atisfying period of his congressional career. The Committee approved over fifty measures authorizing federal programs for minimum wage increases, education and training for the deaf, school lunches, vocational training, student loans and standards for wages and work hours, as well as aid to elementary and secondary education and public libraries.This legislation comprised much of the social policy of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. By the middle of the decade, however, Powell was under attack from both long-time enemies and committee members, who expressed dismay with his erratic management of the committee budget, numerous trips abroad at public expense, absenteeism and self-imposed exile from his district where his refusal to pay a slander judgment made him subject to arrest. On January 9, 1967, the House Democratic Caucus stripped Powell of his committee chairmanship. Furthermore, the full House refused to seat him until completion of an investigation by the Judiciary Committee. The following month, the committee recommended that Powell be censured, fined, and deprived of seniority, but on March 1 the House rejected these proposals and voted 307 to 116, to exclude him from the Ninetieth Congress. Powell won a special election on April 11, 1967, to fill the vacancy caused by his exclusion, but did not take his seat. He was reelected to a twelfth term in the regular November contest, but the House voted to deny him his seniority. Powell declined to take his seat when the Ninety-first Congress convened in January 1969. In June 1969 the Supreme Court ruled that the House had acted unconstitutionally when it excluded him from the Ninetieth Congress, and Powell finally returned to his seat albeit without his twenty-two years' seniority. He unsuccessfully south renomination in the June 1970 primary and failed to get on the ballot as an independent. Powell retired as minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1971 and died in Mi...
