Word: congression
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...redress. Last week, after rebuffs at the district and appeals levels of the bench, Powell won an unusual victory. The Supreme Court ruled 7 to 1 that the House had acted unconstitutionally in denying him his congressional seat. In so doing, the Court mounted an unprecedented challenge to Congress, boldly declaring that it is the final arbiter of the Constitution...
...Supreme Court's premise was simple enough. Since the Constitution sets as qualifications for admission only age, citizenship and state residence, the House could not add its own standards. Though Congress could expel a member by a two-thirds vote-a procedure spelled out in the Constitution-it could not bar him before he took his seat, as if it were passing an ordinary appropriations measure...
...surface, the issue now appears academic. Absent for two years and deprived of his seniority and committee chairmanship, Powell nonetheless was re-elected by his Harlem constituents and was admitted last January to the new Congress. There remained, however, the question of $55,000 in back pay for his uncompleted earlier term. On that hangs potentially one of the gravest clashes between two branches of Government in the nation's modern history...
...House, including most of the leaders of both parties, were defiant. They vowed not to give Powell a penny of back pay-ever. Many of those who opposed the original vote to exclude him were angry, convinced that it was the Court that had acted unconstitutionally in telling Congress what to do. There was concern that if the decision stuck, the Court would be free to intervene in other Congressional practices, such as the seniority system...
...ahead simultaneously with both the Great Society and the Viet Nam escalation, without requesting an increase in taxes. Between 1965 and 1968, federal spending jumped 47%, and the Government put much more money into the economy than it took out. Johnson feared that if he asked for higher taxes, Congress would balk at paying for what some economists now call the "marriage of the warfare and the welfare states." When Johnson belatedly asked for a tax increase in 1967, Congress dallied for ten months before enacting it. By the time the sur charge took effect a year...