Challenge to Congress

After weeks of fuming, fretting and fussing over Adam Clayton Powell's storied peccadillos, the House of Representatives voted in 1967 to bar him from his seat. The Congressman from Harlem, who had sat in the House for 22 years, appealed to the federal judiciary for redress. Last week, after rebuffs at the district and appeals levels of the bench, Powell won an unusual victory. The Supreme Court ruled 7 to 1 that the House had acted unconstitutionally in denying him his congressional seat. In so doing, the Court mounted an unprecedented challenge to Congress, boldly declaring that it is the final arbiter of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court's premise was simple enough. Since the Constitution sets as qualifications for admission only age, citizenship and state residence, the House could not add its own standards. Though Congress could expel a member by a two-thirds vote--a procedure spelled out in the Constitution--it could not bar him before he took his seat, as if it were passing an ordinary appropriations measure.

On the surface, the issue now appears academic. Absent for two years and deprived of his seniority and committee chairmanship, Powell nonetheless was re-elected by his Harlem constituents and was admitted last January to the new Congress. There remained, however, the question of $55,000 in back pay for his uncompleted earlier term. On that hangs potentially one of the gravest clashes between two branches of Government in the nation's modern history.

Vows of Defiance. Far from being chastened by the Court's decision, many members of the House, including most of the leaders of both parties, were defiant. They vowed not to give Powell a penny of back pay--ever. Many of those who opposed the original vote to exclude him were angry, convinced that it was the Court that had acted unconstitutionally in telling Congress what to do. There was concern that if the decision stuck, the Court would be free to intervene in other Congressional practices, such as the seniority system.

Some recalled the famous statement of Andrew Jackson about an edict by the court of Chief Justice John Marshall: "Mr. Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it." Others, like Speaker John McCormack, who was a defendant in the case before the Supreme Court, felt the situation too serious for excited rhetoric.

If Powell chooses to drop the case, satisfying himself with moral vindication, the issue will drop as well. If he demands his back pay, a process that will oblige him to go through lower courts, perhaps over a period of months, the potential conflict will become fact. What if the Supreme Court ultimately ordered the House to pay and the House refused to comply? No one knows exactly, but the script is not pleasant to contemplate. In the most extreme scenario, federal marshals could be ordered to arrest the paymaster of the House, and the House could retaliate by impeaching the Justices themselves. Even if nothing happened--leaving the Court's order, unenforced, hanging in limbo--the situation would be serious enough. The example of the House blatantly refusing to obey an order of the highest court in the land would undermine the Court's moral suasion.

The case was full of precedents, oddities and ironies. One of the greatest of each was the fact that Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the decision, in effect overruled his successor, Warren Burger. Seeking to avoid just such a confrontation with Congress, Burger had written the appellate court's decision that threw out Powell's case last year on the grounds that the courts had no right to interfere with the internal workings of Congress. Warren, on the other hand, took the view that the Supreme Court had not only the right, but the duty, to correct an unconstitutional abuse by a coequal body.

Statesman's Pose. Opinion in Washington varied as to the merit of Powell's case and the wisdom of the Court's ruling, but there was general regret that the matter had gone so far. The hope was that some face-saving legal compromise could be made or that Powell would decide to let things rest and not demand his missing paychecks.

That possibility is not so unlikely. Interviewed in Bimini, the seat that he really prefers, Powell was unusually subdued. For the time being, at least, he affected the role of statesman. His pay and his seniority, he said, were subsidiary points. What mattered was that the Supreme Court had been established as a true equal of Congress. "Adam Powell doesn't matter," he said. "Adam Powell is a secondary consideration. I would say that it's a victory for the American people." Powell's next move may determine whether that "victory" will be pyrrhic, leading to a confrontation between the Supreme Court and Congress.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.