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Into the Vacuum. Eastland denies that he has ever been a member of a Citizens' Council (or of the Klan). There is no doubt that he has become a kind of patron saint of the councils. Stepping into a vacuum at the heart of the councils, he gave them a philosophy and a voice, and today Southern cities which had barely heard of him two years ago fight for dates on his crowded speaking schedule. Those who manage to get him hear what has become almost a canned speech. In it, Eastland starts from the assumption that the anti-segregation decisions represent a violation of the Constitution. "There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution or the amendments there to," says he, "that gives to Congress, the President or the Supreme Court the right or power to declare that white and colored children must attend the same schools." What this amounts to is a denial of the Supreme Court's right to interpret the Constitution—as Eastland himself makes clear when he says: "We will challenge the doctrine that the Constitution is what nine men say it is."
He does not face the question of how a constitutional system of government can operate unless some judicial process can determine in disputed cases what the constitution means. He argues that "in the field of contested powers . . . the states and not the Supreme Court are the final arbiter." This does not mean that Eastland believes in nullification. In January he told a Citizens' Council audience in South Carolina, historic home of nullification, that the South Carolina Nullification Act of 1832 was constitutionally unsound, and added, "no one contends that a state can nullify an act which Congress has the power to pass or to nullify any of the constitutional and legal powers of the Federal Government." What he does advocate is something he calls "authentic acts of interposition." Interposition, as Eastland interprets it, means that "the states affected should say that the Supreme Court . . . has no power to interfere with, or place a limitation on, the power of any state to regulate health, morals, education, marriage and good order within the state . . . We should then request by resolution an amendment to the Constitution which would rivet these principles into our Constitution and into our system of Government."
Eastland himself has already introduced in the Senate a proposed constitutional amendment along this line. He is fully aware that such an amendment, even in the unlikely event that Congress approved it, would be a long time getting passed by 36 states. In the interim, he is ready with a plan for evading the Supreme Court decision by "legal and constitutional means." Says he: "The effective way to oppose integrated schools ... is through the government of the states ... If we contest at the local level, by individual school districts, or by a county, or on a community basis, we are sitting ducks and will be picked off one by one . . . The state and no one but the state can segregate under the police powers . . . The state, if necessary, can abolish school districts, create other ones and thus remove the corpus or basis of a suit. This would mean the whole case just start over, with years' delay."