Legislative Alchemy

As passed by the House last summer, the Administration's civil rights bill was a relatively modest measure designed to protect Negroes and civil rights workers engaged in such civic activities as registering to vote and performing jury duties. In the Senate, however, the bill underwent almost alchemistic changes. All but assured of final passage this week in the upper chamber, the measure could become a legislative landmark in the Negro's progress toward genuinely equal citizenship in the U.S.

The bill, most importantly, would lower the racial barrier for Negroes wishing to buy or rent any of some 80% of the nation's housing units. Dis crimination would be forbidden in about 52.6 million dwellings, including millions of single-family houses.

Maneuvering the bill toward Senate passage through an obstacle course of conservative opposition and a labyrinth of parliamentary rules was a Clausewitzian tactical feat executed by a most improbable general--Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. Long opposed to open-housing legislation, Dirksen lately reversed his field and joined up with the Republican-Democratic liberal coalition (TIME, March 8).

New Spoiler? Last week, after a 33-day filibuster and three abortive attempts to turn off the talkathon by a two-thirds majority vote, Dirksen and the liberals finally succeeded in invoking cloture, though without a single vote to spare. With members now restricted to one hour's speaking, the Senate took up 43 separate amendments to the bill, whose open-housing clause had been tacked onto the House version by Minnesota's Walter Mondale.

The toughest fight was prompted by Dirksen's son-in-law, Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, who proposed to exempt from the open-housing provision certain privately owned one-family units. Several Republican conservatives, notably South Dakota's Karl Mundt, had demanded the Baker amendment as a condition for agreeing to cloture. By a 48-to-43 vote, the Baker amendment was killed.

South Carolina's Strom Thurmond added a stiff antiriot clause, seeking a five-year jail term and $10,000 fine for anyone who travels from one state to another with intent to incite a riot. At week's end, the Senate adopted the entire substitute package; a vote on final passage is due this week.

Then the measure must go to a House-Senate conference, where its fate is less certain. Ironically, the House passed an open-housing bill two years ago, only to have it blocked by the Senate. Now it is the House, much more conservative than two years ago, that may prove to be the spoiler.

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