Busing Battle (Contd.)

As he rips through his familiar litany of complaints against liberals and Northerners, the stomping crowds in Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, West Palm Beach and Homestead roar as though it all were fresh. George Wallace teases, holding his big gun for last. Then he brings it out and blasts away at what has become his favorite target: busing. "I'm in tune with you," he shouts. "This busin' is callous and asinine. We're busin' children to kingdom come. But that busin' is gonna come to an end in this country when you elect me." The crowds go wild.

Busing has emerged as almost the only issue in the March 14 Florida primary, and Wallace seems fairly certain to ride the much-maligned yellow vehicles to victory there. In both North and South, the school bus is emerging as an unexpectedly dangerous hazard on the road that Democratic contenders have to travel to reach their party's nomination for President. The number of politicians still willing to speak out unequivocally against all antibusing moves was dwindling, but at least three persisted: Florida Governor Reubin Askew. New York Mayor John Lindsay and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff. Protested Ribicoff: "If politicians continue to fan blind passions, we are lost. Busing is not the issue at all. The basic issue is whether America is going to have apartheid. I don't think we can exist on that basis."

Softened Stance. Last week, even as Wallace was flamboyantly exploiting the issue in Florida, three of his Democratic opponents hurried back to Washington to soften the Senate's antibusing stance (TIME, March 6). Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and George McGovern-cast decisive votes as the Senate reversed its adoption of the extreme antibusing amendment pushed by Michigan Republican Robert Griffin. Carried by just three votes a week earlier--with all five Democratic presidential contenders absent --the Griffin amendment would have removed the courts' authority to order the busing of children.

In a display of parliamentary subtleties, the Senate took three tense votes on the Griffin amendment last week. Vice President Spiro Agnew even made a rare appearance in the presiding chair so that he could break any tie by voting for the Griffin proposal. He never got the chance. On the first two votes Griffin opponents defeated the amendment by a single vote on one tally and by a three-vote margin on a second.

Next day, when many assumed that the battle was over, Kansas Senator Robert Dole, chairman of the Republican National Committee, slyly offered an almost identical amendment. He again alerted Agnew to be on hand. "We had word," Dole explained later, "that Muskie had to leave, that McGovern had taken off. We thought we might just luck out." The Senate leaders, Democrat Mansfield and Pennsylvania Republican Hugh Scott, were battling hard for a less restrictive antibusing measure of their own. At the end of the roll call, the Dole amendment led, 40 to 37. Then stragglers walked dramatically into the chamber. Dole's information turned out to be wrong: both McGovern and Muskie were still present, and the amendment lost, 48 to 47.

The Senate then went on to approve the Mansfield-Scott proposal by a handy 63 to 34. The proposal would prohibit the use of federal funds to implement busing unless local authorities requested the money--something they would undoubtedly do if faced with a court order to bus, since the alternative would be to raise their own funds. It would also delay execution of any court order requiring the transportation of children across school district lines until all appeals are heard, or until July 1, 1973. The bill's most substantive provision would prevent federal officials, but not the courts, from ordering the busing of children to a school that would provide education inferior to what a student might receive in his home district.

Even as the possibility of a major retreat on integration lessened in the Senate, a new threat arose in the House. There the Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by New York Democrat Emanuel Celler, 83, a veteran civil rights advocate, opened hearings on a constitutional amendment, proposed in no fewer than 30 versions, that would ban busing for racial purposes. Confident that the Administration was also opposed to such an amendment, Celler had planned only perfunctorv hearings, expecting the matter to die swiftly. Now, not at all sure of Nixon's eventual stand (the President last week was studying the matter in Key Biscayne), Celler decided to hold more extensive hearings in hopes of convincing the President that amending the Constitution would be legally unsound and might even be of doubtful political value.

Overblown. After allowing several antibusing Congressmen to score oratorical points for the folks back home, Celler turned to the most prominent of the amendment versions. As suggested by New York's first-term Republican Congressman Norman Lent, the amendment would provide that "no public school student shall, because of his race, creed or color, be assigned to or required to attend a particular school." Lent proved a weak witness; Virginia's conservative Republican Richard Poff, whom Nixon has wanted to nominate to the Supreme Court, questioned the ambiguity of the language. "I don't have the best lawyers working for me," Lent conceded.

Even Committee proponents of the amendment seemed deeply impressed by the countertestimony of the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame and chairman of the U.S. Commission an Civil Rights. He protested that busing was a politically overblown issue, based on the too careless reaction by the press to some outraged parents, and that integration was actually working well in many schools--especially when parents did not interfere (see box). "Where you go to school has a determinative effect on your life," said Father Hesburgh. "For many, the only way to get a good education is to ride on a bus." He charged that the amendment was not so much antibusing as antidesegregation: "We better face that fact. It is also fundamentally an anti-black amendment."

Even so, the constitutional amendment remains an enticing dodge for many worried politicians. They could vote for it to appease the antibusing sentiment, knowing that it might be years before two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-fourths of the nation's state legislatures could, or would, act to put the amendment into effect. By then individual Congressmen would be long off the hook. But any amendment on busing would put the Constitution in conflict with the Bill of Rights. The legal debate over equal rights for the races would be thrown into greater chaos than has existed since the Supreme Court tried to clarify the matter by ruling on Brown v. Board of Education 18 painful years ago.

-Despite a summons from Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to do their senatorial duty, two other campaigners--Indiana's Vance Hartke and Washington's Henry Jackson--stayed on the hustings and ducked the voting.

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