How to Pass Laws

Governor Thomas Edmund Dewey, something less than a success as a national campaigner, last week showed that he still knew a thing or two about the practical politics of handling a legislature.

Tom Dewey desperately wanted a rent-control law that would operate whether or not federal controls were extended. Such a bill would also be a fine vote getter for Dewey--and so all the Democrats, under orders from State Chairman Paul Fitzpatrick, refused to vote for a rent bill Dewey could take credit for. Three of his own Republicans in the senate were also against it. That left Dewey one vote short.

Dewey turned the matter over to his senate leader, brisk, pugnacious Art Wicks. Then, taking a leaf from Harry Truman's successful book, Dewey proclaimed that the people of New York were going to have rent control even if he had to call a special session.

Art Wicks got in touch with his old friend, Dan O'Connell, Albany's Democratic boss. Dan was sick in bed but willing to listen, for he had some personal problems. The state courts had been meddling in real-estate assessments in Albany, which are carefully adjusted to favor O'Connell friends and punish O'Connell enemies. Democrat Dan found that annoying. Furthermore, if & when the state took over rent control, O'Connell would have another problem: the Albany staff of the Federal Housing Expediter, which happens to be stuffed with O'Connell men, would be out of work.

Things began to move. An unpublicized bill, sponsored by Senator Art Wicks, suddenly zipped through both houses. It sharply restricted the power of courts to cut Albany assessments. At the same time the G.O.P. rent-control bill was amended, directing the state administrator to take over any federal employees he wished (e.g., O'Connell's Democrats in Albany).

O'Connell delivered. To the astonishment of his fellow Democrats, Peter J. Dalessandro of Albany County, 28, the youngest man in the senate, abruptly announced that he was going to vote for Dewey's bill after all. The state needed rent control, and the G.O.P. bill was the only one with a chance of passage, he explained. Ex-Sergeant Dalessandro had won the Congressional Medal of Honor when, his outpost surrounded by Germans, he ordered his company's mortar battery: "O.K., let me have it--right on this position." Last week he was getting it again from outraged Democrats. But Tom Dewey had his rent-control bill.

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