Word: dirksenism
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Maneuvering the bill toward Senate passage through an obstacle course of conservative opposition and a labyrinth of parliamentary rules was a Clausewitzian tactical feat executed by a most improbable general-Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. Long opposed to open-housing legislation, Dirksen lately reversed his field and joined up with the Republican-Democratic liberal coalition (TIME, March...
...Apologies. Yet it was clear that most of the Senate favored the measure. As in 1964, when he helped shep herd that year's sweeping civil rights bill into law, Dirksen abruptly appointed himself field marshal of the liberals' forces. Together with a squad of his lawyers known as "Dirksen's Bombers," Ev spent more than two days in negotiations with Senate liberals to fashion a compromise bill. The legislation that emerged would affect an estimated total of 44.6 million of the roughly 65 million housing units in the nation...
...would be a strange creature indeed in this world of mutation," Dirksen intoned, "if in the face of reality he did not change his mind. I do not apologize for my conduct...
...soon as the quickly drawn compromise was ready, it seemed certain that cloture would shut off the filibuster and the bill be speedily enacted. But Dirksen had miscalculated his power to swing most of the conservative Republicans with him. Some were affronted by the haste with which he demanded cloture and a final vote. The nation's powerful and well-informed real estate lobby deluged Senators with telegrams demanding the measure's defeat...
Insurance Policy. Dirksen, for all his gifts of legerdemain, found himself without a solid two-thirds majority for cloture. Therefore he and his son-in-law, Tennessee's Senator Howard Baker, sought to mollify the conservatives by introducing new amendments, this time to weaken the open-housing section. Together, their amendments would exclude from the ban on dis crimination all single-family, owner-occupied housing-potentially 30 million units...