Word: katzenbachs
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Rump Groups. Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler, serving his 22nd term, made another point by reading to Katzenbach a passage from Madison's Federalist Papers urging "frequent elections" for House members to ensure their "immediate dependency" on the people...
...issue, of course, is the proper balance between the President and the Congress-a constitutional question as old as the Republic. In testimony before the committee, Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach contended without dispute that two-year terms force most Representatives to campaign year-round, to the neglect of their legislative duties. No one denied his argument that two years is hardly time enough to gain background for the deluge of bills-11,856 in 1965 alone-that demand a Representative's consideration...
Power Loss. Also unquestioned was Katzenbach's observation that electing Representatives only in presidential years would give the President a more cooperative House and lessen the chance of crippling legislative stalemates, such as those that stymied Herbert Hoover when Democrats took over the lower chamber in 1931 and Harry Truman when Republicans took command in 1947. Only once in this century-in 1934-has the presidential party not lost strength during off-year elections...
...possible compromise would be to stagger the terms so that half the House would be elected with the President, half in off-year elections. However, Katzenbach made clear that the Administration would not accept this solution, fearing that it might split each party in the House into two rump groups, one a "presidential" party, the other an "off-year" faction free to ignore its own "presidential banner and platform." Said he: "A cure, to be a cure, cannot be worse than the malady...
...Patman, 72. Patman, a moonfaced country lawyer from Patman's Switch (pop. 25), Texas, dislikes big banks, tight money and Federal Reserve Chairman William McC. Martin in about equal degree. Sympathetic to the Supreme Court, Patman stalled the revised bill for 25 weeks. When Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach wrote Patman that he favored a liberalized bank-merger law, Patman just tucked the letter into his pocket. That was too much for committee members who wanted a clarifying bill. One morning when Patman was away, a rump majority secretly met and defiantly approved a bill strengthening...