Minority Power

Abstract

This chapter attends to the long moment when southern Democrats came to dominate their party in Congress, just as Republicans were gaining governing capacity after the war years. It highlights how the South successfully remade congressional institutions and practices to accommodate the peculiar fact that the region's heterogeneity and range of preferences were contained within a single political party. This achievement complemented the earlier era's policy outcomes, for it reshaped Congress for the long haul. Southern legislators designed and implemented the radical diffusion of authority in the House of Representatives, enabling the diversity of southern policy priorities to be worked out and advanced in the critical legislative committees. Through compromise, they also ensured that the creation in the Senate of a cloture mechanism that could end a filibuster would only further institutionalize their ability to obstruct legislation that called their region's racial hierarchy into question.