The Senate Historical Office, which serves as the institutional memory of Congress, recalls a particularly timely floor debate from 1967 involving then-Senate Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and efforts to abolish his subcommittee on federal charters, holidays and celebrations.
"Early that year, Senator Allen Ellender, a conservative Louisiana Democrat and member of the Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures, recommended elimination of this two-member panel, with its $7,500-a-year clerk," the Senate historian explains.
At which time Mr. Dirksen launched his counterattack: "Mr. President, I rise in vehement opposition to the proposal to do violence to this little subcommittee. The most important reason that I can assign is that I am chairman. You are not going to do that to me, are you, and destroy my one and only chairmanship?
"I want the Senate to know that this subcommittee deals with holidays, and if you can think of anything more important in the American calendar than that, then I give up."
"Dirksen saved his little subcommittee," the historian concludes, "which continued even after his death, under minority chairmanship, until its elimination in 1977."