To the Victors

As of last year, almost everyone, including President Eisenhower, the Justice Department, the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, and the federal bench, was agreed on the urgent need for more federal judgeships. The number of federal judges had been increased by 26% since 1941, but the case load had soared by 60% over the same period, and the swelling backlog of pending civil cases amounted to nearly a year's work for the federal courts. Thousands of U.S. citizens, argued Attorney General William P. Rogers, were being "denied justice because of delay."

But President Eisenhower's plea for creation of 40 new judgeships died in Congress--a victim of the same partisanship that had buried earlier Administration requests for additional judgeships. Democrats did not want to establish posts to be filled by a Republican President. In the interest of getting a bill enacted, Ike offered to split the new appointments evenly between the two parties, but still the Democrats stalled. Democratic leaders de cided to bet that the next President would be a Democrat, and that their party would then get a lot more than 50% of the new judgeships.

Last week Democrats moved to take the victor's share of the spoils. Brooklyn's Congressman Emanuel Celler introduced a bill to create not 40 but 63 new federal judgeships. There was no indication from anywhere inside the Democratic Party that there would be any such nonsense as filling half the new posts with Republicans.

The victors thus would surely get the spoils--but those spoils could become political spoilers. With rising U.S. tension on the issue of civil rights, few appointive posts are more sensitive than those in the federal judiciary. That sensitivity was one of the factors in the appointment of Bobby Kennedy as U.S. Attorney General. As a tough political negotiator beholden to no Democratic faction, he might be able to placate both House Judiciary Committee Chairman Celler, an all-out liberal, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland, an archsegregationist from Mississippi, in the filling of the new federal judgeships.

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