It had been signaled when Senator Willis Robertson of Virginia—father of recently deceased televangelist Pat Robertson—, the Senator having been a leader of the segregationist bloc in the Senate, had put into the Congressional Record a radio speech by Clarence Manion, spokesman of For America, a group espousing nationalist policies, with which the Quarterly had dealt the previous day. In the speech, Mr. Manion had endorsed interposition, the main legal weapon of the South against the Brown v. Board of Education decision, with Mr. Manion having said that interposition was "the current answer" to the "federal invasion of the long-standing constitutional prerogatives" of the states.

Mr. Manion was the former dean of the University of Notre Dame Law School and had been a New Dealer who had broken with the Democrats to support the late Senator Robert Taft when he had run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952 against General Eisenhower. President Eisenhower had named Mr. Manion to head his Commission on Intergovernmental Relationships in 1953, but had dismissed him six months later after Mr. Manion had made a number of speeches endorsing the amendment proposed by Senator John W. Bricker to dilute the treaty-making power of the President, an amendment opposed by President Eisenhower.

Now, Mr. Manion was co-chairman of For America. His speech on interposition had not been made under the auspices of that group, but according to the national director, retired Brig. General Bonner Fellers, it had stated fully that for which the organization stood. That organization lately had struck up an informal political alliance with the Federation for Constitutional Government, as indicated the previous day by the Quarterly, an association of white citizens councils in 11 Southern states, with members of the two groups having agreed on a political strategy for 1956 to throw the presidential election into the House. The two groups had always had a broad area of agreement, with both describing themselves as anti-Communist and anti-socialist, being for free enterprise, national sovereignty and states' rights. But the Southern group was concerned primarily with the segregation issue, and until Mr. Manion's speech, For America had not taken a stand on that issue. The Manion speech, however, had aligned the organization directly with the Southern Federation in its fight against Brown.

Mr. Manion had endorsed interposition without coming out flatly for segregation, indicating that interposition indicated that "the Supreme Court has no constitutional authority to adjudicate disputes between a sovereign state and the federal government. The word doesn't mean much to the average voter now, but in the coming months interposition may easily mean the difference between the success or failure of somebody's ambition to be President…" (His understanding of the Constitution appeared to have been informed only by decisions up to and through Dred Scott in 1856, perhaps skipping along the way Fletcher v. Peck, decided in 1810, which struck down a state law annulling a conveyance of land as an unconstitutional impairment of a private contract by a state.)

Mr. Manion had asked his listeners to consider how they would feel if the Supreme Court would rule that Nevada could not permit legalized gambling, that one might defend the state's right to permit gambling within its borders, even if believing that gambling was morally wrong. He said: "Whether it is gambling in Nevada, segregation in South Carolina, education in California, or the right to work in Kansas, the basic challenge to American liberty is the continuous, contemptuous disregard to the 10th Amendment by the Congress, the executive and the Supreme Court."

The prior April 16, Representative Noah Mason of Illinois, who had served with Mr. Manion on the President's Commission and had resigned in protest when Mr. Manion was fired, had delivered another attack on Brown, saying that the Supreme Court had become "a court of whims and caprices, with its decisions made on the basis of political, social or ideological theories, not based upon the provisions of the Constitution and the law." Nine Congressmen from Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama had congratulated Mr. Mason on the speech, and the next day he had inserted into the Congressional Record another talk by Mr. Manion, criticizing the recent Supreme Court decision against state sedition laws, a decision attacked by Senator McCarthy in a speech on April 11. (The position of the states' rights advocates on that case appeared to ignore the Court's admonition: "It should be said at the outset that the decision in this case does not affect the right of States to enforce their sedition laws at times when the Federal Government has not occupied the field and is not protecting the entire country from seditious conduct." In the 1954 Phillips Petroleum case which Mr. Manion cited for the same premise, that the Federal courts were invoking the doctrine of Federal preemption of state laws to preclude states from legislating in areas which, according to Mr. Manion, the Congress had never intended in its legislation to prevent concurrent jurisdiction, the Court, in a decision announced by Justice Sherman Minton, considered one of the Court's more conservative members of the time, who, as a Senator, had earlier sponsored a bill to hold the press criminally liable for publishing a "known untruth", though not defamatory, that is an opinion not based on fact, determined its holding on the basis of the peculiar facts of the natural gas industry, not on any broadly based, pervasive legal principle involving the preemption doctrine, as the Federal statute had specifically exempted from coverage certain activites which were deemed intrastate rather than being involved in interstate commerce, thus beyond the purview of Congress to regulate, the case ultimately being decided on the basis of the meaning of "production and gathering of natural gas", those activities statutorily exempted, whether the sales of natural gas in the case of Phillips were part of the "production and gathering" process, holding that they were not—about as far afield from Mr. Manion's contention of Federal usurpation of states' rights as the oil fields were from Washington, yet connected via pipelines and thus involved in interstate commerce. The Court's holding had worked to the decisive advantage of consumers, especially in the Northeast, but against the interests of the big oil companies who wanted unfettered ability to set natural gas prices without Federal regulation. Thus, one can also associate the clamor for "states' rights" with unregulated corporate profits, the view that a corporation is an "individual" equipped with all the rights of an individual, as the spare majority of the Supreme Court decided in 2010 was the case in Citizens United v. FEC, holding the McCain-Feingold campaign spending restrictions on corporations to be violative of First Amendment freedom of speech.)

The piece concludes that the increased and broadened Congressional attack on the Supreme Court was part of the legislative strategy formulated by the newly strengthened Northern nationalist and Southern states' rights coalition.

It might be noted that the Dobbs decision of a year ago, overturning for the first time in the nation's history a longstanding precedent of the Supreme Court in a manner which narrowed rather than expanded a right, was the direct outgrowth of a 49-year effort by just such organizations, fueled markedly in the 1970's and 80's by the televangelist movement, all of which groups had begun life from the point of conception as states' rights groups in the wake of Brown, "states' rights" always having been only a euphemism for maintenance of segregation, the two going hand-in-hand.

A letter writer from Pittsboro comments on the Governor's State Committee on Education, which had made recommendations regarding desegregation of the public schools, finding nothing in the report which could not have been said the previous December as easily as after the filing deadline for the gubernatorial primary. He believes the delay had discouraged serious opposition to Governor Luther Hodges and that such had been the reason for that delay. He does not agree with the newspaper on the meaning of desegregation or how to handle it, but believes the paper had done more than other papers in putting forth opposing views in the letters to the editor. He says it was now obvious that the Supreme Court was "hell-bent upon ruling out segregation in the South. It has ruled that public moneys might be used to provide transportation of students to parochial schools, which are private; and it has ruled that public moneys might be used to buy books and stationery to be used by students in purely private schools. The federal government has issued grants, under the GI rights, to private schools, and colleges on the segregated basis to former soldiers." He finds that those precedents, however, meant nothing when it came to segregated schools. He thinks that education of black students was not the objective of the desegregationists, but that it was rather the amalgamation of the black and white races in the South. "If you stack the Negro and white kids from the nursery to manhood in the classrooms, on the playgrounds and buses like sardines in a can, you might as well tuck them under the same cover in the same bed, for such would follow just as naturally as the night follows the day."