Word: colmer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dour, gangling man with a choppy gait, Colmer looks younger than his 70 years, has gradually swung from a moderate, internationalist position to that of a diehard conservative. He is generally and initially suspicious of any federal project, unless it happens to benefit his Gulf Coast constituents. He is, of course, a segregationist, but he says he has never made an "anti-Negro" speech. For 20 years he has enjoyed his power on the Rules Committee. There his vote, along with those of Chairman Howard Smith, the courtly Virginia judge, and the four Republican members, could and often did produce...
Equal Treatment. There was sufficient pretext to demand Colmer's ouster: he had given his lukewarm support to the anti-Kennedy electors in Mississippi. Reprisals are not unheard of in such situations, but the recent tendency has been for the Congress to forgive its prodigal sons. In 1949 the Dixiecrats escaped unscathed after their 1948 rebellion against Harry Truman, and in 1957, after Congressman Adam Clayton Powell campaigned for Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, his fellow Democrats did not touch his committee assignments, although they did strip him temporarily of his patronage. (In the heat of the anti-Colmer drive...
...Rules Committee (two Democrats, including one Southerner, and one Republican). Smith flatly rejected the offer, and Mister Sam thereupon decided to join the rebels. The next morning he summoned a group of top Democrats to his private office and broke the news: he would lead the fight to oust Colmer, whom he is said to regard as "an inferior...
News of Rayburn's commitment soon leaked out. When Missouri's Clarence Cannon got the word, he turned purple. "Unconscionable!" he shouted, and rushed off to the Speaker's Room to object: "A dangerous precedent!"* Cannon, a powerful, conservative man, brought welcome support to the Smith-Colmer forces: as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, he holds over each member the dreadful threat of excluding this or that congressional district from federal pork-barrel projects. Sitting quietly on an equally big pork barrel was another Judge Smith ally, Georgia's Carl Vinson, chairman of the Armed Services...
...needed nearly twice that number to control the 260-member Democratic caucus. The liberals, smelling blood, were faced with the necessity of winning three big votes-in the Democratic Committee on Committees, in the full party caucus, and on the floor of the House-before they could oust Colmer. (One big question: If Colmer was to be purged, what should the House do about the other three senior Mississippians who supported the maverick electors?) In all three arenas, they seemed certain of victory-especially with Sam Rayburn applying his whiplash...