The Right to Vote

The clock in the almost empty Senate chamber stood at a few minutes past 11 one morning last week as Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas unfolded his lanky frame from his first-row seat and tersely asked unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to consider a minor bill already passed by the House. Senators drifting into the chamber almost ignored the majority leader's routine request, which was routinely granted. The bill, a piece of legislative trivia, would authorize the Army to lease an unused barracks building at Fort Crowder to neighboring Stella, Mo. (pop. 177) to replace its burned schoolhouse. Only Master Parliamentarian Johnson knew that, in this quietly innocuous fashion, the civil rights debate of 1960 had begun.

His strategy burst suddenly on a somnolent Senate. Announced Johnson: Civil rights amendments may be offered to the Stella school bill. Quickly, Georgia's Senator Richard B. Russell, leader of the outfoxed Southern Democrats, was bolt upright, protesting "the lynching of orderly procedure." Maverick Democrat Wayne Morse of Oregon, though ardently pro-civil rights, joined in the protest because "I am opposed to legislation by rider."

Too Late. Lyndon Johnson, as everyone speedily realized, had used an unusual but legitimate way of fulfilling a promise made last September: that he would call up civil rights legislation on Feb. 15, 1960.

After the shouting came a test of strength; by more than a two-thirds majority, a bid for delay by the Southern Democrats was beaten. Although the Dixieland band started talking in a polite filibuster, it was clear that, as in the civil rights showdown of 1957, Johnson had the votes to get another rights bill through the Senate.

Meanwhile, in the cause of credit for their own party, Republicans sought to outflank him in the House. Locked up in the powerful House Rules Committee since last summer was a modest civil rights bill that liberal House Democrats had been trying to blast loose for debate.

With belated help from the Republicans --prodded by President Eisenhower--the bill was voted out last week and scheduled for debate beginning around mid-March. By amendment from the floor the Republicans hope to stamp the House bill with an Administration trademark : Attorney General William Rogers' plan to guarantee Negro voting rights by federal court appointment of voting referees where they are needed (TIME, Feb. 8).

Too Long? A House civil rights bill built around the referee plan might in the long run prove more attractive to the Senate's Lyndon Johnson than a Senate-made bill. Reason: an original Senate bill might get tied up again in the House Rules Committee, presided over with benevolent segregationist despotism by Virginia Democrat Howard Smith, committee chairman.

Moreover, the fortnight delay in House debate and the predictable foot-dragging of Southern Senators would push Senate crucial votes into early spring, when Johnson's rivals for the Democratic nomination -- Massachusetts' Jack Kennedy and Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey -- would be most anxious to be off campaigning in Wisconsin for the April 5 primary. But what good Democratic candidate would risk missing a civil rights debate, even if it starred Lyndon Johnson?

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