A.P.S.A.

Some in Congress were amenable and put the leader of the A.P.S.A. team in charge of a Joint House-Senate Committee.

But the reorganization didn’t include the A.P.S.A.’s most important suggestions: changing the rigid next-in-line “senility system” of chairmanships, reducing the power of the Rules Committee, taming the filibuster with a less onerous cloture rule.

But a second and even more influential A.P.S.A. report, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” published in 1950, sifted through the problem of party discipline.

Two Southern Democrats who had supported Goldwater were stripped of seniority rights, the kind of “sanction” the A.P.S.A. report had called for.

Some drafters of the A.P.S.A. report had admired recent events in England, where the Labour Government elected in 1945 had nationalized the railroad and coal industries and, over Tory opposition, introduced a national health service.