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I was checking out Caro's LBJ bio Master of the Senate earlier today, and he actually gave a pretty thought provoking WI in January 1957 -- VP Nixon, it seems, had a manuever wherein the Senate rules of the previous congresses are not adopted in whole, yadda yadda, and the filibuster is effectively abolished!

What stopped it OTL was LBJ himself, who as majority leader, had the automatic perogative to be called on when the motion on the rules was proposed and tabled it. Had not LBL done so, says Caro -- or, by extension, if LBJ was not Majority Leader* -- then the Southern Democrats would have only one more blocking mechanism remaining, which essentially boiled down to debating all the rules of the Senate forever (way more irrevocably crippling than your run of the mill filibuster).

So what do you guys think? If LBJ hadn't have stopped them at the start, did the filibuster have a shot of being eliminated in 1957? And if so, how might things have changed if they'd succeeded? Could, for example, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 had real teeth?

*say, if one more Republican had won in 1956
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