The Congress: A Squeeze on Both Their Houses

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"There is almost volcanic feeling in the country today," orated Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen, speaking on the subject of federal courts and the state legislatures. "I see nothing but legislative and judicial chaos in this country unless something is done." With that, Dirksen offered an amendment to do something about the U.S. Supreme Court's June 15 reapportionment ruling.

In that historic decision, the court decreed that both houses of state legislatures must be apportioned according to population. In most cases it has been traditional for only one house to be so apportioned, but the Supreme Court held this unconstitutional, since it denied the principle of "one man, one vote." That seemed clear enough, even though it meant that a considerable amount of confusion would follow during the next few years as the states cranked up the machinery of compliance. The big trouble is that many state legislatures do not want to reapportion themselves, since the general thrust of such a move would shift increased legislative power from rural constituencies to urban centers.

The Object: Delay. On Capitol Hill the outcry was immediate and immense. A flood of bills and resolutions dropped into the hoppers. All were designed to blunt the Supreme Court's ruling, and some proposed smothering the ruling altogether by amending the U.S. Constitution to deny the federal courts the right to rule on such matters.

The object, therefore, was to delay implementation of any reapportionment schemes until such time as the Congress and the states could effect a constitutional amendment barring jurisdiction of the federal courts. To this end, Ev Dirksen filed a rider onto the foreign aid bill. It was a shrewd move: President Johnson could ill afford to veto foreign aid just to kill an obnoxious amendment. Dirksen's proposal required that federal courts, "in the absence of unusual circumstances," automatically grant stays in reapportionment cases if so much as one citizen in an affected state requested it. To Senate liberals and Administration loyalists, the Dirksen rider was distasteful because they felt that it threatened the integrity of the judicial process. Almost immediately a flock of dissident Senators threatened to filibuster the measure to pieces.

"A Harsh Method." The squeeze was on in the House too. Chief agent of delay there was Virginia's Democratic Congressman William Tuck, 67, and his proposal brooked no "unusual circumstances"; it simply prohibited the federal courts from moving into reapportionment cases period. Tuck's proposal was bogged down in the Judiciary Committee until last week, when Virginia's Judge Howard Smith, boss of the Rules Committee, obligingly lifted it out of Judiciary and started it on its way to the House floor.