No More Learning

No distribution of wealth to public-spirited connivers is taking place by this route. What is available, in various ways, is only a small percentage of the untaxed industrial revenues in the form of "campaign" contributions, gifts, fees and retainers. These are tips to menials.
It is not being suggested here that members of the Establishment and their veiled supporters are in all cases primarily trying to gain affluence for its own sake. Rather is it a fact that they must have affluence in order to function on their chosen level. The organization men split their "take" with other organization men in the home party organization. Many, it can be plainly shown, are eager estate builders--Johnsons, Dodds, Dirksens, Kerrs et al. Some, probably most, are a combination of the two. The prospect of money is definitely in the picture except in a very few cases.
Money is needed to get into electoral politics. Money is needed to remain there. And money is needed to carry one over the bleak days if one is voted out.
In saying this, one is not saying something that would have astounded the Founding Fathers. Under the Constitution as it originally stood, there were property qualifications for voting even for members of the House of Representatives and the state legislatures. Only as the various states gave the franchise to the nonpropertied in the early nineteenth century was this qualification removed, thus opening the way to office for poor men. This was a dangerous development because the poor newcomers to politics, seldom themselves partisans of the poor, needed money going far beyond the paltry pay of office, originally designed purely as honoraria for men of property and still on this level
in many jurisdictions. The unpropertied man in politics was in time, according to an unwritten convention, expected to use ingenuity in providing for himself. Imaginative and defensible schemes were devised by some, but the sheer logical possibilities of making adequate monetary provision outside of meager salary without going beyond the law or the proprieties are few and largely boil down to writing, lecturing, making after- dinner speeches or practicing ordinary law--all of which take some talent. Promotions in which the name of the officeholder was used to confer prestige were legitimate--when the promotions themselves were legitimate. But for most of the new off-the-soil officeholders, always with noteworthy exceptions. it all boiled down to acquiring money in some questionable way. They were necessarily purchasable men. In the practice of law the purchase price took the form of heavy retainers from big interests.
In order to attain congressional or any political office one must, as many experts have attested: (1) be independently wealthy either as an inheritor or a builder of better booby traps; (2) have the backing of a wealthy individual, group or organization; or (3) have the backing of a local party organization which in turn has access to suspect supporting funds. Sometimes a "bad" organization supports a man of impeccable probity as a way of disarming critics. The supporting funds, it is true, could come from thousands of "little people" chipping in quarters or dollars; but the "little people" are either not sufficiently interested, do not understand or cannot afford to contribute--or a combination of the three. They have money for booze, soft drinks, tobacco, cosmetics, gadgets, high installment interest rates and the whole range of stuff at Woolworth's but not a cent as expense money for their tribunes. They may well suspect, too, that the candidates have already been spoken for by higher bidders.
What I say here is by no means original with me, arising from some internal distemper. It is the consensus of sophisticated observers. "Many people are asking the question," says Drew Pearson in his nationally syndicated column, "'Do Congressmen steal? ' Our answer is that they do not unlawfully take money from the government but they do take money lawfully for representing 'anti-government' interests. In this sense they do steal the right of the voters to have a man in Congress who represents them, instead of representing his law firm and its big business clients. " 17 There are, however, many ways of legally putting money into a congressman's hands apart from attorneys' "fees" and "campaign" contributions. Attention will be given this lush aspect of standard garden-variety "democratic" politics further along.
The Establishment Method
How does the Republican-Democratic Establishment extend its will over the rest of the Congress? It does this, first, by its power to block anything, which forces others to trade with it. But its general control derives from its minute control over committee appointments. As the work of Congress is quietly done by committees, not through rational debate on the floor, such control is fundamental.
Any newcomer to Congress, whatever he has rashly promised his constituents, has as much to say over surrounding affairs as if he stepped into the rush-hour crowd at Grand Central Terminal or into the midst of a Bombay riot. If he managed to get the floor to make the most rousing speech ever delivered, there would be nobody present to hear it except the bored clerks and some flabbergasted tourists in the galleries. As soon as he rose to deliver himself of his deathless remarks, all the members would walk out as they customarily walk out on each other.
What he must do, Senator Clark informs us, is to keep quiet and watch what goes on. And the way to "get along," he further tells us, is to "go along"--with the older hands. If he continually "goes along" with those who are solidly ensconced, he will soon find that he is a member of some friendly bloc. It might seem that the smart thing to do would be
to join the Establishment at once but this cannot always be managed because Establishment ideas are under some dispute in the more crowded and variegated parts of the country. The next smartest thing to do is to be against the Establishment on the record but to support it on showdowns, as many do in voting that a majority of a new Senate may not vote to close off debate in order to pass on a change in the rules. He can, also, be a "maverick" like the fortyfour senators of 1963, although not many of these are very far-ranging.
If the new member continually "goes along," particularly with the Establishment, he finds that he is able to get various things done of interest to himself and to his standing in the eyes of his constituents. He may even be allowed to get his name on bills--the "Sascha Schmaltz Bill to Exterminate Poverty in Our Time" or something similarly astonishing. Also, his bank account, if he so desires, will steadily improve. His banker and broker will know he is now running with a well-heeled crowd.
Committee appointments, especially the powerful chairmanships over (not of) the most powerful committees, are commonly supposed to go to the members with the most seniority. Senator Clark shows conclusively, citing chapter and verse, that the Establishment freely deviates from the seniority rule whenever it wishes to push some member for reasons obscure to the observer.
Committee appointments are made by two party groups--the Democratic Steering Committee and the Republican Committee on Committees. The Establishment holds a majority of both, and, through its ability to entice new members, holds its power as an hereditary fief.
The Democratic Steering Committee varies in composition from time to time. By custom its members serve until they die, resign or are defeated at the polls, the last not likely in the one-party states and districts from which they emanate. As of 1959 it had fifteen members, seven southerners plus Lyndon B. Johnson, majority leader, and Carl Hayden, president pro tempore of the Senate, thus giving the Establishment a majority of nine. Johnson all along has been a 200-proof, sour-mash Establishment man.
Because the composition of Congress changed with the election of 1960, bringing in more Democrats, Senator Clark wanted the Steering Committee changed. He did get himself and three others put on, but the Establishment still controlled with nine votes. In 1963 at a Democratic Conference, composed of all the Democrats in the Senate, he proposed that the Steering Committee be increased to nineteen members.
Such an increase would have brought about geographical and ideological balance, in Clark's view, and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield promised to support him. "To my chagrin and surprise, Mansfield opposed my motion and [Hubert] Humphrey failed to support it. They told me later Bobby Baker had told them the votes were not there to approve the increase. Perhaps this was right. . . . Had the Majority Leader and Whip supported Senator Anderson and me, I believe we would have won. " 18 The point, though, is that they did not. On the secret ballot the Establishment vote was highest.
Within the Democratic Conference itself on a secret ballot the forces of reform represented by Clark were outnumbered nearly 2 to 1. The Republicans, the nonurban element of them Establishment people from the cradle up, have no need of such stacking in their Committee on Committees, which Senator Clark finds to be regionally and ideologically representative. With the Democratic Party in the majority, the Republicans get few committee appointments anyhow. Yet their members plus the southern Democrats constitute the Establishment power.
As the Republican Party has been deflated to a minority since 1932, it is clearly the congressional wing of the Democratic Party that is now the chief block to legislative
forthrightness. Yet the Democratic Party is the one that is popularly regarded as liberal, even radical. When the Republicans have a president he usually sees pretty much eye to eye with the Establishment; but since the accession of Democratic Lyndon B. Johnson as president, the Establishment is now in closest harmony with the White House. On the basis of Senator Clark's analysis, it would appear that the Establishment controls all the positions except the Supreme Court.
Through its power of appointment the Establishment in both houses "stacks" the committees of Congress with its supporters. "In the Eighty-sixth Congress [House] members from seven [backward] states controlled 97 of the 153 committee votes. " 19 As Senator Clark shows, the Establishment dominates all vital committees and keeps off non-Establishment men with seniority.
In the crucial committees of both houses there is a frequent installation of the same pro-Establishment men, although in the Senate no person may be a chairman of more than one committee. A small percentage of pro-Establishment men hold majority votes, with few exceptions.
The effect throughout, from the party committees to the standing legislative committees, with only minor exceptions, is as though a permanent bureaucracy were installed, Senator Clark notes. In Russia the same sort of phenomenon, differently arrived at, is known as the Politburo. What Senator Clark calls the Establishment is indeed very much like the Politburo in its permanence and indestructibility, although not perhaps in its specific objectives. The methods of holding and wielding power are similar. But one does business in rubles, the other in dollars.
Owing to the large number of intra-party and legislative committees the Establishment people sit on, they are heavily worked. Russell, leader in recent years of the Establishment as the most senior member, always managed the opening-session struggle against changing Rule XXII, master-minded meetings of the Democratic Steering Committee, was active in the Policy Committee, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was a member of the Appropriations Committee and chairman of its subcommittee on defense, member of the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee, the joint Committee on Atomic Energy and a member of the commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination and of the Boards of Visitors to the Military, Naval and Air Force Academies. And similarly with other Establishment people. 20
Senator Clark makes much of the distinction between liberals and conservatives in the Senate, but just how little it signifies was shown in 1966 on the vote to allow the Foreign Relations Committee and Appropriations Committee to share supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency with Senator Russell's Armed Services Committee. Russell was opposed to the change; Senator Fulbright, chairman of Foreign Relations, favored it.
Russell won on the show-down, 61 to 28. While no Establishment people sided with Fulbright, plenty of liberals sided with Russell, namely: Anderson of New Mexico, Douglas of Illinois, Magnuson of Washington, Neuberger of Oregon, Pastore of Rhode Island, Ribicoff of Connecticut (all Democrats) and Kuchel of California. (It is this sort of thing that earns liberals the label of "fuzzy-mindedness. ") Clark and Scott of Pennsylvania were not present-not that it would have made the slightest difference . 21
The CIA is ideologically a straight Establishment agency, designed as an identical opposite number to the Soviet para-military intelligence network. Whatever its model, the Soviet apparatus, does the CIA can and does do as well--or better.
The committees of the Senate are rated in order of prime importance about as follows: Finance (taxes), Armed Services (military supplies), Foreign Relations (world markets),
Appropriations (domestic allocation of money), Rules and Administration, Banking and Currency (monetary policy and credit), and judiciary and Government Operations. Committees such as Agriculture and Forestry, Commerce, District of Columbia, Interior and Insular Affairs, Labor and Public Welfare, Post Office, and Civil Service and Public Service are far less important (possibly excepting Agriculture) because they exert less leverage.
It is the power to block plus leverage in vital situations, often involving stupendous amounts of money, that makes certain committees paramount. Chairmen of committees are powerful because they are permanently installed as the senior member, are alone empowered except in the case of a very few committees to call committee meetings, and alone set agendas, call up bills for consideration, regulate bearings and terminate committee debates. Within the jurisdiction of each committee the chairman is almost a dictator. He can kill any bill in his jurisdiction by simply pigeon-holing it. Although it is possible to call meetings at the demand of a majority of committee members, practically this is rarely done because most committee members are more handpicked than the chairman, with whom they have many convenient understandings. They may even have been picked by the chairman himself. Until a bill is reported out by a committee it cannot come before the Senate unless two-thirds of the senators want it out. A bill could be ordered out on a majority vote, of course, but only if the Establishment approved.
In the House the chief committees are Rules, Ways and Means (taxes), Armed Services, Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Banking and Currency, Appropriations and Judiciary. Before going to the floor, unless a hard-to-get majority votes to bring it out, a bill must first be reported out by the Rules Committee. Most proposed bills, many of them having wide public approval, are never reported out. Filed with the Rules Committee, they might just as well have been dumped in a wastebasket. A majority of the House may order a bill discharged from committee, but ordinarily such a majority is hard to get.
Even though the House does not allow unlimited debate it has a more complex set of rules than the Senate. These rules are used to strangle or whittle down proposals unwanted by the House Establishment.
"Committee and subcommittee chairmen have more naked power in the House than in the Senate," Senator Clark notes. "There is no tax legislation if Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, doesn't want any, nor a wilderness bill against Aspinall's wishes. " 22
The various committee chairmen are kingpins in the House and form the nucleus of its Establishment. "While power seems more fragmented in the House than in the Senate," Senator Clark remarks, "it is probably because the former body is so much larger. Thus it is easier for chairmen to become more powerful. For the same reason there is less cohesion. There appears to be less sense of a 'band of brothers. ' While the South is to some extent in the saddle, it seems less obviously so. " 23 Still, the men from the nonmetropolitan sector rule.
Yet the Establishment coalition "operates on many an occasion even more effectively in the House than in the Senate" and has killed or whittled down a long line of useful bills--federal aid to education in 1960, area development in 1963, the Mass Transit Bill and Youth Opportunities Act, health care for the aged in earlier versions, improvement of foreign aid. "It cannot stop civil rights legislation because of the urban and suburban Republicans. But it can usually stop if it really wants to what the Establishment likes to call 'spending programs. '" 24
It did not, however, stop or whittle down Administration requests in 1965 and 1966 for additional appropriations for the undeclared presidential war in Vietnam. Although
costing some $20 billion or more annually, the Vietnam operation is not construed as a "spending program. " It is, more properly put, a patriotic program. Opposed to expenditures for domestic improvement programs, the Establishment in both houses is religiously devoted to all military spending, sometimes votes more than is asked for by the president.
Committee control and the two-thirds rule are only part of the Establishment method. The American constitutional system at best, as all scholars know, yields a cumbersome government that operates much like a Rube Goldberg threshing machine. With everybody giving his best the machine will work according to the intention of the designers, not efficiently but surely. But when the delays inherent in the checks-and- balance system are added to, as by Rule XXII and other contrivances not found in any parliamentary manual, the machine simply stops.
Rule XXII and the dominance of committee chairmen in the House by no means constitute the only devices of delay.
As Senator Clark notes, certain procedures have been adopted that use up more than half the time of Congress with a view to keeping new business from coming up even if it could be dislodged from the dilatory committees. There is, first, a requirement that the Journal of each Senate session must be read the following day unless unanimous consent to skip it is obtained. Says Clark: "It is utilized only for purposes of delay . . . . " 25 Next, the morning period reserved for minor business, using up a valuable legislative hour or more, "makes for delay. " 26 Senators speak at exhaustive length; Clark believes speeches should be limited to two hours. Often the subjects talked about haven't the remotest connection with anything taking place; they may be a description of the scenery of the solon's native state, memories of boyhood, a disquisition on the culinary arts, the national flower or the care of dogs--all with a view to using up time.
Again, "A motion to take up a bill on the calendar made by the Majority Leaders should be determined by vote without debate. At present such a motion is subject to unlimited debate, thus giving the opponents of the bill two chances to filibuster instead of only one. . . . " 27
Establishment senators, with a keen instinct for wasting time, introduce all manner of irrelevancy in their speeches, violating the rule of Jefferson's Manual that "No one is allowed to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously. " Says Clark: "No other legislative body in the world, so far as I have been able to discover, operates without a rule of germaneness. " 28
Clark's staff in a survey of the Congressional Record for 1961 found that nongermane speeches, excluding written insertions made only for the record, took up one-third of that gangrenously swollen publication.
While the Senate is in session, committees may not sit. Thus committee work can be delayed. When quorum calls go out, senators check in on the Senate floor, then fade out, leaving nobody to vote on measures. Thus arises the amusing distinction between a "live" quorum and a pro forma or on-the-record quorum.
The Appropriations Committee, however, sits continuously. It obtains unanimous consent at the beginning of each session to sit at any time whether or not the Senate is in session. It would be just too bad if appropriation bills were not ready for railroading on time.
Still another way of slowing down the legislative process is by requiring separate House and Senate hearings on the same bills, thus making witnesses appear twice at different times. As Clark points out, such time-consuming duplication could be eliminated by joint hearings.
Again, when there are joint House and Senate conferences with a view to harmonizing different bills, Establishment leadership sees to it in both houses, very often, that the representatives of the stronger bill are men who voted against it and are unsympathetic to it. These men tend to favor the weaker bill and to compromise accordingly.
It is sometimes an election ploy by a rival for his seat to charge a House congressman especially with a long series of absences from roll calls and votes, implying that he has not been attending to business. But if he is not a member of the Establishment and does not have many committee appointments, there is really no need for him to be present most of the time. He knows the votes on most matters coming up are cut and dried in advance. There is no issue on which his presence can make a difference. The sensible thing to do is to be absent until such time as he can function meaningfully.
It would look better on the record, it is true, if he hung around and answered the roll calls. But such roll-call response can be misleading with respect to the significant activity of a congressman. Some merely sit and read and entertain visitors in their offices between roll calls and votes.
I have given here only a taste of Senator Clark's revealing work. The student of American government, steadily fed on formalistic pap, can do no better than turn to it, read it, memorize it, put it into blank verse and set it to stately music.
Why doesn't somebody, it may be asked, point out in detail to the senators themselves precisely what is taking place? As men of goodwill, the naive will suppose, they will quickly respond and mend their ways. Senator Clark, however, has already performed this bootless task, without avail. 29
Clark's books offer many concentrated grotesque details--tabulations on the stacked committees, on the ages of the principals, etc. Congress in truth is ruled by a collection of old men, like a primitive tribe. The average age of chairmen of leading Senate committees in 1963 was 67. 5 years, with one chairman aged 86 and the youngest 51. 30 In the same year the average age of chairmen of the important House committees was 68. 7 years, with the oldest 84 and the youngest 54. 31 A reason advanced by agile Establishment spokesmen against the invariable application of the seniority rule is that it would, unless relaxed from time to time, leave senile dodderers in charge. Yet such are in fact left in charge despite variations in application of the rule to others.
In general, these committee chairmen are unimaginative, insensitive, uncultivated, set in their ways and nurture a vision of social reality long since vanished--always with the inevitable exceptions such as J. William Fulbright of the Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton P. Anderson of the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee and perhaps a few others.
The preponderance of the lawless South on key committees is clearly evident. There were twenty-three Democratic senators in 1963 from Dixie--eleven Confederate states plus Arkansas and Oklahoma (23 per cent of the Senate). Yet they held 50 per cent of the seats on the Appropriations Committee, 42 per cent on Armed Services, 55 per cent on Finance, 42 per cent on Foreign Relations, 47 per cent on the Democratic Steering Committee and 33 per cent on the Democratic Policy Committee--this last their true proportion among sixty-seven Democrats. 32 Among Democrats on the committees their disproportion is far greater than given above.
Something not realized by Senator Clark and his on-the-record anti-Establishment cohorts (generally styled liberals and reformers in both parties) is that they themselves lend plausibility to the Establishment game, which is to seem part of a representative body. Without Clark and his stalwarts, playing according to the democratic book, Congress would be visible to all as a heavy-handed affair, like a Russian Constituent
Assembly, redolent of the hangman.
As it is, the anti-Establishment opposition makes it look at times like a representative legislative body, full of enticing nuances and shadings. The opposition gives the Establishment a brisk dialectical workout from time to time, keeps it on its toes. Whenever it wishes to, the Establishment can submit its power to a test vote, play for real and knock the opposition through the floor with solid "democratic" votes.
Agreeing with Senator Clark's analysis, up to a point, I must dissent from the final chapter of his magnum opus. There, no doubt remorseful for the way he has thrown a scare into the stray American reader by showing how he is ruled by nothing very different from a grim Politburo, he gives way to optimism and looks forward to changes. Simply the many required conditions for changes that he mentions show that it is an all but impossible dream.
Actually, if only thirty-five senators were as demonically opposed to Rule XXII as the Establishment is in favor of it they could destroy it in a matter of weeks, perhaps days. All that a determined opposition need do is to start filibustering on the first item of Establishment business brought to the floor. When there finally came a call for a termination of debate, by the Establishment this time, on the showdown vote there would not be the necessary two-thirds. The hardy thirty-five (or more) would stand adamant. So the filibuster would go on, if necessary for weeks, and Senate business would grind to a halt. Appropriation bills would not get passed and the government would need to resort to financing through the banks in a large way.
As the price of ending the filibuster all the opposition would do is to demand the end of Rule XXII. If the rule stayed, the filibuster would continue.
It is highly doubtful if thirty-five senators, or even fifteen, are this resolutely determined to end Rule XXII. They have, it is true, no mandate for such action from their constituencies. The latter for the most part do not even know of Rule XXII. The non-Establishmentarians are not so determined to abolish it as the Establishment is to keep it, nor are they sufficiently numerous. It follows that the Establishment rules completely, with no sign of an early break in its grip. Such a break--when, as and if it comes--is not likely to develop on the basis of a Clarkian appeal for fair dealing. It can come only as a consequence of some profound upheaval in American society.
The discarding of Rule XXII would not in itself break the power of the Establishment, although the alignment of forces within it would no doubt shift. One sees this by looking at the House, which is run by full-time self-centered intrigants without resort to unlimited debate as a threatening weapon. Rule XXII, while convenient, is not really needed.
The remedy for all this, some will say, is in the electoral process before the people. How inadequate a refuge this is one can see by noting that most of the members of Congress occupy "safe" seats, are always virtually sure of election. In the House, supposed paladin of the people, hardly more than a hundred seats are ever in doubt, as Senator Clark admits. More than three-quarters of the occupants know they will invariably be re-elected. An even larger proportion of the Senate holds completely safe seats. Under the impact of a social cataclysm as awesome as the Depression, seats change hands slowly, and after the cataclysm the new incumbent is usually in for the rest of his life.
Such exceptions as there are can be cited from only a few highly competitive, transitional and variegated regions, mainly California and New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, etc. Inertia in the stuporous electorate is a large factor in holding seats. Not only do the voters usually dislike change but they see no reason for it, can discern no more merit in new contenders than in incumbents. All promise heaven. Unless one can
raise the strong suspicion that an officeholder is a Communist, a homosexual, a freethinker, a dabbler in science, a sexual athlete, a practitioner of divorce, a reader of prohibited books or something equally esoteric, he will be hard to dislodge if he has conducted himself according to the established routines of the electoral game.
Senator Clark, like others who feel as he does, lays great stress on public opinion, the need to mobilize it in order to put the government on a course conducive (as he sees it) to the long-term interests of the people and the very safety of the Republic. Such stress on the need for an informed public opinion is an indirect confession of the inadequacy of representative government. If everyone must be fully informed on every question and press insistently for government action, it means we simply now have a more cumbersome form of the New England town meeting when the populace as a whole was the legislative body. If public opinion must be so rampant, and at variance with its own standards, what is the need of representatives? Why not submit all proposals to direct popular vote?
The Establishment in Action
Devoted conscientiously to blocking adjustments in the ramshackle status quo, the Establishment can be cooperative and quick-moving when it wishes. It is most cooperative and retiring, Senator Clark points out, in time of war. Then it endorses anything asked for remotely likely to help in crushing the enemy. War, in fact, seems most effective in unlocking its springs of action, in quickening its pulse, in arousing its ardor. It is as bellicose as any Prussian Junkerverein. It equates patriotism with war.
Bills affecting its special pets among the finpols also get rush-order treatment. Thus, the emergency bill to exempt Du Pont stockholders from the capital gains tax in the distribution under Supreme Court mandate of General Motors stock held by E. I. du Pont de Nemours was galloped through prestissimo, as Senator Clark notes, It was as though the Establishmentarians knew that now they were being watched by the gentry and were anxious to show what really fine work they could do--all of which was no doubt very reassuring to Wilmington, Delaware.
How the Establishment works to ensnare the country in something the electorate finds distasteful is more interesting and more revealing of Establishment ways and is best shown in the matter of taxes.
Congressmen in general are not well informed on taxes--or on much else, for that matter. They are, to put it bluntly, conveniently ignorant and depend on the word of floor leaders, whips and committee chairmen.
Needless to say [as the infinitely expert Eisenstein remarks] members of Congress are not as well versed in taxation as they should be. Of course, they are also inadequately informed on other matters which are entrusted to their care. It is no secret that votes are commonly cast without a firm grasp of the issues involved. In taxation, however, knowledge comes with unusual pain and suffering. The statutes are enveloped in a peculiar verbal fog of their own. The Internal Revenue Code, indeed, is a remarkable essay in sustained obscurity. It has all the earmarks of a conspiracy in restraint of understanding. The conspiracy never ends because amendments never cease. Year after year many minds combine anew against the grave danger of being understood. . . . Surely, the nimblest member of Congress can hardly hope to perceive in a day what the alleged experts are unable to understand over the years. Most members are soon lost and bewildered when they move beyond the rates and personal exemptions. As Representative Patman gently understated the ignorance of Congress, "the tax laws are passed with the Members not knowing exactly what they mean. " 33
Rank and file Republicans and Democrats, right and left, complained at its submission that they did not understand the tax law of 1954, 34 which still provides the main base.
A vote on a tax bill, then [says the legist Eisenstein] is an act of faith. With few exceptions the members of Congress helplessly approve whatever the tax committees may choose to offer. They "must take the word" of the committees. While the committees usually provide reports for each bill, the reports hardly qualify as guides for the perplexed. As a rule, they merely fortify the sense of organized confusion. If the members look for enlightenment during debate, they rarely learn much more. Complex tax bills are poorly discussed and hastily enacted. At times there is no discussion at all. . . .
The House, in fact, proceeds on the theory that individual members should generally abstain from thinking for themselves. This principle of parliamentary behavior is known as the "gag rule. " The members are discreetly denied the right to offer any amendments or to vote on separate sections of a bill. They can only accept or reject the bill as a whole. Since their function is so limited, they have little incentive to be enlightened. In any event, too many questions cannot be asked because debate is carefully curtailed . . . too often the explanations on the floor sound as if the halt were leading the blind. 35
Within the tax committees and among their technical staff writers--the people who compose taxese or tax prose--there is a clearer view of affairs. Among them, Republicans and Democrats alike, there is full understanding of the workings of special dispensations or "loopholes. " 36
"The story is always the same," Hubert Humphrey admitted when he was a senator. "Higher rates are imposed and at the same time loopholes are carefully framed which permit the wealthy to get out from under the higher taxes. " 37
Says a leading tax expert: ". . . the average congressman does not believe in the present high rates of income tax, especially those applicable in the upper brackets. When he sees these rates applied in individual cases he thinks the rates are too high and therefore unfair. . . . True believers in these rates would long ago have torn down the tax shelters and resisted all pressures for special relief. Instead, the reverse is true. " 38
Astronomic rates, headlined hysterically by newspapers, impress the general public. The rich , it is presumed, are being made to bleed and disgorge by a stern socialistic or at least fanatically liberal government. Rightists fulminate. With the left hand, however, a trucksize loophole is chopped that cancels the high rate, in some cases allows no tax at all to be paid.
For one oil and gas virtuoso, for example, on a total income of $14. 3 million in five years, all subject prima facie to a 91 per cent tax, the total taxes were only $80,000 or 3/5 of 1 per cent. Still another artist in oil did even better. He tenderly groomed properties that brought in nearly $5 million one year--on which there was no tax due. "In escaping tax on his oil income, he also escaped tax on most of his other income. His total taxes for the period were less than $100,000, but his income from sources other than oil averaged about $1 million a year. " 39 At the same time the lowest rates for ordinary taxpayers, the fevered patriots in the streets--rates they could not escape-- ranged from 19 to 23 per cent. Theirs not to reason why. . . . Some ultra-large oil companies find the tax at times so infinitesimal that they do not even list it as a separate item in reports to stockholders. 40
The politically illiterate common man pays what others do not. The government always gets all the money it says it needs. It never permits a "raid" on the Treasury.
The committee process by which the rambling Internal Revenue Code is amended is childishly simple, yet difficult and fatiguing to follow, much like a long-drawn
tournament between chessmasters. Like a chess game, too, it is tedious to describe in its inwardness for noninitiates owing to the ramifying effects of simple little moves.
It is in committee hearings that one sees men of C. Wright Mills's executive "power elite"--all figures of distinctly secondary rank, many of them subject to the pleasure of the president as temporary appointees in the Executive Branch. If committee chairmen or members feel like it, they rake them with sarcasm, challenge them point blank, give them the lie direct.
Before these committees a good deal of careful deference is shown by visiting executives and lawyers. It doesn't all run one way because there is a good deal of reciprocal respect and there is the knowledge among committee members that the witnesses are, after all, connected as underlings with big distributors of pecuniary patronage. Such knowledge is not always controlling because, as the front men in well- entrenched one-party state political factions, the committee members already have plenty "going for them" both politically and financially. If he felt sufficiently irked, one of these committee chairmen could tell the Du Ponts, Rockefellers and Mellons combined precisely where to head in and never feel even slightly threatened by the possibility of any successful electoral reprisal. It has been done, simply as a bravura finger-exercise.
Critics charge that the major tax forces represent narrow and selfish private interests as against public and presumably broad and generous interests, But as Eisenstein points out, it is not possible to isolate public and private interests as separate determinate essences.
In the eyes of these critics, "The taxing process emerges as an unceasing struggle between good and evil. The 'general taxpayer,' the 'general public,' the 'People' are on one side; 'organized groups,' 'special groups,' 'pressure groups,' on the other. " But "The 'public' or the 'people' necessarily consist of individuals, and individuals fall into various groups. Not even the adherents of ability insist that all taxpayers should be similarly treated. If they are not to be treated alike, they must be treated as distinctive groups. " 41
Some groups, each of the tax proponents feels, are more vital to the public interest than others, and are entitled to special consideration. This, basically, is the point. Some people count, most do not.
How it plays out is well shown by Eisenstein:
The same generalities are perennially repeated because they are vacant expressions. Everyone may freely put into them whatever he wishes to take out. That is why they are beyond dispute. For the same reason they are also very useful. Dispensations may be broadly condemned and then selectively approved without fear of engaging in any contradictions. Senator Wiley of Wisconsin, for instance, declares that taxes "should be as fair and equitable as possible. " They should be "based primarily on ability to pay," and they should not discriminate "as between different groups. " But at the same time the senator also maintains that taxes should, "as a matter of principle," provide a "reasonable incentive to earn, to grow, to expand. " Therefore, he warmly recommends such special dispensations as a credit for dividends and a reduced rate for income from foreign investments. Apparently dispensations which remove barriers and deterrents do not discriminate "between different groups. " The public interest similarly enables Congressman Mills to distinguish between one dispensation and another. Our income tax, he charges, is "riddled with preferential benefits. " The statutes are "full of special provisions through which a shrewd or lucky taxpayer can often escape paying anywhere near his full share. " But having said all this, Congressman Mills indicates that it would not be "desirable to eliminate all the special provisions that we now permit. " Those who fail to pay their "full share" may also serve the public interest. 42
Whatever is said at these tax hearings, and whatever one may think about what is said, the result (whether explicitly intended or not) is clear: Most of the tax burden is shouldered over, directly and indirectly, on the nonpropertied, free-spending labor force, which constitutes the main body of patriots upon which the future of the Republic depends.
After protracted hearings the tax committees go into "executive session," excluding the profane. Staff writers get their instructions. Whatever is not of sentimental appeal is put into the customary opaque language, but what is of sentimental appeal such as high rates on the big incomes and baited deductions for blindness, medicine, children and superannuation is left crystal clear.
When ready the bill is reported out on the floor near the end of the session, when a great many other bills, equally suspect under careful analysis, are also awaiting passage. There is here the usual "logjam" of important legislation, with members impatient to get home to sweet-talk low-IQ voters. The "heat is on" for swift passage.
If anyone wishes, he may suggest amendments, which may or may not be voted down. The votes are there, the floor managers know, to pass the bill. The word is passed to the stalwarts, all ready to act. At the signal, the bill is easily pushed through.
The Senate Finance Committee in 1966, of which Russell Long, an Establishment stalwart, was chairman, consisted of 17 members. Six were identified by Senator Clark as of the Establishment core, 6 were from the South, 8 were from one-party states and 12 were from outside Metropolia. Only 7 were clearly non-Establishmentarians and only 6 would ordinarily be classified as liberals or rationalists.
The House Ways and Means Committee under the redoubtable Wilbur Mills of Arkansas had 11 members out of 25 from one-party states, many more from one-party districts, 8 from the South and 13 from outside Metropolia. The back country was clearly in the saddle. As the committee is under the mesmeric control of Mr. Mills, much like the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein, it is not necessary to carry the analysis further. It is all an Establishment affair.
Oddly, what radicals call Wall Street tax laws are largely put into final form by men from the swamps, bayous, tundra, bogs, crossroads, pastures, plains, bills, ravines, badlands and backwoods of the country. These men with some exceptions have not attended fancy law schools or studied at the leading universities; there is about few of them any taint of sickly intellectuality. They are, one might say, as common as any drug-store loafer. Nor did any of them, so far as I can ascertain, ever have to meet a flabbergasting payroll in private business. None was ever a super-salesman, a super- lawyer or a big-time entrepreneur. One can safely say that none has had either firsthand or theoretical knowledge of economics, finance or business affairs. As far as taxes are concerned they only know what they may have alertly picked up by hearsay in their committee rooms from visiting monetary sophists.
Yet, when all is said and done, they are well able to distinguish campaign contributors from unsound, unkempt and uncouth, not to say openly literate, ivory-tower theorists.
The Pay-Off
Contrary to common supposition a majority of those in the House and Senate enjoy incomes vaulting far beyond their relatively modest salaries of $30,000 a year plus office expenses, travel allowances and other extras. Merely at this salaried minimal they are already in the upper 1 per cent of income receivers. 43 Income-wise they make members of the Mafia look like bashful Boy Scouts.
Much of this congressional income--by all signs probably most--is obtained in ways that, although technically legal, would be condemned by almost any citizen having ordinary claims to respectability and even by many of the more high-toned swindlers who comb the bistros for hard-to-get victims.
So many, indeed, are the ways on record congressmen have of funneling furtive lucre into their pockets that they defy description at any seemly length. Some attempt must be made, however, to comprehend what goes on among political entrepreneurs in order to understand the weltaunschauung of the men who confect our tax laws.
Congress is largely but not exclusively staffed by assiduous off-the-soil moneymakers who use government as a tool in their profit-seeking operations with the gusto of a pack of hypertonic pickpockets assailing a convention of paralytics. In so doing, manifestly, its members are engaging in wholly unfair competition with the business and professional classes, especially with the small and medium-sized portions. Most business people, high or low, and even Mafians, do not have such ready toll-free access to the inner valves and spigots of government.
I am far from contending that money-making congressmen (who must be distinguished from a civilized minority genuinely concerned about the fate of the Republic) are primarily athirst for lucre. So to say would involve me in a bootless squabble with degree-flaunting sages about the tenuous and wholly irrelevant question of primacy in motivation--of possible interest only to psychologists. Whether congressional absorption in money-making is first or last in order of emphasis it is patently materially the largest and most assiduously pursued of all congressional interests.
These possibly truistic prefatory remarks are inspired not by some hostile, foreign, pagan and blasphemous un-American influences such as the godless writings of Karl Marx, Nicolai Bakunin, V. I. Lenin or Leon Trotsky but by first-hand, on-the-scene, carefully put together reports in such solidly established, churchly bourgeois publications as the New York Herald Tribune and the Wall Street Journal. On the score of method it would be difficult to find sources more homey and comfy unless one had it all in the form of a unanimous opinion of the United States Supreme Court certified in blood by the National Association of Manufacturers.
A bastion of old-line conservatism that yearned for the return of the mansard roof and the Stutz Bearcat, the Herald Tribune was until its demise the nonpareil Republican organ of the country. * (* The discontinuance of the valued Herald Tribune was announced as the consequence of a prolonged, complicated strike involving ten labor unions and two other newspapers.