Up to the Legislature

There was Lester Maddox, happily pouring coffee for 100 Georgia legislators just as if he were back at the Pickrick, his onetime restaurant. Maddox had good reason to be happy --and to pour for the legislators, who were at tending a forum on government at the University of Georgia. As a result of a decision handed down last week by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Georgia legislature in January will bestow the state's governorship on either Democrat Maddox, 51, or Republican Howard ("Bo") Callaway, 39, neither of whom received a majority in the November general election. The likely outcome is that the nod will go to Maddox, even though Callaway outpolled him on Election Day by 3,538 votes.

By a five-to-four vote, the court up held a 142-year-old amendment to the Georgia constitution stipulating that no-majority gubernatorial elections be decided in the legislature. Similar provisions are now in effect in only two other states, Mississippi and Vermont, and no legislature has legally elected a governor since New Hampshire did so in 1913. Overruling a federal-districtcourt decision, the high court also rejected the view of dissenting Justice William O. Douglas that a legislature should not make the final choice "when the election has been entrusted to the people." Despite the fact that the Georgia assembly is malapportioned, said Justice Hugo Black's majority opinion, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution "which either expressly or impliedly dictates the method a state must use to select its governor."

The decision led both Maddox and Callaway to step up their efforts to woo individual legislators, but the advantage obviously belongs to Maddox. All but 29 of the 259 assemblymen are Democrats, who are unlikely to give Georgia its first Republican Governor since 1872. Maddox boasted that he had assurances of at least 175 votes, said that only one legislator had refused him, "and he was drunk." Said Callaway: "I never thought that it would be easy for a Republican to become Governor of Georgia."

Georgians who are unhappy over the segregationist position of both Maddox and Callaway--and who caused the dilemma by casting 48,439 votes for a write-in candidate--most likely will have to wait until the general election in 1970.

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