Nothing like a nice solid statistic! The American Conservative Union has released another of its lists of Republican congressmen whose hearts, it seems, are on the other side of the aisle. On fifteen key votes (foreign aid, public television, postal rate/federal pay hikes, Peace Corps appropriation cut, other such), liberal Republicans gave Democrats the margin of victory—two of them, Theodore Kupferman of John Lindsay’s old district and Ogden Reid of New York, the full fifteen times. Other leading fence-jumpers: Gilbert Gude and Charles Mathias (Md.), Frank Horton and Seymour Halpern (N.Y.), Brad Morse (Mass.), Florence P. Dwyer (N.J.). John Ashbrook (R., Ohio), a firm party regular and chairman of ACU, laments that “no pressures have been exerted by the Republican leadership” to prevent defections to the Great Society. Gerry Ford, the minority leader, still seems uninterested in the demands by Ashbrook and others for “party unity.”
But then party disunity works both ways: that coalition of Southern Democrats and most Republicans that Ford pronounced dead last spring is still very much in business. On 54 of 245 House roll calls, Dixiecrats crossed the line to vote with the GOP and made the difference in 38 tests, seventeen of them—including deep cuts in rent supplements, the war on poverty and foreign aid —considered major Administration defeats.
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