Shadow & Substance

The shadows that flitted fitfully over both houses of Congress last week periodically enveloped matters of substance. In the second week of the civil rights debate, the substance was an evolving bill primarily aimed at guaranteeing the voting rights of the Southern Negro (TIME, March 14). The shadows that darkened the effort were cast by both the filibustering South and the coalition of Northern Democratic and Republican civil rights advocates. The liberals clamored for provisions beyond voting rights, e.g., statutory recognition of the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision, and the Southerners wanted no bill at all. And both groups were making a record for home consumption.

For the Senate leadership, it was a waiting game: shoulder to shoulder, Republican Leader Everett Dirksen and Democratic Leader Lyndon Johnson were waiting for the right moment to ring down the debate and bring off a victorious vote for a solid bill that could get passed. Johnson, in fact, called off round-the-clock sessions. From the way things were going, it looked as if the right bill would be handed to them this week by the House; Speaker Sam Rayburn was trying to see to that.

But as the Senate waited for the House to go through its well-disciplined motions of debate, the impatient ranks behind the Dirksen-Johnson front broke free. Despite Johnson's warnings, the eager liberal wing, led by Illinois' Democratic Senator Paul Douglas and New York's G.O.P. Senator Jack Javits, rounded up enough signatures to force a cloture vote to cut off debate. Leaders Johnson and Dirksen opposed the liberal play because it was out of time and doomed to failure. Sure enough, when the cloture vote came, Johnson and Dirksen, together with the Southerners, beat it down with a vote of 53-42-- proving, in seeming contradiction, that Lyndon Johnson still controlled the biggest block of the two-thirds majority needed to invoke cloture.

In all the week's shadow boxing, the Senate produced one positive matter of substance by killing off the first of Ev Dirksen's seven-point civil rights program. It was a proviso that would have made it a crime to interfere with Federal court orders in school desegregation cases--a statute of doubtful importance, for, as the Senate could see, federal court orders already have their legal standing, and there is little logic in giving special authority to court orders for desegregation. When it came to a show down, the combined force of both the South and Northern liberals beat down the section.

To the untrained eye, the week's work contained little substance for a body of grown men who deliberate on matters of global importance, but sensible Senators knew that delay was a light price to pay for hoped-for sound results. Said Texas' Johnson on the floor: "The process of legislation may be slow--annoyingly slow--to many people. But this issue has been with us for many decades. I believe we must sit here at least several days more [until] genuine progress is in sight . . . When the Senate is ready to act, it will act, and I believe wisely and well."

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