Four For the Road

The rural minorities who control the State legislatures of the nation have seen the future, and they do not like it. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, their days of complete domination are numbered; in coming years, the city man will begin to get something approximating an equal voice in the management of his own affairs. In the South, where fear of Federal intervention on behalf of the Negro has robbed legislators of all sense of proportion, the reaction against this vision of democracy has been particularly violent.

The most curious aspect of this reaction has been the strength and steady progress of a quiet campaign to add four bizarre amendments would be to turn the Constitution into a sort of half-baked Articles of Confederation. Their main support, unsurprisingly, comes from the same extremists of the right who seem to believe that the Constitution was written by God.

The most innocuous-sounding of these amendments is also the most dangerous, since it has a chance, though a very small one, of being ratified. It would permit the state legislatures to amend the Constitution directly, bypassing the Federal structure altogether. Two-third of the legislatures could propose an amendment, which would have only to be ratified by three-fourths of the legislatures to become part of the Constitution. It has been calculated that because of malapportionment, state legislatures representing only fifteen per cent of the people would be able to amend the Constitution under the terms of this proposal. Ten states have already endorsed the amendment, nearly a third of the thirty-four needed to call a Constitutional convention. Support for it is not limited to the South; the New Jersey legislature is among those recorded as favoring it.

Another proposed amendment, so far endorsed by light eight states, is directed against a specific Supreme Court decision. The amendment would forbid Federal courts to intervene in the apportionment of state legislatures. A third proposed amendment contemplates a more sweeping subversion of the Federal judiciary: this is the celebrated "court of the Union" idea. It would set up an enormous tribunal composed of the chief justices of the fifty state supreme courts and with the power to throw out any Supreme Court decision it considered an invasion of states' rights. The noisy proceedings of such a court are amusing to imagine, the possibility of such a body actually being created is not at all humorous. Fortunately, only four states--Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Wyoming--have endorsed the proposal.

The fourth amendment, tagged the "Liberty Amendment" by its supporters, incorporates three old favorites of the far right. It would (1) force the Federal government out of all business enterprises, (2) keep the country out of international agreements, NATO as well as the UN, and, of course, (3) abolish the income tax. The Liberty Amendment has been approved by the legislatures of Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, and South Carolina, whose state senate passed it without a dissenting vote. Here in Massachusetts, the principal lobbyist for the measure is Col. Laurence E. Bunker, a John Bircher who organized January's "Rally for God and country" in Boston.

These proposed amendments do not represent any real threat to the American Constitutional system, since it is highly unlikely that any one of them will get near ratification. What they do represent is the grotesque death-rate of outmoded undemocratic state legislatures which are fading into the past where they belong. The fact that the amendments could get as far as they have is a good argument for proceeding with reapportionment as quickly as possible. The sooner the Federal government puts real pressure on the states to comply with the Supreme Court's reapportionment decision, the better.