One-man-one vote Gingrich.

THE NARROW victory of Newt Gingrich for Republican Whip in the House of Representatives can be likened to a narrow victory a generation ago by the civil-rights alliance against Southerners and constitutionalists. The narrowness of victories at the parliamentary or electoral counting houses tends to disappear in meaning. The Lend Lease Act passed by one vote in 1941, but from that moment on the historical narrative was set in concrete: the United States would sooner or later enter the war, and on England's side. JFK beat Richard Nixon by three and a half votes, one of them Mayor Daley's: and it became the Kennedy decade. Newt Gingrich from Georgia, the official "firebrand," defeated Edward Madigan of Illinois, official conciliator, by 87 to 85. But we may be entering the Gingrich Republican decade.

It is an engrossing coincidence that Gingrich's victory came on the same day tbe Supreme Court voted that New York City's Board of Estimate was an unconstitutional violation of one man, one vote. It struck many jurists as quite extraordinary that the Court voted unanimously against this powerful board, which for instance gives the Borough of Staten Island, with a population of 377,600, the same representation as Brooklyn gets, with its population of 2,309,600. When Baker v. Carr was decided in 1962, the vote was 6 to 2. That ruling decreed one man, one vote as a part of our constitutional patrimony. Now-as then-this continues to astonish Americans who were never taught that the Constitutional Convention that gave to Rhode Island the same weight in the Senate as it gave to New York really had in mind one man, one vote as a necessary feature of republican government.

But the tradition has apparently been accepted by the Supreme Court and it comes at just the time when Congressman Gingrich's resentment of the Democratic hegemony in the House begins to spread, after three presidential elections in which the Republicans have not failed to garner at least 51 per cent of the vote, while the Democrats, using a variety of stratagems, continue to control the House with robust majorities.

Now the majority of Republican congressmen became convinced that if the situation does not change after the 1990 census, we may as well think of the House of .Representatives as a permanently Democratic body. I have mentioned a study last summer which revealed that there is a greater turnover in the House of Lords (ftom superannuation) than there is in the House of Representatives (where 99 per cent of the incumbents who ran for reelection were returned to office last November). That was not at all what Article I of the Constitution had in mind when it gave to Congress "all legislative powers," having carefully attended to guarding the individuality of the several states by giving them an equal vote in the Senate. The historical irony is that the Senate tends to reflect changing political inclinations much more faithfully than the House.

Newt Gingrich is a graduate of Emory, a first-class college, and of Tulane, a firstclass university, where he got his doctorate in history, a subject he taught before coming to the House. He has always been a leader of striking originality and toughmindedness. He is determined that if the people of the United States prefer Republican government to Democratic government, as apparently they do, they should be given a constitutional opportunity to say so. In his own way he is as adamant as Martin Luther King. And when he took time off to insist that evasion of the re-election finance laws ought to apply not only to lowly congressmen but also to the Speaker of the House he faced a barrage from shocked fraternity brothers. But Gingrich had warmed up on Tip O'Neill, whose genial prodigality with the people's purse was accepted as, well, the good-old-boy way of doing .things. Not so, said Gingrich; who went on to ask questions about Jim Wright the answers to which might well have the effect of unseating him. Armed now with the power of second-in-command of the minority, Gingrich is likely to pursue the question of Speaker Wright's conduct in a Congress that seems to have abandoned, with its extraordinary treatment of John Tower, any notion that sibling loyalties prevail over political opportunities.

The objective is: the 1990 census. The fat-and-rich Democratic gerrymanderers are going to find a dragon waiting there for them when they rev up for the decennial hanky-panky. Those interested in self-government should side with the dragon.