The Liberal Realignment

The Congressional election could scarcely have turned out better for Lyndon Johnson. In the Senate the biggest and most liberal "class" since the New Deal remained intact and may even have increased slightly. More astonishingly, 71 million voters have transformed the House of Representatives. In the 89th Congress, the House should be a help, rather than a hindrance, to the President.

Through the four years of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations the House has been the more conservative legislative body. This year it passed the Tuck amendment on reapportionment, defeated medicare, and forced Johnson to hold up several bills (mass transit, school and college construction) until deals could be made. When the President got his majority on a bill, the majority was usually small; 44 times in the last four years, according to the National Review, Republican votes have been needed to pass "crucial measures of anti-conservative nature."

This will probably not be true anymore. Almost 40 Democratic Congressmen have been added, ballooning the Democratic majority to 295-140. And the additions were not made in the South, nor, surprisingly at the expense of liberal Republicans.

The Deep South gave Republicans seven new seats (five in Alabama, one in Georgia, and one in Mississippi). Democratic victories in Kentucky, Texas, and Virginia limited the Republicans to a two-seat gain in the 13 states of the South.

It was outside these states, then, that Democrats piled up 39 new seats. The gains came in the Northeast and in the West, liberal regions. The beneficiaries may be expected to be Johnson backers in their first terms.

It was the liberal Republicans who held up best while Democrats made their gains. Fourteen of the 16 most liberal G.O.P. Congressmen (using the National Review's scoreboard) were re-elected (one of the other two retired). All of them had to overcome Johnson sweeps in their states.

Meanwhile the young conservative stalwarts suffered. Of those who were beaten, the most prominent (Alger and Foreman of Texas, Snyder of Kentucky, St. George of New York) were among the most conservative.

The House will be far more liberal in the 89th Congress than it was in the 88th. The Senate, liberal enough to approve the entire Kennedy-Johnson program last session, was made slightly more pro-administration by the addition of two Democratic votes and by the substitution of Ross Bass for conservative Herbert Walters in Tennessee. Furthermore, the preservation of the "Class of '58" virtually insures the preservation of a Democratic Senate until 1970.

Johnson, the master wheedler, has a Congress that will need little coaxing to do his bidding. He can get the rest of the Kennedy program passed; he can begin to shape his own "Great Society."

It may be said that even with his huge majorities, Johnson cannot afford mistakes. Franklin Roosevelt had still larger majorities after the New Deal's high-water year of 1936. Once Roosevelt attempted to pass his court-packing bill, his majorities fell apart. The Johnson coalition, glued together not by the depression but by Barry Goldwater, could prove similarly collapsible.

That this is Lyndon Johnson's chief worry in Congressional liaison, however, shows that in Congress, Lyndon Johnson does not have much to worry about.