The New Chairman

From Martin Van Buren to Pat McCarran, for better or worse, the chairmanship of the U.S. Senate's Judiciary Committee has been a wellspring of power. The committee handles up to half the legislation submitted to the Senate, passes on all nominations to the federal courts (including the Supreme Court) and on all Justice Department positions requiring Senate confirmation. It has jurisdiction over all legislation on immigration and citizenship. It studies all amendments proposed to the U.S. Constitution. It handles civil rights matters. Last week, after the death of Chairman Harley Kilgore, the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee went to a man considered by many to be the nation's most dangerous demagogue: Mississippi's racist Senator James Eastland.

In a Senate speech after the Supreme Court's desegregation decision, Eastland said that the Supreme Court "has been indoctrinated and brainwashed by left-wing pressure groups." Speaking last January to members of the White Citizens' Councils in Columbia, S.C., he said that the Justices of the Supreme Court in the segregation decision had "prostituted both the letter and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution." The groups working toward improved civil rights "run from the blood Red of the Communist Party to the almost equally Red of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A."

Eastland's succession to the judiciary chair is bound to have political repercussions in the North. Last week, for example N.A.A.C.P. Counsel Thurgood Marshall, a New Deal Democrat, said: "I have terrible difficulty in separating Adlai Stevenson's Democratic Party from Senator Eastland's Democratic Party. If I can ever separate them, I would assume I would be for Adlai Stevenson, but until I can separate them, I am against Senator Eastland's Democratic Party."

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