LBJ Proposes Amendment to Allow Four-Year Terms for Congressmen

Members of Harvard's Government Department yesterday expressed mixed reactions to President Johnson's proposal for extending Congressmen's terms of office to four years.

Johnson announced the proposal, which would require a Constitutional amendment, in his State of the Union message Wednesday night. He said that "the nation, the principle of democracy, and each Congressional district will be better served by a four-year term."

Robert G. McCloskey, professor of Government, labelled as "old and rather crude" the idea that "where annual elections end, tyranny begins. There has been a growing recognition that the two-year term tradition is nonsense," he said yesterday. "No one now seriously thinks that a legislature elected every four years is any more tyrannical than one elected twice as often," he commented.

A professor of Government who chose not to be identified expressed "great reservations" about four-year terms "if it would mean that Congress would provide a less sensitive check on the President, and I think perhaps it would." He noted that a Congress elected only in Presidential election years, as it would be according to Johnson's proposal, would be more vulnerable to Presidential pressure. "I would not like to see the limited power that Congress now has reduced further," he said.

However, there are two alternatives to the Presidential year elections--either electing the whole Congress in what are now the off-years, or electing half the Congress every two years. Johnson's proposal would be "a very important improvement," Don K. Price, professor of Government, said yesterday, but he noted that "a great many Congressmen are not eager to be elected with the President."

"Now that Johnson has opened up the idea, it could get out of hand in Congress," Price said. He fears that either of the two alternatives to Johnson's proposal would leave at least half of Congress "never exposed to even the implicit threat of party discipline. I'm very much in favor of what has been proposed but very much opposed to what could happen," Price noted.