The recommendations are that private individuals be denied the right to sell their property to whom they please, to loan their money to whom they please, and to refuse to loan their money to whom they please. To my mind if a man hasn't got liberty in those fields he hasn't got any liberty at all.

I think a man who does not have liberty to do otherwise than what the majority may think he ought to do with his own private affairs has no liberty at all.

And the trouble of it is that the only authority that the Federal Government has under the Constitution in this whole field is authority to deal with a denial of due process of law or denial of the equal protection of laws not by individuals, not by banks, not by private corporations, but by the States.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Howe. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator ERVIN. The committee will adjourn until 10:30, June 12. (Whereupon at 4:45 p.m., the committee was adjourned, to reconvene at 10 a.m., Wednesday, June 12, 1963.)

CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 1963

U.S. SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to recess, at 10:30 a.m., in room 318, Old Senate Office Building, Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr. (chairman of the subcommittee), presiding.

Present: Senators Ervin (presiding), Johnston, and Kennedy. Also Present: William A. Creech, chief counsel.

Senator ERVIN. The subcommittee will come to order. Senator Hill was scheduled to testify today. However, due to other pressing business, he was unable to be here and asked that his statement be printed at this point in the record.

STATEMENT OF SENATOR LISTER HILL IN OPPOSITION TO BILLS EXTENDING THE CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am grateful to you for the opportunity of offering my comments in opposition to the measures presently before you to extend the life of the so-called Civil Rights Commission. As you know, I was strongly against the initial creation of this agency and have unswervingly opposed its continuation. My present position is unchanged, for to hold otherwise would be to betray the Constitution that we inherited from our Founding Fathers.

When the Civil Rights Commission was established, I took the position that such an agency was unwarranted and unnecessary and that it would lend itself to unmitigated harassment of local officials and meddling into local affairs. The Commission has been in existence for almost 6 years, and its record has undeniably proven that this concern was well-founded. I think it would be well worth our time to review that record in juxtaposition to certain articles of the Constitution. Surely we will all agree that this great and endurable document must constantly serve as our guideline, and no matter how zealous lawmakers may become in a cause they have espoused, the Constitution must not be forgotten nor ignored. I submit that the Civil Rights Commission has too long flaunted its disregard of that mainspring of freedom.

Let us look at the reports of the Civil Rights Commission, for they patently illustrate the attitude and unconstitutional actions of this agency.

First of all, in its 1961 report on voting the Commission states as recommendation 1 that Congress should declare that voter qualifications other than age, residence, confinement, and conviction of a crime are susceptible to use, and are being used, to deny the right to vote on grounds of race or color. It recommends that Congress enact legislation providing that citizens shall not be denied the right to vote, or to register to vote in Federal or State elections for any cause except for inability to meet reasonable age or length-of-residence requirements, uniformly applied, legal confinement at the time of registration, or prior conviction of a felony.

Recommendation 2 proposed that the completion of the sixth grade in elementary school should be sufficient qualification for voting in all States where a "literacy" test, an "understanding” or “interpretation" test, or an "education” test is administered.

In my judgment, these proposals are wholly unconstitutional. They are in violation of section 2 of article I of the Constitution and the 17th amendment, which reserves exclusively to the States the right to determine the qualifications of electors.

They are in violation of the 10th amendment to the Constitution, which states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

They are in violation of the ninth amendment, which states:

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

These proposals would completely destroy the time-honored constitutional right of the States to establish the qualifications of electors.

Two members of the Commission, Vice Chairman Storey and Commissioner Rankin, dissented in the first recommendation on the ground that it was unconstitutional. In my judgment the second can be no less a violation of the Constitution.

For further illustrations of the unconstitutional attitude of the Commission, I direct the subcommittee's attention to the 1959 report on voting. In that report it was recommended that the President be allowed to appoint election registrars who would administer the State qualifications for elections and issue certificates to qualified citizens.

This recommendation is another example of the proposed encroachment on the rights that have been reserved to our States and to our people. Commissioner John S. Battle, a former distinguished Governor of the State of Virginia, put it well when he stated the following in his dissent to this recommendation:

"I concur in the proposition that all properly qualified American citizens should have the right to vote, but I believe the present laws are sufficient to protect that right and I disagree with the proposal for the appointment of a Federal registrar which would place in the hands of the Federal Government a vital part of the election process so jealously guarded and carefully reserved to the States by the Founding Fathers."

In light of the 9th and 10th amendments and the other constitutional safeguards for the right of the States to qualify electors, this proposal is blatantly unconstitutional.

It contravenes the spirit of the sixth amendment, which states:

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed by the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."

The appointment of Federal registrars would violate the spirit of this amendment because it would remove a local registrar from his duties, and, in effect, condemn him as being guilty of a crime the crime of unlawfully denying a qualified person of the right to exercise his franchise as a voter in violation of sections 241 and 242 of title 18 of the United States Code.

Regardless of whether or not such local registrar should ever be prosecuted, he would remain forever an accused who did not enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial nor an impartial jury of the State and area wherein the crime allegedly was committed. He would have been denied his constitutional right to be informed of the nature and the cause of the accusations against him. He would have been denied the right to be confronted with witnesses against him and the right to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor. And whether or not he employed the assistance of counsel would make no difference, for he would have no defense nor any right to present his defense. Surely such a departure from the Constitution that assures the rights of freemen is reason enough to sound the death knell for a public agency which conceives such a recommendation.

But now, Mr. Chairman, and members of the subcommittee, I must cite the most preposterous recommendation that has come from the Civil Rights Commission. As you know, this agency only recently proposed that the President withhold Federal funds from the State of Mississippi until it agrees to desegregation. To me, such a vindictive proposal if put into effect would be a violation of the due process clause of the fifth amendment, to say nothing of being a clear-cut abuse of the power of the executive branch of the Government. The

proposal that such a condition be attached by the President to the acts of Congress appropriating Federal funds is so obviously a disregard for our very system of government that I am surprised and taken aback by such a recommendation by even the Civil Rights Commission. I was glad to see that the President stated that he had no such power. Government by Executive decree has never been embraced by the people of this Nation, for it is a characteristic of dictatorships and monarchies.

By no means do these illustrations constitute the total of all the recommendations and actions of this agency that violate our Constitution. I should think that these are more than enough reasons, however, to halt the abuse of the principles of law with which we have been endowed.

When the representatives of the free, independent, sovereign American Colonies met in Philadelphia in 1787 to determine what form of government would succeed the tyranny of the British Crown, they had the benefit of the works and labors of great thinkers, philosophers, statesmen, and writers. They had the rich traditions of Montesquieu, John Locke, and all the thoughtful historians and warriors for liberty that preceded them in the vast concourse of history. But this was not enough. It was only through the great assemblage of patriotsdeeply devout, dedicated men-that they were able to pen the most nearly perfect legal document that has ever been drafted, the Constitution of the United States.

They had many questions to answer, many issues to determine. It was their task to determine whether or not we should have a parliamentary system of government, a centralized system of government, or a Federal system of government in which the rights and sovereignty of the people would be carefully divided between the State and local governments on the one hand and the National Government on the other. They fortunately chose the latter.

And the foremost consideration in that Convention was not how much of the sovereign rights of the people they desired to yield, but how much of these precious rights they had to yield in order to establish a stable society that would secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and to their posterity. As we all know, the Constitution, as we know it, would never have come into existence if the sovereignty of the States and the rights of the people had not been positively recognized in the Constitution itself.

Of all the liberties which the Founding Fathers enshrined in the first 10 amendments, they specifically designated articles, IX and X as the impregnable guardians of the sovereign rights of the States and of the people. Have these rights become any less meaningful to us today? Are the dangers of a centralized government any less? I say "no." It is time to regard these basic tenets of government and law and refuse to extend the life of an agency that has demonstrated repeatedly its unconcern for them.

The bills before you not only ask for new life for the Civil Rights Commission; one of them even seeks to make it a permanent agency of the Government. Both provide for an increase in its power.

In order to justify the Commission's existence, its advocates are now asking that it be made a so-called national clearinghouse for information on civil rights. Even if we should grant that such a service was needed, it is apparently a duplication of similar activities of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. In the 1959 appropriation request justifications for the Civil Rights Division, its spokesmen stated:

*

"We have in mind the great importance of the collection of far greater information--both factually and legally-in the whole civil rights area ** We think that without such activity we just cannot do the job."

The Civil Rights Commission has already spent almost $32 million of the taxpayers' money in their useless ventures. This unwarranted squandering of funds should cease.

Mr. Chairman and fellow Senators, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission has ignored the Constitution, has abused the unlawful power that it was given, and has squandered the taxpayers' money; on the other hand, it has done nothing to deserve the approbation of us as freemen. I submit to you that the bills pending before this subcommittee do not merit the approval of its members and I hope they will be defeated.

Mr. CREECH. Mr. Chairman, the first witness this morning is Dr. Paul Cooke, representing the American Veterans Committee. Dr. Cooke.