Keeper of the rules: Howard W. Smith of Virginia.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

Keeper of the Rules: Howard W. Smith of Virginia

Bruce J. Dierenfield. University Press of Virginia, $25. Quick: who is chairman of the Rules Committee in the House of Representatives? Only Congress junkies can answer that question today (Claude Pepper), but a generation ago liberals cursed the Rules Committee and its reactionary chairman, Howard W. Smith of Virginia. The author of this informative biography, Bruce J. Dierenfield, writes that in the fifties Smith was widely regarded as the third most powerful figure in Washington, surpassed only by Dwight D. Eisenhower and House Speaker Sam Rayburn. An ardent segregationist who used his committee to hold up or weaken civil rights legislation, Smith, at the very least, deserves a place next to Bull Connor and the "old' George Wallace in the demonology of the civil rights movement. Instead, he's largely been forgotten, making it all too easy for pundits to get nostalgic about the days when Congress was ruled by a few powerful men.

Trained in the precepts of strict constructionism at the University of Virginia law school, Smith dedicated his public career to fighting the expansion of the federal government. After serving as a judge in Alexandria, he was elected to the House, where he became a leading opponent of FDR's New Deal. He believed that Congress rationalized its intervention in business activity through a misreading of the Constitution's commerce clause; it then abdicated its imagined power to the president, who set up federal agencies to issue regulations that Smith judged illegitimate. (His abhorrence of extending federal power did not keep Smith from sponsoring the activist--and anticommunist-- Smith Act, which led to the prosection of scores of radicals in the late forties.)

Smith's opportunity to wield clout against the expanding federal government came with his ascent to Rules chairman in 1954. Created in 1789, Rules was for a century an inconsequential committee charged with perpetuating old procedural rules. But at the end of the 19th century, the congressional leadership beefed up its powers to counter special interests and promote the will of the majority on tax and tariff bills. Through the twenties, Rules served to strengthen the hand of whichever party controlled the House. During the Roosevelt administration, however, it became a means for a...