One Roadblock Bypassed

Senate Southerners, accustomed to using the unlimited-debate rule to talk civil rights measures to death, got a bitter taste of their own by-the-rules medicine. Dusting off a rules paragraph that had lain idle for a decade, Senate Republicans used it last week to save the Administration's civil rights bill from the strangling clutches of the powerful Judiciary Committee, chaired by Mississippi's James 0. Eastland.

Since January, Eastland had kept the Administration bill in a tight committee grip. Meanwhile, the House went ahead with its own version, beat off Southern attempts to enfeeble it with amendments (TIME, June 24), finally last week passed it by a vote of 286 to 126. By the usual procedure, under Senate Rule 25, the House's bill seemed headed for the Eastland committee. But California's Minority Leader William F. Knowland was ready with a fast parliamentary ploy: he invoked 80-year-old Rule 14, under which a member can request that a House-passed measure "be placed on the calendar," thereby keeping it out of committee.

Knowland's move touched off five hours of oratorical fireworks, mostly Southern protests, before a packed and tense chamber. Finally the Senate tossed the parliamentary puzzle--Rule 14 or Rule 25?--to Vice President Richard Nixon. Ruled Nixon, following a line laid out by New Jersey's scholarly Republican Clifford Case: since the precedents were unclear, it was up to the Senate to decide by vote whether to refer the bill to committee or place it directly on the calendar.

After three more hours of speechmaking, the talk-tired Senate, backing up Bill Knowland, voted to bypass the Eastland roadblock under Rule 14. The tally: 45 to 39, with eleven Northern Democrats (not including Oregon's civil righteous Wayne Morse) supporting Knowland, and five mossy Republicans (Arizona's Barry Goldwater, Nevada's George Malone, South Dakota's Karl Mundt, North Dakota's Milton Young, Delaware's John Williams) breaking ranks to join the Southerners. Still ahead after the Fourth of July recess: an all-out Southern attempt to drown it in a flood of filibluster.

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