Double Defeat

Lyndon Johnson, that old wizard of Capitol Hill, seemed to have misplaced his wand last week. Twice the Congress refused to perform on cue, inflicting on Johnson his first major legislative defeats since taking office.

In the House, Johnson's legislative aides found no way to get around Democratic Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills's adamant opposition to the Administration's medicare plan. They had pressured it through the Senate as an amendment to a social security bill. But when they sized up sentiment in the House, they discovered that they could not rally enough Democrats to get medicare past Mills in a direct test on the House floor. So they quietly consigned it to certain death in a House-Senate conference committee.

In the Senate, up for a vote came a toothless, Johnson-backed compromise designed to end a five-week filibuster, mainly by Democratic liberals, against Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen's attempt to delay enforcement of a Supreme Court ruling that both branches of every state legislature must be apportioned on a one-man, one-vote basis. Johnson does not really care how that matter is resolved--just so long as it goes away and frees Democratic Congressmen to get out and campaign for the national ticket. But the compromise, sponsored by Minnesota Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy and New York Republican Jacob Javits, was defeated 42 to 40. That left Ev Dirksen's proposal once again the pending business of the Senate.

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