The system that made this possible was not original with the Kingfish. It had been devised by two astute parliamentarians, Oramel Simpson and George Wallace, to meet the exigencies of a flood crisis in 1927.
By convening the legislature late at night, with all bills whipped into final shape before the lawmakers assembled, having one member introduce all the bills, suspending the rules to have them all referred at once, and all to the same committee, regardless of content, what would otherwise be delayed by being parceled out on two separate legislative days could be accomplished in a matter of minutes.
Then, immediately after midnight, or even the next morning, the committee could meet, gallop through the dossier, give all administration-sponsored measures a favorable report, and turn thumbs down on all anti-administration proposals (the record was forty-four bills thus “considered” in an hour and seven minutes), report them back to the House, and order them engrossed and put on the calendar for final action the next morning. That would be another legislative day.
On the morrow the House would then pass the bills as fast as the clerk could mumble a few words of the title and the members could press the electric-voting-machine buttons. Immediately thereafter the bills would be rushed across the corridor to the Senate, where the same routine would be followed.
Thus the third legislative day in the House would also be the first legislative day in the Senate, so that a few minutes after the fourth midnight, the governor could sign the bills into law, each measure having been read “in full” on three separate days in each house.
This was a brilliant device for meeting an emergency; the iniquity of it lay in the fact that, when employed as routine, it shut off all real study of the proposals, and barred opponents or representatives of the public from being heard on them before committees.
By Thursday noon, September 5, everything was in readiness for the introduction at a moment’s notice of thirty-one administration- (i.e., “Long”) sponsored must bills—all this without one official word to indicate that a special session was so much as contemplated. None the less, among the press correspondents in the capitol gallery it was taken for granted that such an assembly would be convened at the weekend; but when they pressed Senator Long to confirm or deny the surmise, he professed complete ignorance.
“As far’s I know,” he said blandly, “Oscar hasn’t made up his mind about if he’ll call one any time soon. Leastaways he never said a word to me about it.”
“When are you going to make up his mind so he can tell you?” quipped one of the reporters.
“He’d near about kill you if he heard you say that,” chuckled the Kingfish good-naturedly, “and his wife would finish the job.”