On the substantive question--which, as I have implied, is probably more important--Bolling contends that his reforms will help liberals and hurt conservatives. This follows from certain assumptions, such as that conservatives, having more seniority, are at an advantage in the present system; that procedural obstructions help conservatives because liberals are more inclined to want to pass bills; that the leadership will tend to be more liberal than an unlead resolution of the various issues. Many of these are justifiable, but there are some reservations that could be made.

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For example, in the last Congress, liberals used traditional conservative tricks--which did not work particularly well for the conservatives in that Congress--against the conservatives. Two examples of this are such traditional liberal objects of attack-- Committee obstruction and the filibuster.

Virtually every liberal bill was able to at least get to the floor for a hearing. Even the medicare bill, which Wilbur Mills and a majority of the Ways and Means Committee had bottled up, was finally added as a Senate amendment to the House-passed Social Security amendments, thus by-passing the Ways and Means Committee, though it failed to be passed after that. At the same time, however, the Becker (school prayer) amendment, which would unquestionably have passed if it had gotten to the floor, was bottled up in the Judiciary Committee by New York liberal Emmanuel Cellar. After the initial uproar and intense agitation for the amendment had died down, Cellar held hearings on the bill and got the establishment-constitutionalist and more responsible church leaders--who had been slow to begin exerting pressure against the school prayer amendments--to convince enough Committee members so that the majority switched from supporting the amendment to opposing it. From then on, the bill was dead. Traditionally conservative delaying methods had enabled liberals to prevent passage of a bill reflecting momentarily popular conservative passions.

A second example is the filibuster. In the same Congress in which conservative use of this device against its traditional target, civil rights, was dealt a death blow by the urgency and overwhelming popularity of the issue, liberals found the procedure of invaluable use. A highly conservative measure directed against Supreme Court involvement in the reaportionment issue, the Dirksen-Mansfield amendment--note the participation of bipartisan leadership in this conservative measure--had been added as a rider to the foreign aid bill and seemed sure of passage. Since the House had already passed the much more extreme Tuck amendment virtually anything passed by the Senate would have become law. Yet, the amendment was defeated, miraculously, by successful liberal use of that old shibboleth, the filibuster.

Of course, there has been no complete shift. The threat of filibuster hanging over the voting rights bill has forced the administration to rely on Dirksen and such conservative influences of his as defeat of the poll tax amendment. And conservatives will still be able to use the devices they have used in the past, although, hopefully, greater liberal majorities and a more efficient liberal machine--partially DSG organized--will at least equalize the previously disproportionate amount of parliamentarian talent which conservatives had.

The point is, that all these qualifications raise important issues with which Bolling never deals. He provides a serious analysis of neither the abstract advantages of his procedural reforms, nor the relevant factors relating to his substantive claim that stronger leadership in the House will aid liberalism.

A similar lack of clarity of analysis characterized Senator Joseph Clark's Congress: The Sapless Branch which pre-dated this by a year. Clark's history is no better than Bolling's; and he is even more prone to accept, unexamined, theories for a stronger two-party system, such as those of his close friend, James McGregor Burns.