Third Time Unlucky

"I am no johnny-come-lately," intoned Everett Dirksen. "When I start, I play for keeps." What he was playing for last week, the third time around, was a characteristically Dirksenian lost cause: a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's "one-man, one-vote" ruling.

In a rambling Senate speech larded with Familiar Quotations from Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Douglas MacArthur, Abraham Lincoln and Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Republican leader reiterated his fear that the reapportionment of state legislatures entirely on the basis of population would lead to their domination by "the bosses of the big-city political machines." Instead, Dirksen proposed, the voters in any state should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they wanted to elect one chamber on the basis of geographical or political subdivisions.

Though it drew 55 yeas to 38 nays, the measure fell seven votes short of the necessary two-thirds--the same margin by which it was defeated last year. Even if it had passed both houses of Congress, the amendment would still have required ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures--and three-fourths have already completed the onerous task of reapportionment with, as yet, none of the dire consequences foreseen by Dirksen. Though Ev vowed doggedly to make a fourth try next year, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield pronounced the Dirksen amendment "a dead issue."

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