Quid Pro Nothing

The most embarrassing thing that can happen to a politician is, of course, to get beaten in an election. The next most embarrassing thing is to make a bargain and not be able to keep it--which is precisely what happened last week to House Speaker John McCormack.

At specific issue was a seat on the House Ways and Means Committee, which must pass on all revenue legislation, including the Kennedy Administration's 1963 tax program and medicare bill. There were two vacancies on Ways and Means that would go to Democrats. Tennessee's Ross Bass had already nailed down one of them--and McCormack already had promised the other to Georgia's Phil Landrum, 53, co-author of the Landrum-Griffin Labor Bill and, until recently, a certified conservative.

Behind McCormack's promise lay the recent fight over a 15-member Rules Committee, which presumably would not act as a roadblock to Administration legislation (TIME, Jan. 18). McCormack had thought he needed the ten votes of Georgia's House delegation to win that battle. He thereupon entered into negotiations with old Carl Vinson, dean of the House Georgians. In return for Georgia's votes--plus Landrum's promise that he would support both the President's tax program and medicare--McCormack agreed to get Landrum on Ways and Means.

With Georgia's help, McCormack won the Rules Committee fight. Now it was his turn to deliver. But House Democratic liberals had heard about the deal--and they did not like it one bit. Neither were they soothed by Landrum's promises on taxes and medicare. "It's not just this year's bills," said one. "Landrum will be hitting us in the head for the next 20 years." The insurgents got support from labor, which has the authors of the Landrum-Griffin Act on the same blacklist as the authors of the Taft-Hartley Law.

They also got support from Rules Committee Chairman Howard Smith, a Virginia conservative who remained rankled by what he considered a Georgia sellout on the Rules vote. Smith decided that even a liberal might be preferable to an apostate, and he led 25 or 30 Southern conservatives into the liberals' camp. In the Democratic caucus, the vote for the available Ways and Means place was 161 for Pat Jennings, the only liberal member of Virginia's House delegation, to 126 for Landrum. Since both Jennings and Tennessee's Bass are loyal Administration supporters, their election certainly strengthened the chances of passing the fiscal legislation President Kennedy believes is vital. But McCormack's inability to deliver his end of the bargain was an ominous sign, another reminder of the tenuous control the Administration's chief spokesman exercises over the Democratic Party in the House.

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