Monsters of the Senate
I have been reading Robert Caro’s essential biography of Lyndon Johnson in four volumes (Volume Five may yet be published, according to Caro). I am currently in Book Three, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Master of the Senate. In it, Caro describes the history of the United States Senate, from its 26-member origin until 1957, when Lyndon Johnson was able to push through the first Civil Rights legislation since 1871. It is particularly relevant to today’s conflicts to review Robert Caro’s narrative, to understand the nature and intransigence of the machinations we are facing.
The Senate, Caro tells us, was created because
The Framers of the Constitution feared the people’s power because they were, many of them, members of what in America constituted an aristocracy, an aristocracy of the educated, the well-born, and the well-to-do. More specifically, they feared the people’s power because, possessing, and esteeming, property, they wanted the rights of property protected against those who did not possess it. .. James Madison wrote of the “real or supposed difference of interests” between “the rich and the poor” ...and of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would outnumber the former. ..”Symptoms of a leveling spirit, as we have have understood, have sufficiently appeared in certain quarters to give notice of the future danger….” The abuses of liberty, Madison wrote, were more likely because the emotions of men in the mass ran high and fast, they were “liable to err...from fickleness and passion,” and “the major interest might under sudden impulses be tempted to commit injustice on the minority.”So the Framers wanted to check and restrain, the people, they wanted to erect what Madison called “a necessary fence” against the majority will. To create such a fence, they decided that the Congress would have not one house but two...
The purpose of the upper house, the Senate, would be, said Madison, “...to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led. . The use of the Senate is to consist in its proceeding with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom, than the popular branch..to be “an anchor against popular fluctuations.”
The Framers agreed to appoint only two senators to each state. So the first Senate consisted of just twenty-six men. Another barricade against the people was the way the Senators would be selected. When Framer James Wilson of Pennsylvania suggested that the senators be elected by the people, not one member of the Constitutional Convention supported him.
“The people should have as little to do as may be about the government,” Rpoger Sherman declared. “They lack information and are constantly liable to be misled.”
Elbridge Gerry, he for whom the Gerrymander is named, said that “The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy.”
The Framers agreed that Senators would be elected by the legislators of their respective states.
This was the United States Senate until 1866, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Freedmen’s Bureau became law, over the presidential veto of the infamous Andrew Johnson. The next Civil Rights law was passed in 1871. The Enforcement Act of 1871 empowered the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy organizations. The act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and signed into law by United States President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871. The act was the last of three Enforcement Acts passed by the United States Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction Era to combat attacks upon the suffrage rights of African Americans.
The next Civil Rights Act was passed in 1875, and it excluded any provisions to desegregate public schools. But the United States Supreme Court ruled the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. In a consolidated case, known as the Civil Rights Cases, the court found that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted Congress the right to regulate the behavior of states, but not individuals. The decision foreshadowed the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision in which the Court found that separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional. There would not be another Civil Rights Act until 1957. That’s 86 years.
After the Civil War, the Senate entered a period of Southern committee chairmen whose influence on national policy was blatantly authoritarian and contemptuous of the public’s views. By Franklin Roosevelt’s time, of the House’s 10 most important committees, Southerners chaired nine. In 1957, journalist William S. White wrote “The Senate might be described without too much violence to fact as the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.”
From 1957 through 1977, we could characterize the Senate as The North Finally Won. But that would be wrong. It looked that way for a while – Senate committee chairmanships changed hands and the national conversations included Civil Rights, the War in Viet Nam, the Great Society, the Women’s Movement, the Environmental Movement. But the Christian Coalition became a force. From 1980 until 2008, the Democrats did manage to win two presidential elections, but only because they put forward an all-Southern ticket that talked more about “family values” than most Democrats wanted, even if they did understand the political reality. We held our noses and voted over and over and over again.
And here we are today, living through the same damned wars. The Christian Nationalists and a sociopath have dominated the Republican Party, and one of the worst Senate leaders in American history, Mitch McConnell, is stepping down because he understands power – and he endorsed Donald Trump.
From 1787 to 2024, we have not resolved the war between the aristocrats and the people.