American political mythology and the Senate filibuster.

• Author: Murphy, Troy A.
• Position: Special Issue: Argumentation and the U.S. Senate

As Congress opened its 104th session in early January, 1995, both the House of Representatives and the Senate were under Republican party control for the first time in over 40 years. Marked by media fanfare usually reserved for presidential inaugurations, those first few days of the legislative session focused the nation's attention primarily on the House of Representatives, the new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and the implementation of the Republican campaign manifesto known as the Contract with America. As a symbolic indication of the new Republican workmanlike spirit, Gingrich delivered on a campaign promise and presided over the longest first day in the history of American Government.

On the other side of the Capitol building, however, the revolutionary spirit was much more tempered. For most of the first two days, the meticulous U.S. Senate debated an amendment by Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa that would have greatly reduced the power of the much embattled procedural rule known as the Senate filibuster. With the glow of the national media on Gingrich and the House, the upper chamber's laggard deliberations went largely unnoticed.

The contrast between the two bodies was similarly evident throughout the celebrated first 100 days of the 104th Congress as the House of Representatives quickly, if not hastily, passed nine of the ten Contract with America items only to see those same measures pile up on the other side of the building, backlogged in the Senate docket. In both historical design and contemporary practice, there is no monolithic Congress; the House of Representatives and the Senate are two very different institutions.

The Senate's unique position within the bicameral legislature is typified most clearly by Senate rule XXII, the so-called filibuster rule, which allows for free and unlimited debate in the Senate. The filibuster has a long and storied history; from the events leading to U.S. entry into World War I to Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart's dramatic romanticization of the filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the contentious civil rights debates of the 1960's, the American public has witnessed the practice of filibustering in the Senate with both scorn and adoration.

This essay attempts to examine the history of the filibuster with a particular eye toward the ways in which the discourse surrounding the attempts to eliminate the filibuster exemplify certain fundamental contradictions in American political mythology. The debates make it apparent that popular democracy and the American form of republican government are often as contradictory as they are collaborative. More succinctly, yet likely more blasphemous to American sentiment, the relationship between Democracy and The Constitution of the United States is tenuous at best. The debate over the filibuster provides an especially lucid contemporary example of how these conflicting mythologies, which have been part of American politics since one could properly claim an American politics, are reconciled over time and within very different rhetorical contexts.

Because the debate over the filibuster closely resembles the original debate over the Senate's role in American government and because the intent of the Founding Fathers is appropriated by both sides of the contemporary debate, it is necessary to examine briefly the history of the United States Senate. Turning back to the Constitutional Convention of 1789 allows us to understand better the genealogy of American political mythology and the constitution of the two competing, if not contradictory, conceptions of American government that are at the heart of filibuster debates. After examining the relevance of Senate history to the current debates, I turn to the discourse in the debates over the filibuster to determine how what I call the political mythologies of Democracy and The Constitution, which are most often in a state of dormant contestation, come to the fore.

I will focus primarily on two debates: the debate of 1917, the first time a "cloture rule" was allowed in the Senate, and the most recent debate of 1995, in which Senator Harkin's proposed rule change failed by a vote of 76 to 19 (CR, 1995b). Finally, some conclusions will be drawn about the role of the filibuster in constitutional government and how that role exemplifies the dissonance between America's version of democracy and America's idea of democracy.

Before examining the genesis of the political mythologies central to the filibuster debate, I pause to clarify and expand on my use of the term. By political mythologies, I refer to those historically sacrosanct rhetorical constructs that influence contemporary political realities and largely constitute national American identity itself. American political mythologies such as Democracy and The Constitution are in this view a type of rhetorical collage, whose contemporary form has been constructed piecemeal over more than 200 years and is continually evolving to embody national political ideas and ideals both historical and contemporary.

The function served by mythologies in the political arena is not unlike the function of the mythical tale in primitive societies: they express, enhance, and codify the beliefs and values that are common to a particular culture (Malinowski, p. 19). For contemporary public argument, mythologies provide rhetors not only a resource from which to draw certain conceptions of American sentiment, but also a means for the creation and transformation of such sentiment.

Contrary to the common connotation of myth which presupposes falsity, I am in agreement with Murray Edelman who privileges the practical importance of such discursive constructions: ". . . [myth] includes much that is plainly contrary to what we see happen, yet the myth is all the more firmly believed and the more dogmatically passed on to others because men want to believe it and it holds them together" (p. 1). David Kertzer also alludes to the unifying function of mythologies, saying ". . . symbols provide a way to understand such abstract political entities as the nation and a means (indeed the compulsion) of identifying with them" (p. 13). Often steeped with patriotic and nationalistic sentiment, mythologies help define what it means to be an American.

Given the diachronic nature of myth, an analysis of political mythologies requires attention to both historical legacies and contemporary continuities. Claiming myths are a "historical phenomena," Leonard Thompson concurs by explaining that political myths "originate in specific circumstances as a product of specific interests, and they change with the changing interests of successive generations. . . . They vary in intensity: they may be dormant, they may flourish, they may decline, they may die out . . . they may serve one interest at one time and another interest later on, or they may be manipulated to serve more than one interest at the same time" (p. 8). Like a collage whose most salient features change with successive layers, mythologies are rhetorical constructs imbued with the layers of history, but strategically constructed anew to fit the specific context in which public arguments are being advanced.

In summary, political mythologies will be used in this essay to describe both historical and contemporary phenomena, entities that have historical legacies but endure in the continual process of becoming contemporary. Second, mythologies are rhetorical constructs that are an inevitable and necessary part of contemporary culture, serving as points of intuitive reference for social agents to make sense of their world. Finally, I hold political mythologies to be marked by an elasticity that leaves them open to transformation in different historical contexts and different rhetorical forums.

The immediate concern is with the genesis, transformation, and application of the political mythologies of Democracy and The Constitution as indicated in the filibuster debates. These two mythologies have throughout history been balanced against one another as antithetical forces at opposite ends of a continuum. That is, the rhetorical themes constitutive of these two mythologies are used in political public argument to reconcile the conflict between pure democracy and the Constitution of the United States. Given the ambiguity and openness of these symbolic forms, the mythologies of Democracy and the The Constitution are simultaneously antithetical and complementary. Rhetors in the political arena attempt to use the inherent ambiguity to their advantage, seeking to alleviate the dissonance between notions of direct democracy and the practice of American republicanism by arguing for one balancing point or another along the continuum. In an effort to uncover the genesis of these political mythologies, we turn to the genesis of the American republic itself.

FEDERALIST AND ANTI-FEDERALIST THOUGHT

James Madison stated in Federalist Paper #51 the general concern of many at the Constitutional Convention: "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself" (Rossiter, p. 322).

The participants of the Constitutional Convention, known as the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, encapsulated the varied and discordant political ideas and ideals of 1789. The Federalists favored a strong national government for the new republic and supported the final Constitution. They believed strongly in the idea of representative government as hierarchical, in which "elites" would be chosen by the people to represent them. Such representation was to be more, however, than a simple reflection of popular opinion. In Federalist #10, James Madison explained the basic Federalist idea of representation, in which the chosen representatives would "refine and enlarge the public views by passing...