their argument, especially the fact that two-thirds of the Senate's membership holds over, lends logical support to this view, although it has never been directly tested. Yet in the case of these Southerners, at least, a basic opposition to civil rights legislation is he underlying rationale.

No explanation so simple is available for the Northern Senators who will oppose the change. Some will sincerely maintain, with the late Senator Taft, that the Senate gains "prestige and power" through continuing status. Others may simply feel that the Democrats are easier to beat if a filibustering Senator can be shown to Negro voters.

The Democratic Party is admittedly weak on this issue, and constructive action must be undertaken by the Republicans if anything is to be achieved. But the G.O.P. in the past has shown a regrettable predilection for quibbles over semantics, both in 1953 when it overwhelmed an attempt like the forthcoming one, and four years before, when it used the Wherry amendment, the current rule, to break Scott Lucas' effort to change the filibuster rule.

Some Northern Democrats can be counted on to back the party's platform pledge to seek a better rule, but they need G.O.P. help. The Administration can provide that help if it wishes, and forever end the curious right of an irresponsible minority to talk to death the majority's concern for the Constitutional rights of all citizens.

The Republican Party should fulfill its debts both to the huge number of Negro voters who supported it this year and to its heritage of Lincoln. Vice President Nixon, as the Senate's presiding officer, and Minority Leader Knowland are able to provide the leadership if the President will not. They can carry enough votes to swamp Majority Leader Johnson if they wish, and, with liberal Democratic support, end the filibuster.